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Expand your running knowledge, identify running misconceptions and become a faster, healthier, SMARTER runner. Let Brodie Sharpe become your new running guide as he teaches you powerful injury insights from his many years as a physiotherapist while also interviewing the best running gurus in the world. This is ideal for injured runners & runners looking for injury prevention and elevated performance. So, take full advantage by starting at season 1 where Brodie teaches you THE TOP PRINCIPLES TO OVERCOME ANY RUNNING INJURY and letβs begin your run smarter journey.
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On today's episode, Managing Sleep and Time Zones for Better Performance with Jesse Cook. Welcome to the only podcast delivering and deciphering the latest running research to help you run smarter. My name is Brodie. I'm an online physiotherapist treating runners all over the world, but I'm also an advert runner who, just like you, have been through vicious injury cycles and when searching for answers, struggled to decipher between. common running myths and real evidence-based guidance. But this podcast is changing that. So join me as a run smarter scholar and raise your running IQ so we can break through the injury cycles and achieve running feats you never thought possible. Check this out as an interesting research paper title. It is, influence of circadian preference, sleep inertia, and their interaction on marathon completion time. That freaked up my ears, I hope it did for yours as well. Jesse is a researcher and the author of this paper, and I wanted to discuss all of those things, what is circadian preference, sleep inertia, how can we run better marathons, especially when it comes to sleep and maybe traveling for your marathons, changing time zones. traveling across continents. We dive into all that. So let's take it away. Jesse, thank you very much for joining me on the podcast. Ah, thanks for having me Brody. It's an absolute pleasure to get to discuss two of my favorite things in life, uh, sleep and running. Yeah. I wanted to dive straight into that cause it's, it's good that you have those two passions. What is your history? What's your career history? What's your athletic endeavors and that sort of stuff? Well, I was born in 19, I'm just kidding. Um, so. Generally speaking, growing up, I was very much a kind of bat and ball kind of sport athlete. I played a lot of basketball, baseball, golf, and it wasn't until later in life that I actually found running overlapping in many ways with my journey academically in graduate school as a tool for kind of distancing from work and stress relief. So that was generally around 2017. My actual journey with sleep began a little bit earlier than that in 2011 as an undergraduate at the University of Arizona in the United States. I was trying to prioritize some really important things, only having classes on Tuesdays and Thursdays. There just happened to be a class taught sleep and sleep disorders where it fit my schedule perfectly. I was like, cool, dreams, subconscious, awesome. I'm going to do it. And I literally knew nothing about sleep at that point, other than you go behind a door and eight hours later, you're supposed to feel refreshed. Well, the class blew my mind and kind of opened my eyes to this amazing world. And I got, I got very lucky where I was taught by a pioneer in the field of sleep research, um, Dr. Richard Bootson, who has since passed, but he was a pioneer of behavioral interventions for insomnia. And so I joined his research lab, got hooked, had some really good mentors who steered me away from medical school towards more of the behavioral side of treatments for individuals and studying human behavior and pursued a clinical psychology PhD through the university of Wisconsin in Madison hitched my wagon to a really awesome psychiatrist, a board certified in sleep medicine, who kind of allowed me to further grow as a researcher and a scientist and practitioner model. Um, and over that time, I basically fell in love with running. Uh, so this is 2017 to present day and many different variations in my relationship with running where historically previously Definitely had my Strava app going every single time, had to log everything, was so rigidly focused on splits and improving and have since learned that I prefer a different relationship with running and have more kind of a spiritual, I guess, dynamic with it. Love to trail run, love to just spend a lot of time in nature and use it as a cleansing experience. But something that is near and dear to my heart, something I try and do most days. And has allowed me, I think, to progress professionally as well, the kind of synergy between the personal life and the professional pursuits where over my research career, I've developed kind of three different programs, one that's really focused on a clinical disorder where people experience excessive sleepiness without an underlying cause, something called idiopathic hypersomnia. And I think more relevant to today, um, I've found myself really garnering knowledge about the utility of wearable sleep tracking technology for clinical and recreational purposes and also the role of sleep in circadian health and not just the performance, but the wellbeing of athletes. Um, so I think, you know, as we talk about different things today, those will probably be at the centerfold of discussion and generally, you know, if I leave the audience with anything today, it's just, you know, sleep health matters and it's a really important. aspect of behavior for immediate and long-term functioning and health. And attention is different than pressure. So we certainly want to prioritize our sleep health, but not put too much pressure on ourselves is that can actually be hazardous over time. All right. Happy to dive into all of those. You recently wrote a paper. Uh, the title was influence of circadian preference, sleep inertia, and their interaction on marathon completion time. So all of those topics. combine into one study like had my, you know, curiosity peaking before we dive into the actual study design itself. Um, circadian preference, circadian rhythm, um, and sleep inertia. If someone isn't familiar with these terms, how would you best describe them? Yeah, it's definitely a good place to start. So, uh, circadian rhythms are these biological based, you can think of them as clocks, if you will, that basically turn on and turn off various things across your body, your physiology. And it comes from the Latin roots circa about dies a day, because they're about a day in kind of their length. And we actually found circadian rhythms, I guess, as humans through the study of plants back in the 1700s. And notice that they kind of opened and closed at various times of the day, clearly being by some sort of timing mechanism. So seemingly all animals and plants have some sort of circadian biology, if you will, that helps adapt to their environment. And for us, we have these kind of innate, what we call chronotypes, which is more of the biological representation of one's circadian rhythm. And within that, there are people who are innately... very advanced with their rhythm, meaning it happens kind of earlier in the day. They may go to sleep earlier, they may wake earlier. And there are people who are much more evening or later in their chronotype biologically, where they go to bed later, wake up later than what is more in the traditional rhythm. Now, the reality is most of us tend to fall somewhere in the middle. Um, but there are these kind of extremes that we must be mindful of. In this paper, we use the word circadian preference. Because we're not measuring the biology. We're asking people, and we'll talk more about the methods, but what is the preferred timing for sleep and wake? And generally, it's thought that the biology and your preference will map onto each other, yet I do think there is a little bit more nuance there at times, and sometimes there's a mismatch between one's preference and actual biology that can lead to sleep problems and other difficulties in life. So we can think of circadian preference as one's circadian rhythm more times than not. And that's really about the timing of their sleep and wake. Um, when it comes to sleep inertia, one thing I got really interested in, and this actually comes from my other research program, which focuses on idiopathic hypersomnia. So sleep inertia is actually generally thought of as a symptom. And It's a symptom of idiopathic or it's a, it's a primary symptom of idiopathic hypersomnia. Now what's unique about sleep inertia is we all experience it. And it's this period of time between sleep and wake after we wake up in the morning and we come through where we have this kind of impairment, cognitively, physically, psychologically, we're not our best selves. There's kind of a lethargy and we. Generally think that within about 15 to 30 minutes, that should dissipate. And we should kind of become our normal selves and be able to perform optimally. We kind of shake it off. Um, but some people don't and some people, it takes longer, 45 minutes, 60 minutes, and clinically it starts to become concerning anytime, really we get over 30 minutes, but certainly over 60 minutes when somebody experiences sleep inertia longer than that. For some people. They actually don't really ever shake off the sleep inertia and they kind of persist across their day. Um, and that's more of a sleep disorder than anything else. But I started to think about these things in the context of running performance. Largely because they haven't really been studied before in the context of marathons, um, only, I guess, a few studies when it comes to the circadian rhythm component, but not well understood. And what's really unique about marathons. is they often take place at a specific time of day in the morning or kind of mid morning to later morning and seemingly there may be a circadian effect there. Um, so those two things kind of came top of mind for me. And then, um, fortunately there was a dataset that allowed us to potentially pursue that. All right. Talk us through that. So like when you get a dataset, how large was it? Like what did the study design actually look like and what was found? Yeah, so I got to give a shout out to the Center for Sleep and Human Performance out in Canada, Dr. Charles Samuels, Dr. Amy Bender, and my good friend, Dr. Jonathan Cherist, the JC of the North. They were really principally involved in kind of collecting this data set. So it centered around the London Marathon in 2016, and I believe it was Dr. Bender who actually approached participants about participating in the research study. under kind of board approval as we do with our studies and investigations. So, all ethically sound and more or less these participants, ultimately we had I think about 950 in our final analytic sample. They completed a questionnaire called the athlete sleep screening questionnaire. And this questionnaire has emerged over the last decade or so largely because a lot of our sleep questionnaires can lead to biased. characterization of sleep in athletes just because athlete sleep can be a little bit different. So the ASQ or the athlete sleep screening questionnaire seemingly addresses some of those gaps and it provides a wealth of kind of information on retrospective sleep characteristics. So what's happened in the past? And similarly within that too there's two questions. One is circadian preference related and one is sleep inertia related. So the circadian preference question is You know, if you had to just, um, pick a time of day when you would be your best, it's four choices of definitely morning, more morning over evening, evening over morning, and definitely evening. I believe it's taken from the reduced morning, eveningness questionnaire scale. And then there's a sleep inertia question or a proxy into sleep inertia that asks about how long it takes before you feel attentive and vigilant in the morning. Um, and similarly it's kind of a 15 or less minutes, 15 to 30, 30 to 60 or greater than 60, I believe are the choices. So we use those scale responses to characterize athletes based on their circadian preference and sleep inertia. And then analyze those responses against their marathon completion time, which was data we were able to get based on their participation. Um, so it was really unique to have that. And especially given the kind of robust sample size, you know, in science, one of the limiting factors is getting people involved. Um, and no, it's not the most ideal way that I would ever measure these two variables, but we have to make best of what we have. Um, and so, yeah, it was a really awesome kind of rich data set. We've actually been able to publish two papers out of it. One earlier that looked at specifically more of the sleep health characteristics. Um, and how that varied across individual characteristics. Um, and so, yeah, I appreciate them for collecting it because it definitely opened some doors for me. Was there anything you found surprising or expected in the results? You know, interestingly, um, and this was one of the better studies in this. You, you approach studies often with the hypothesis, right? Why, what question are you trying to answer with, with this study in general? And, and truthfully, my hypothesis was that. those with later eveningness preferences were going to have slower marathon times, largely leveraging the timing of the competition, but also other factors as well that are often associated with eveningness. And I certainly am not here to stigmatize eveningness. The society does a good enough job on that already, and we can talk more about the complexity of these dynamics later on, perhaps. So I approached it with that question principally, or that hypothesis. And similarly, I thought that those that had A harder time kind of shedding sleep inertia in the morning would also be at a disadvantage. And we actually got some really strong evidence that in support of the circadian preference hypothesis, it was kind of this linear, almost surreal linear relationship where the more eveningness you got, so the farther away from morningness, the slower your marathon time was. And that was really, really surprising. I thought there'd be kind of a stark jump as we got to the later evening groups. So that linear relationship was almost like a step model, if you will. In sleep inertia, we saw kind of a similar trend, but it wasn't as statistically significant. And we did try and account in both of these dynamics for individual characteristics like age, sex, runner ability, and sleep health as kind of a general score that we included. So we tried to account for some covariates that would explain some things as well. But yeah, we kind of hit on both of those hypotheses. thing to get back to your question that was really interesting. I thought that they would have what we call as an interaction where that they would kind of enhance each other's relationship. That is you got more eveningness and more sleep inertia, that would be the most kind of like deleterious or worse set of characteristics that they would kind of multiply each other's effects if you will. Well we actually saw what was called a significant interaction. Okay. But the direction was not what we expected. And what it actually tended to show was that the effect of eveningness decreased wasn't as important as sleep inertia worsened. And that was a hard one to explain and I still am trying to chew on it, but it was certainly a really interesting finding that I had a hard time or had a fun time trying to unpack. So generally speaking, The ones who had a circadian preference more towards the morning had a faster completion time, marathon completion time compared to those in with an evening kind of preference. Could you maybe give a, I don't know, generic example of like, who sits in the middle? Like is, if you wake up at 7am, is that more of an, is that more of a morning or is it more 6 or 5am? Like, do you have any? general guidelines to those who are listening might be able to allocate their own preference. Yeah. Anchoring kind of the circadian, the rhythm, if you will, the scheduling. Certainly so when we think about more of like the traditional circadian neutral, that's probably going to fall with a like nine, 10, 11 PM bedtime. So let me put that 2100, 2200, 2300, things like that. As soon as we start to go beyond that, either towards midnight or earlier than that, that's when we start to think of things as kind of phase advanced or phase delayed, uh, in kind of sleep medicine terminology. Um, and generally when you start to think about the other side of the rhythm, the wake time, um, or the other side of the sleep schedule, we're really working with like eight to nine hour assumed windows there. So if you're thinking like, 2100 or 9 p.m. you're really thinking that that's like a 5 to 6 a.m. kind of traditional rise time. So when we start thinking about like morningness I would say kind of on the fringe of that 5 a.m. wake time and then like sometimes clinically concerning advanced rhythms or morningness or more in that 3 or 4 a.m. rise time and certainly later on you know if we're waking up 9, 10, 11 More so in the 10, 11 range, that's more of like when the eveningness or delayed sleep phase disorder kind of terminology starts to come up. Gotcha. And probably this would be like without distractions. This would be without TV or phones and that sort of stuff. I was listening to a podcast last year and they'll mentioning the circadian rhythms and it's, um, almost like if you were on an island, no distractions, no commitments, no social media, no electronics. What would you, what would you prefer to go to bed and wake up? What would that preference be? Because some people are like, Oh, I am a late, more of a evening type of person. Yet they're doing work until 10 PM on the computer or they're watching TV or Netflix or something until 11 PM and then going to sleep. Um, would you advise the same when looking at circadian rhythms and preference, um, without distractions? I think you're unpacking or touching upon a really, really important, yet complicated topic here. And that is to what degree are people's behaviors mapping on to their actual core biology? And how much of that circadian preference is driven by the social, familial, professional factors that kind of push people to work at certain hours. Or organize their schedule in that way. And is that in alignment with their actual biology? And it's a really kind of circular discussion, which is kind of the challenge here is because if I measure your biology based on something called dim light, melatonin onset, the gold standard for circadian rhythm, it's probably going to track based on your behavior. And yet to me, that doesn't necessarily mean that is like the innate biology that you would operate best in. And certainly if you think back on like evolutionary terms, and I like to think about behavior in that con and that, that format, it seems most likely that we were more aligned with like sun and moon because we didn't have artificial lighting. We didn't have all these things to help have differential rhythms. And yet there are many in the field who also still believe that there are innate biological late kind of night owl chronotypes. Um, so that's all to say that it's like a really complex puzzle that we don't really know yet well about. From like birth to where you are now, like how constrained that rhythm really is biologically. And yet to your point, we do still know that a lot of people are choosing a rhythm based on all these other factors, not necessarily what we may be best aligned with or best equipped to operate under. And, and one factor that goes into that too, that from a psychologist's heart is, I think, most difficult to deal with in today's society is that people are not really happy, or at least here in the United States, they're not really happy at times. And, you know, that may be an aversion towards going to bed, kind of delaying it. That's like the one period of the day, the couple hours before sleep where, where there's not a lot of demands, there's not a lot of stress. And so there's no wonder that people have. kind of an affinity for that time of day. And yet that doesn't mean that would be the best thing for them to operate under. And so it's a really complicated kind of web. And I would think that the majority are probably more neutral in our society. And yet I think there is more of a push towards later these days due to a lot of the artificial technology and lighting that we have at our disposal. Some people might be listening to this and being like, Oh, damn, I am an evening type and circadian preference. And I want to run marathons. I want to run them and do everything possible to get my fastest marathon time. What advice do you have for them? Is there a way that we can tailor or prepare them better? Uh, to if they are that evening type to perform better? Yeah, I think, you know, it's, it's. I never liked to speak in universals and I don't think that's what you're getting at here in any sense. And yet it's always tough just giving kind of global advice without looking at the person, right. And like what's driving them to train at certain times of the day or whatever it may be, like just cause you're an evening type doesn't mean you're training earlier in the day. I get the sense that you probably are. Um, but if that's the case, then perhaps we may want to, if you're training later in the day, we may want to have some, you know, training periods that are more in alignment with your actual competition timing, just to see what that's like for you, you know, perhaps you are kind of immune to the circadian effects of, of when you're training and you won't have to change anything, but hypothetically on a Saturday per se, you're able to train at that nine or 10 AM start time. Um, and you're usually training at like seven or 8 PM at night. And you notice like a major difference. Perhaps that's telling on things that we may have to adjust at that point to better prepare. Um, as far as actual like, you know, preparation for, for an event, it also depends on the event and where you're coming from, right? If you're say in California and you're traveling to Boston, um, which is a three hour time zone change here in the United States and you know, you are an, an evening type person, well, It's actually going to be really tough for you to fall asleep in that environment at a standard clock time. This is the West to East travel. And so you may want to actually like gradually adjust your sleep schedule gradually is a key word in the weeks preceding that to perhaps have better sleep the night before that actual marathon competition. Now, if you're going East to West though, it actually may not be beneficial for you to adjust your circadian rhythm. This is some of the nuance we don't really know in science yet, but if you're going west to east or sorry, east to west as an evening this type, and it's a 10 AM start time, well, you actually may be able to be more biologically aligned with the place you're, you're landing at and fall asleep at the time that's more in align with, with that environment and your biology maybe more at like 11 midday one. And you actually may be primed from a biological perspective to perform at that time. So a lot of people throw out these ideas of like, um, what are the countermeasures, if you will, of using kind of light therapy? Um, the circadian rhythms are really sensitive to light. There there's these things called zeitgebers clock and trainers and lights are principles like Geiber. And so you can use light to shift the rhythm. And I think in theory, that makes a lot of sense. We do it a lot. clinically as well. Um, and yet I don't know that the data is out there yet to really show that it's going to have a meaningful effect on your performance itself. Um, and so I try and actually guide in many ways when people ask me kind of socially what to do to, to limit that much, uh, perhaps on the professional side of things, but sometimes adding too many things to the equation can be more complicating than beneficial. Um, and I know I'm At a point where I've taken the question and hijacked it to a whole different area. But more or less, I think when I think about the evening, this kind of preference chronotype situation and trying to prepare for a morning event, one, it's complicated to just like anything else. When it comes to preparing for event, you don't want to change up too many things and the week's proceeding competition. It's probably good to feel out what that competition looks like for you at that timing window and then see if there's any sort of adjustments as far as Can I train more at that time? Can I shift my training around? Can I ensure that I get a proper night of sleep by altering some habits around those types of things? You mentioned a gradual transition. If someone is training more in the evenings and the races in the morning, and then wanting to see how your body feels pushing that earlier and earlier to align with the race start time. How gradual is gradual? Are we talking like 10 minutes? per day, 10 minutes per week. In your with your guidance, what would you recommend? Yeah, Brody, I think your head's in the right direction. You know, in terms of gradual really took in like 1015 minutes a day. And and certainly backing off if you're starting to noticing yourself having difficulty falling asleep. As we can we can push our rhythm and try to sleep at certain times that are not necessarily in alignment with our rhythm. And then that can lead to difficulties falling asleep. And then we get some other issues where we might start to pair the bed as a place of wakefulness and that can lead to kind of a perpetuation of insomnia over time. It's kind of conditioned arousal response. See, and we're talking gradual, really talking, you know, 10 minutes. Um, and just kind of seeing how you respond each and every day and, um, you know, probably not aiming for too drastic of a shift over time. You know, if you're going from California to Boston again, doing this three hours, like, I don't know that you're really going to want to shift that three hours of a window prior to the competition that may take a long time and also may have some negative effects on your day to day life before you go. But maybe just an hour or so could be helpful to just combat some of the challenges you're going to face. Yeah. So 10 to 15 minutes change per day you mentioned. Um, and then just seeing how your body feels and seeing if you are falling asleep or whether you're just lying in bed awake, then we know that's too much of a change or too much of a shift. But I guess as you're shifting earlier and earlier, you also training earlier and earlier. So when you wake up the run itself and the exercise session is actually being brought earlier and earlier, is that fair to say? Yeah. If you're, if you're able to do that, you know, if you're able to bring that training period more in alignment with the actual performance time, I think that's Yahtzee. Um, I imagine a lot of people that are listening to this are, are probably not professional runners. And if you are, you probably have better support than what I'm giving you here. And most people are juggling a lot of demands, right? And you're just only able to squeeze in your training at certain times of day due to familial demands, due to social factors, professionals. But if you have flexibility, you know, really trying to be strategic about. Um, tailoring your training period to the actual performing time of competition and whatever environment you're going to be in, I think that's optimal. How long would it take someone's circadian rhythm to shift once they do go across time zones, cause some people go across continents to train and race for marathons and you mentioned that sunlight, um, or the circadian rhythm is very responsive or reactive to sunlight or light in general, is there. recommendations on like how many days before a marathon you should travel and then get used to that, um, daytime or light exposure and feel a little bit more in sync with the daylight hours before race day. Yeah. Great question. There's, there's a general rule of thumb that for each time zone you travel, it takes one full day, 24 hours or so to, uh, kind of acclimate one hour. So if you're traveling three time zones, then in theory, the general rule of thumb is, uh, three days to acclimate to that environment. Um, I would take that with a grain of salt. I think it's a good general rule of thumb, but I would say it hasn't been necessarily rigorously tested. And to your point, you know, I'm less concerned about kind of the shorter travel. It's more of these kind of long haul travels. And this has been. pretty well extensively studied in kind of Aussie rules football, or I guess, best known in Aussie rules football from these like 14 hour journeys that are often taken for competitions. And in those situations, it's definitely seemingly more useful to implement more of the invasive strategies of kind of these light therapies and other sort of like kind of banking protocols that may be really helpful to address these major circadian and travel related challenges they're facing. But on a kind of a acute level, again, I think that 24 hour rule applies, you know, if you are traveling, being mindful of these factors and trying to do your best to adjust as best you can. I could just imagine like people traveling like a 10 hour difference or like even like, you know, across the world could be 14, 16 hours, but if there's a marathon that they're wanting to do. I think a lot of people would travel to that destination maybe two or three days beforehand and then race and then maybe, you know, spend a week or two there, you know, celebrating and enjoying and sightseeing and that sort of stuff. Um, you know, maybe it's worth bringing that sightseeing and enjoyment, like, you know, the week before the marathon, get used to syncing up things before you have to perform, um, sounds like a little bit wiser, would you agree? Truthfully Brody, I think you just solved the whole protocol right there. Um, No, I love that and especially not at a sacrifice of kind of the well-being of life and the enjoyment of life, right? You're actually inviting that more in and kind of the acclimation process was I think is huge when thinking about hobby hobbies in general. You know, I see that approach and I also see kind of the combination of approach of a gradual shift plus, you know, three, four days in the new environment and kind of using that combination there. It is really interesting, though, just to draw upon the National Football League. This. the non-international football, the one that's played in the States. And as they've been doing more of this travel to London and Germany for these international games, teams have been taking differential approaches. And some have been traveling like a week before and trying to acclimate that way. And some are taking more of the like, we're going to stay home. We're going to leverage our medical support. We're going to be in our own beds and we're going to fly like a day or two before. And honestly, we haven't analyzed it from a scientific perspective, but I'd be curious to see like what sort of effects are happening from the two different approaches. And I think that kind of goes into your point there of like, how do we want to really do this? Right. And, and do we really want to schedule things out kind of rigorously, or do we want to just kind of like, stay pretty stable and then make the transition to the environment? Yeah. You mentioned Australian rules football. the travel, I think it is a rugby that you may be referring to as a, as a sport. Yes. Yeah. Um, Australian rules football, slightly different. They stay here in Australia most of the time, but if there's a, uh, rugby, usually rugby tournaments, they have like five Australian teams, five South African teams, five like New Zealand teams, and they, they travel all over the place just for like tournaments. It's crazy. The amount of stuff that they have to do. So if you're traveling from, if you have to play it right. Say play one week in South Africa and then play one week in New Zealand. And then one week in Australia, that is commitment and brutal when it comes to circadian rhythm and performance. Cause you need to perform it amazing feats to it's not just as simple as travel. Like most people are very groggy and that sort of stuff. If they were to do that just for work or just for luxury, but to try to perform at your best at the same time. Yeah. You're going to run into some real issues. Yeah. Well said. And I appreciate you cleaning that up. Brody and my sincerest apologies for blurring the rugby and Australian football boundaries. I should probably cancel for that one. This is like, this is my other domain. It is Australian sports and sports in general. That's, uh, it's running in sports that are my two main passions and main fields. So yeah, I had to, I had to correct that one. Um, all right. If someone is really struggling with their sleep inertia, And I'm just self reflecting myself. I feel like I have zero sleep inertia. Like the, the one thing that's weird about me is like, I'll wake up. Like I, if I, if I didn't have any commitments, I'd be going to bed at like eight 30, uh, and usually I'll go to bed at nine at the moment and I wake up five o'clock by 30, but I am like out of bed straight away, exercising within 10, 15 minutes, I like have like, it feels like my sleep inertia is like 30 seconds. But I don't know, maybe that's as well I've been trying to do, or maybe my habits. But for those who are more around the 30 to 60 minute mark, um, is there anything that can do is a, do we have to just go with our biology or is it just more of a strategies and interventions to get them, you know, going a bit quicker? Well, I'm, I'm envious of your roll out of the bed and go, go ability. Can I ask you personally, what, what yours? sleep inertia and preference might be? Well, I'm definitely, I've, I've been morning this, I think across my entire life. And I think part of that is driven, um, from a hereditary side of it. My father was always morningness and then certainly being a baseball player and a golfer growing up in Arizona, it's so hot during the middle of the day that a lot of your competition timings and practices are in the morning. So behaviorally, I've been cued that way. And I think it's over time been really kind of Reinforce so that's what I've carried into adulthood as well. There was certainly a shift as there is naturally in my developmental journey in high school, there is a natural shift towards later circadian, um, chronotypes, some of that is hormonal and kind of what we call endogenous. And some of it is also the external social factors as well. But then in adulthood, I kind of stabilized again and went back to my morningness as far as sleep inertia. I kind of was more in your camp for. my twenties. And then I don't know what happened, but like, sometime a couple years ago, as I started getting close to the mid 30s, like I started to get a little bit more sluggish in the morning. And so now I'm more in the like, most days when I've had a good sleep, 15 to 30 minute range, I'm not itching to put my running shoes on immediately. I like to have like kind of an hour wake up before I get those shoes on. But I used to be more in the like, five minutes out of bed, put the shoes on, go only have a cup of coffee, something like that. and then ready to go. And now I'm just sitting there kind of enjoying my mornings more these days, perhaps slowing down a little bit. Um, but as far as kind of like addressing sleep inertia and, and what can we really do? One of the reasons I like the term sleep inertia, I like the, um, variable itself as I think it's kind of a catchall. So when I look at, um, excessive daytime sleepiness, excessive daytime sleepiness can be a consequence of a lot of different things. And so that's what I mean by a catch-all is like sleep inertia can be a consequence of a lot of different things. And so it's a proxy into potentially kind of a flagging of health, if you will. And I start with that because the reason sleep inertia may be happening is paramount to like how you might want to address it. So again, if it's this like pervasive persistent thing that's happening across my entire day, well, you should probably be checked out by sleep medicine. or a specialist to really see if there's an underlying sleep disorder or some other problem going on rather than trying to implement certain strategies up front. And if it really does seem to be something in the kind of 30 to 60 minute range, then the first thing I would really start with is looking at my sleep and just kind of seeing if there's a way to enhance that. Am I getting enough sleep? Is the quality of my sleep poor? And is that contributing to my sleep inertia? kind of lesser quality sleep. Now, if we were trying to just kind of adjust it acutely, there are these reactionary countermeasures that a good friend of mine, colleague, Cassie Hiljich, she's building a program around this, largely focusing on kind of operators, those in the field that are on call kind of combating sleep inertia. And I don't think they'll be very surprising, but like caffeine can work pretty well to combating sleep inertia. Cold water is one that I'm very interested in. I think it's great. Um, you know, I, I definitely have gone through periods in my life where I've done cold plunges in the morning and certainly sleep inertia dissipates immediately, and then of course, using light as best we can and movement to get things going and the wake biology activated as far as other strategies. We don't have much right now, but I think those are good places to start. And I would encourage kind of exploring the behavioral sides of kind of cold water and light. Does general light, can I flick on my lights at home and expect that as light? Or are we talking different light? Important question. Whenever we're trying to like really impact the circadian system, we're looking for like a minimum of 10,000 lux is often what we kind of guide in recommendations and you can find these kinds of light boxes available on, you know, your major shopping platforms for reasonable prices these days of like 15, $20. I think a good place to start is just getting any light, you know, flicking overhead, doing a couple of jumping jacks, it's playing, pushing some water on your face. I think you'll see some benefits at that point. But if we're really trying to like, aggressively or not even aggressively, but more directly nudged biology, that 10,000 lux number has really been one that's come up kind of more than not. Okay. Um, so that it seems like the intensity of the light's more important than the of light meaning like artificial light compared to sunlight? I'm definitely always in the camp that the natural sunlight is probably more effective than the artificial light just because biology likes what it's been trained on. And yet I don't know that I can make that definitive statement yet that you'll see a meaningful effect one way or another. And I'm certain that certain wavelengths of light will probably have a more profound effect than others. but I can't speak kind of too definitively on those dynamics right now. I would encourage get outside, get the natural sunlight, even if it's a cloudy day, you're getting much more intense light that way than by the artificial light that we have in our homes. All right. So acutely addressing the sleep inertia, we're talking caffeine, cold water, light, but you also mentioned, uh, we also want to uncover if there's anything throughout your sleep per se, that might want to be addressed. So is there any bad habits, common bad habits that you might see with runners who are listening to, if they want to go through a checklist to see what might need to change if they're noticing their inertia is a bit poor, or if they just want to improve their sleep in general. You know, I think, um, generally before even getting into like the runners, specific things that might come up or, or sports specific things, athletes that might come up is just practicing healthy sleep really starts with the relationship you have with sleep and society itself, I think, at least in our Western society often creates a major challenge with having a healthy relationship with sleep because so much of our day is occupied by things that are kind of antithetical to healthy sleep as we're stressed. or not physically active or sedentary. And so I would start there and just recognize like, do I, do I like sleep? Do I view it as a good thing? And if not, you know, if we don't, if we're looking at sleep as an enemy or something that we have to do, but we think it's a waste of time, then we're probably not going to have the greatest sleep. So I think starting with that relationship in general is really important. And then also maintaining, and people don't really like this, but maintaining a consistent wake time as best as you can. Uh, trying to really minimize the variation in that wake time, even regardless of the amount of sleep you had the night before is one of the best kind of healthy sleep behaviors you can have leaning into the two processes, the circadian process and something called the homeostatic process, the sleep need, if we maintain our consistent wake time, those two processes will kind of work itself out so that we'll probably be falling asleep at a similar time each night. rather than focusing on a specific bedtime, which can create anxiety and stress and this arousal pre-sleep, that isn't helpful for our sleep at night. So always starting with trying to focus and anchoring that consistent wake time that anchors your circadian rhythm and allows your homeostatic process to reach its highest point. And I think specifically, we all struggled with this in a society. If we can distance ourselves from electronics, that's probably prior to our bedtime, that's probably for the best. Now there is emerging data that light before bed is not, we'll say, as bad as we thought it once was. Um, that's not to say let's just saturate ourselves with light and we'll be okay. But it really captures the fact that it's more about the content that we're having with the electronics prior to bed and kind of the emotional response that we're having with it. You know, if I watched Game of Thrones and I see a bunch of people get their heads cut off, it's probably not going to help me transition into a peaceful slumber. So being very mindful of this like pre-sleep arousal that we have. And with athletes, especially those that are kind of your, your everyday athletes, really trying to squeeze in training. One of the things that's really challenging is getting your training in. In a time that's distant from a far enough distant from your sleep period that you're not having still this physiological arousal from your training. That's going to make it more difficult for you to fall asleep. And even if you do fall asleep, the quality of your sleep may not be as good because you're kind of having this mixture of income. competition of wake and sleep biology. So I would say as best you can have a healthy relationship with sleep, really try and maintain that consistent rise time. You know, we like to say one hour variation is, is within normal limits or good limits, if you want to call it that the weekends of course are challenging, but you know, sometimes we make sacrifices for our health and being mindful of the type of content and the light that we have before bedtime. Allowing, you know, two to three hours, I would say minimum two, probably closer to three between our training and our targeted bedtime, and then implementing some sort of wind down routine that allows you to land your plane and if kudos to you, if you can build in some like, um, hot tub or some warm bath for muscle recovery at that time too, that can also help with transitioning into sleep as you heat up your body. It starts to cool your body. When you get out. which is kind of a mechanism that is with falling asleep and staying asleep. Yeah. I've heard somewhere that your core body temperature needs to drop in order to fall asleep sufficiently. And so a warm bath will help, you know, distribute the temperature away into the extremities and sort of away from your core. And so when you get out, you know, you keep shedding heat from your peripheries and then that cools down your core temperature a little bit. And so might be effective for some, but that'd be a fair mechanism. Yeah. Beautifully put well unpacked. And I mean, to me at first, when I heard it, I thought it was kind of like paradoxical. Um, I thought that if I got into a warm bath, I'd feel more awake. And yet it's, it really is helpful for that transition into sleep and the kind of deeper, more restful sleep that you will have. And so doing that, pairing that with a cool, dark, quiet environment to sleep in. I think you're, you're on the right track. Yeah. It can be tough with sleep though, because you know, most runners, they, they train for marathons, they've got training plans and they want to improve their performance and like their attitude is like, you know, just put in more, like get hyped up, build up your mileage, build up your intensity, build up all this sort of stuff. And it's like, it's very easy, practical stuff to do, but you have to do the opposite for good sleep. You have to actually calm down and unwind. You can't be like, yes, let me tackle 10 hours. Let's go. I'm getting ramped up and like, let's go to sleep. You can't do that. And then. As soon as you're not sleeping, you're worried about not sleeping. And then that like has this perpetual cycle of, Oh man, I need to get to sleep now. I've been up for an hour. I really need to get to sleep. And that makes things worse. And then as you mentioned, your body tends to, we want that association between bed and sleep. And sometimes when people are too amped up and that goes on for a period of time, your body starts to associate bed with awake rather than asleep. And so then it's even harder to fall asleep. And so that. shift can be very, very hard to overcome. And then I don't know, a lot of times with recording sleep, a lot of people measure their sleep and that can, I know, I've measured my sleep for a very long time. I'm fine with that at the moment. But I remember when I very first got my device to start recording my sleep, I was like, as soon as I wake up, I struggled to fall back asleep in the middle of the night because I'm like, Oh man, this is going to affect my sleep score. And like all that sort of stuff. So I want to touch on the recording side of things and measuring sleep and devices and those sorts of things. Um, if we're talking about the. Psychological side of sleep and winding down and maybe some people have the importance of measuring sleep because they like measuring things, they like data, um, where do you sit on it? How useful is it? Yeah, it's a really, really important question. And one that is kind of at the forefront of discussion these days as, you know, Devices are everywhere, right? They're ubiquitous. I have a watch on, right? That purports the ability to track my sleep. It's almost like inescapable these days in society to get away from something that tracks your sleep in some degree. And I come from a place that what gets measured gets managed. So having some data is definitely important. But also it's important to have accurate data, starting there as one. Is the data helping shape my behavior is another question too. And if not, you know, is the data hurting my behavior? And I think something you brought up there is this term that is all too common in the athlete and high-performing populations, or it's thought to be very common is this term called orthosomnia. That's getting a lot of attention, um, getting passed around cause it's, it's kind of a nice click bait term. And it's this notion of being. really fixated on the outputs from your monitoring devices to the point that it's actually causing sleep problems. And this is the challenge, right? Of I want the information, but I don't want the information to hijack my behavior and my wellbeing. I want to have the information, to be attentive to it, to prioritize it. but not have it cause undue pressure on me to perform in some ways when it comes to sleep. So I would say for most, it can be helpful, but it really needs to be looked at the individual level and what sort of relationship, how is this stuff affecting you? And in the clinical sector, this is something that comes up. You know, some people will just do sleep diaries, right? That's kind of the standard way to track sleep. And clinicians will often kind of monitor their clients early on and see if it's causing problems. And if it is, they kind of abandoned that approach because they don't want to do harm when it comes to tracking sleep. And I think this population in general, because they're so attentive and vigilant and fixated on kind of optimizing just about everything to improve, you know, there's, there's a structure and there can be a benefit to rigidity at times. But when it comes to sleep. That's at odds with healthy sleep. And so it really comes, can you track with a manner that's not gonna interfere with your sleep? And then what are you using the data for? Are you using it to track any sort of other metric at all, as far as your speed? Are you noticing changes there? So on and so forth. There was a lot of other kind of things that come top of mind when thinking about the devices. And I don't know if... maybe beyond the scope of today's talk, but I just want to plug that devices are getting better at their actual metrics itself for sleep. Some of the more name brand devices are getting much better when it comes to estimating sleep duration, the time you get into bed, the time you get out. Their ability to classify sleep, this light deep REM better, but still, I would say not trustworthy, um, especially in kind of the generations. previous ago, the most emerging generations getting better, but generally not trustworthy and not something to change your behavior over. And even within that, all of these metrics are highly vulnerable to inaccuracies on a night to night basis. And so if you are going to track your sleep, really focus on patterns over time. And if you're looking at, say like HRV metrics, really anchor it to a single point in the day. You know, usually it's upon awakening or before you go to bed at night, those are less vulnerable to error or, um, inaccuracy to, to other noisy factors across the day, but be really consistent. With when you're taking data from and look for those patterns over time. Yeah. And I think going back to what you said before, like self reflecting on, is it, is the data helpful or harmful for you in the as you go through your training. This is very timely because it was probably the last couple of weeks. I've actually been thinking with my sleep data and my heart rate variability and guiding my training. Initially wanted to do this to help guide my training. And particularly around the heart rate variability side of things, looking back over the past year, like how many times have I actually changed my training based on my sleep and my heart rate variability? I would say it has. hasn't really like there has been times has been really poured because I've been sick and that has like, I've just been sick. So I've just that's guided my training. I'm not necessarily the data per se, but I would say looking back on the past year of me and tracking my sleep scores and my health scores, I would say it's fairly neutral. I'm not. Yeah, sure. It's a cool thing to look at and be like, Oh, cool. I got good sleep or my heart rate variability is cool. I'll look at that and say, Oh, that's nice. And move on with my day. But if it's poor, I'll be like, Oh, damn move on with my day. So it doesn't really affect me too much. And I haven't really changed any of my decisions or any of my behaviors based on the data that it's given me. So it's been very neutral and I've actually been contemplating whether I continue with it or not, because it has been so neutral. So I think a lot of people can look back. It's only just taken me, um, up until now to actually ask myself the question. Is it really helping me? Is it hindering me? I know I said initially when I very first got it, definitely was hindering me just cause it was something new and something like, you know, kind of exciting. What was my sleep score? I hope it's a good sleep score, but you know, that faded over time, but, um, it is a good question to ask ourselves. I think, um, yeah, you've, you know, prompted some really nice things there. Um, before I get you to go, there was one thing I wanted to mention, which was banking sleep. Um, is there research? Cause. If we're hovering around this topic around marathons, getting our best marathon time, um, can we bank our sleep to increase our performance? If so, how many days, how much sleep can we do? Um, what's some practical guidelines around that? Well, what I would want to, uh, before answering that, I just want to give you the reflection that, you know, I really appreciate the relationship you've developed with your device and the, the self reflection you have yourself on kind of questioning whether or not to continue wearing it or whatever it may be to monitor. I asked my that myself, you know, why do I do it? Cause people ask in my background, do you track? I'm like, well, I wear it. It's like, well, why do you wear it? And I was like, I don't know. Um, and sometimes it'll say my readiness is like a hundred and I have a terrible training day and sometimes it says 56 and yet I had eight hours of sleep. It doesn't make sense a lot of times. So, um, I do wonder, I think it's fun sometimes to have the data, just to be like, that's actually not how I feel. Uh, it was actually one of the reasons I kind of like having it. So, uh, the interoception don't ever let go of that. Uh, you know, you best and to lean into that at times, um, as far as sleep banking, there is some data out there. Um, I would say it's still not well understood and I sound like a broken record on that one, but human behavior is hard. I think it mostly comes from kind of military personnel, uh, that have been studied and kind of operational groups there and the data does suggest that like, yes, you can bank sleep in the coming days before kind of an operation or an event or a task, and you can have a significantly improved performance. You can be resistant. to the negative effects of sleep is kind of a better way, or sleep loss is a better way to say it. You're not enhancing yourself, but you're becoming more resistant, more resilient to the negative effects. And I think it has been extended recently more towards athletic populations, but it's not well studied there. And one of the things I always struggle with in this sector is we can show in science a clinically, or not clinically, a significant effect, right? Do this in a statistically significant. That doesn't always mean that it's actually practically meaningful. Right. And so like, just because your reaction time may be a light, slightly improved because of something we did. Doesn't mean that you're going to see that in a four hour race. Right. And so sometimes I feel like we try and do too much for effects that may not actually be there. With that said, sleep banking in theory can be useful. And I think, you know, proceeding competition, um, If you want to, if you, if you feel like you're going to have a sleep loss and you can achieve more sleep in the days proceeding one to two hours, I say, go for it. You know, one of my hesitations here is like, again, if you're able to sleep more in a given night, that probably means you're also under slept and you're operating under a sleep debt. And so there's a delicacy here of, of some people just can't sleep more because they actually are saturated. Um, And yet, you know, if you can sleep more than perhaps instead of the banking, the sleep, let's just try and extend it more consistently over your kind of standard protocol. Well said. I think that's, um, when I've competed, say in triathlons and I'm doing high rocks races at the moment. And the night before I am just so wired up. It's so hard for me to fall asleep. Well, I wouldn't say it's hard for me to fall asleep. It's hard for me to stay asleep. Um, and. knowing that within myself, try as many strategies as possible to calm myself down, but trying to see if I can get more sleep a few nights prior, knowing that this, I wouldn't call it inevitable, but you know, likelihood of me having a poorer quality sleep the night before event day, to something that the strategy that I've tried to work with in the past and I think your example there. really gets to the point, we're not necessarily running faster, it's not going to help you run faster. But what it might do is sort of increase the like the losses. So I'm talking like fatigue, maybe like this overall tiredness towards the end of a race. You know, that's kind of lethargic nature towards the end of race, maybe we're just offsetting that a little bit or delaying that those negative effects of loss of sleep. Is that fair to say? Definitely fair to say. And to your point quickly, like, I don't think we know very well what the sleep proceeding an event, how that's going to predict your performance. We know very well that people can perform extremely well on extremely poor sleep in the night before an event. Right. I like to draw to Dennis Rodman, a former basketball player in the NBA who'd be out in like Vegas the night before a NBA championship game and never sleep and do a bunch of other stuff and then show up. grab 20 rebounds and perform at an optimal level, right? And so we know that it's not necessary or sufficient a good night of sleep for optimal performance the night before. So again, thinking about your sleep as a behavioral priority that you wanna do your best over time to proceed competition. And if you can, you know, there also is ways to embed sleep across your day kind of tactically, so that if you're not able to get that sufficient sleep at night, You know, having these tactical naps kind of in the mid day, if you're so lucky to have a work that supports that, um, try and keep them less than 60 minutes, 30 to 60 minutes, um, distance from your targeted bedtime, probably about eight hours would be a nice window to block off. That can be a nice way to supplement sleep proceeding competition as well. Excellent. Right. Um, and if people want to continue learning more about sleep, I know that you have, well, before recording, you mentioned that you had the podcast and some other social media handles. So if people do want to learn more and investigate more about their sleep, where can they go? What what links can I leave in the show notes for them? Well, certainly, Brody, I just want to thank you for the opportunity to be here today. The invitation, it's been lovely. You've done a great job with this podcast. So cheers to you and cheers for the vulnerability that you bring to this podcast to and the authenticity. Uh, yeah. So I, I do host the sleep research society podcast. Uh, you can find that on major platforms. We try and unpack the latest science and sleep in circadian rhythms. And, um, if you're interested in voracious for that, please stop by. We try and release once a month. And then if you want to track me down, I'm available on social media platforms. Most of the major ones usually under the handle of at sleep and sports. Um, so two of my favorite things rolled into one title. Excellent night. Um, Well done for getting this paper published. Um, is there anything on the horizon, any other future papers or topics and things you might be interested in that, um, might be published in the future? Yeah, you know, I'm actually, um, working currently trying to work on some data here at, I'm back at the university of Wisconsin, I'm really interested in student athletes and I think they are really vulnerable to a lot of the issues from a sleep and circadian health perspective that have all these downstream consequences related to cognitive health. uh, psychological health, injury, risk, um, illness, all these things. And, and so I'm hopeful that I can get some data here soon to start tackling those questions of how travel really affects student athletes from not just a performance, but a wellbeing perspective and, and hopefully fingers crossed, I think I may have a data set where I can start really looking at. Is it the day before? Is it two days before? Is it three days before that principally impact performance? So more to come. Excellent. Um, and if you do. managed to release anything or learn anything more, reach out because I would very much like to share that with the audience, whether that's getting you back on or whether that's just me discussing it as a solo episode, but I'm very interested in this topic and a lot of people are as well. So thanks for all the hard work that you do. And you've been very generous of your time today and you've shared some incredible insights. So thanks for coming on and joining us today. My pleasure, Brody. Thank you all. If you are looking for more resources to run Smarter, or you'd like to jump on a free 20 minute injury chat with me, then click on the resources link in the show notes. There you'll find a link to schedule a call, plus free resources like my very popular injury prevention five day course. You'll also find the Run Smarter book and ways you can access my ever growing treasure trove of running research papers. Thanks once again for joining me and well done on prioritising your running wisdom.