Mark Dini is a decentralized health consultant specializing in quantum and circadian biology, functional medicine, comprehensive blood testing, tissue-specific bioregulator peptides, signaling peptide therapy, and longevity and healthspan optimization. His career is dedicated to advancing holistic and scientific methods to improve health and well-being on a global scale. As a business partner at an innovative health tracker startup in Singapore, Mark is contributing to the development of the world’s first preventive health tracking ring, now in the third stage of seed funding. The initiative aims to revolutionize health monitoring and management by enabling early detection and personalized prevention. In addition, Mark is involved in the development of an AI-driven app in partnership with a longevity clinic in South Africa. This collaboration seeks to enhance the precision of laboratory diagnostics, enabling more accurate analysis and personalized treatment protocols.
Mark Dini is a decentralized health consultant specializing in quantum and circadian biology, functional medicine, comprehensive blood testing, tissue-specific bioregulator peptides, signaling peptide therapy, and longevity and healthspan optimization. His career is dedicated to advancing holistic and scientific methods to improve health and well-being on a global scale.
As a business partner at an innovative health tracker startup in Singapore, Mark is contributing to the development of the world’s first preventive health tracking ring, now in the third stage of seed funding. The initiative aims to revolutionize health monitoring and management by enabling early detection and personalized prevention.
In addition, Mark is involved in the development of an AI-driven app in partnership with a longevity clinic in South Africa. This collaboration seeks to enhance the precision of laboratory diagnostics, enabling more accurate analysis and personalized treatment protocols.
SHOWNOTES:
😴 How a personal health journey reshaped the way we think about sleep
😴 Why western medicine alone often misses the root cause of poor sleep
😴 How type a habits can quietly sabotage deep sleep and recovery
😴 Why understanding the mind-body connection matters more than routines
😴 How nervous system safety unlocks true sleep recovery
😴 Why “if you’re not testing, you’re guessing” applies to sleep optimization
😴 How to use wearables as tools for awareness, not competition
😴 What recovery actually requires beyond workouts and biohacks
😴 How light exposure trains your circadian rhythm from morning to night
😴 The biggest sleep breakthrough: why getting thoughts onto paper changes everything
😴 And many more
SPONSORS:
🧠 If You “Can’t Turn Your Brain Off” At Night…try a quality magnesium supplement that addresses ALL the necessary forms of magnesium that you need to support calming your nervous system and sleeping deeply. https://magbreakthrough.com/sleepisaskill
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DISCLAIMER:
The information contained in this podcast, our website, newsletter, and the resources available for download are not intended to be medical or health advice and shall not be understood or construed as such. The information contained on these platforms is not a substitute for medical or health advice from a professional who is aware of the facts and circumstances of your individual situation.
Welcome to the Sleep As a Skill podcast. My name is Mollie Eastman. I am the founder of Sleep as A Skill, a company that optimizes sleep through technology, accountability, and behavioral change. As an ex sleep sufferer turned sleep course creator, I am on a mission to transform the way the world. Thinks about sleep.
Each week I'll be interviewing world-class experts, ranging from researchers, doctors, innovators, and thought leaders to give actionable tips and strategies that you can implement to become a more skillful sleeper. Ultimately, I believe that living a circadian aligned lifestyle is going to be one of the biggest trends in wellness.
And I'm committed to keeping you up to date on all the things that you can do today to transform your circadian health and by extension, allowing you to sleep and live better than ever before.
Welcome back to The Sleep Is a Skill podcast. I'm so excited for today's episode because the moment Mark and I first connected both online and in person, we immediately dove into a dozen fascinating rabbit holes. Today's guest, mark Dini, is a decentralized health consultant working at the crossroads of quantum biology, circadian science, functional medicine, and longevity.
His own quote, heroes Health Journey led him from personal training and mindset coaching into deep study of psychology, physiology, peptide therapy, and advanced biomarker analysis. All in pursuit of one question, how do we fix things at the root? Mark is helping shape the future of personalized preventative health.
He's a partner in the world's first predictive health tracking ring merging out of Singapore and collaborates with a longevity clinic in South Africa. On AI driven diagnostics, his guiding philosophy is simple and powerful. If you're not testing, you're guessing and if you're not addressing at the root, nothing sticks.
His work touches so many of the themes we explore on this show from circadian, entrainment, and peptides to wearables, emotional regulation, and the deeper patterns that influence our sleep more than we often realize in this episode, we explore everything from the role of light and infrared and. Setting your internal clock to why many high performers unknowingly sabotage their sleep through hormetic overload.
We also dive into psychoemotional safety, the evolution of wearables and Mark's data-driven approach to healing. So without further ado, let's dive into this expansive conversation with Mark. But first, a few words from our sponsors. As we head into the fall and vacation season, winds down IEA time when late nights irregular eating habits and indulgence tend to become the norm.
It's time to get back on track with our health and of course our sleep. Just a quick, interesting fact about sleep to mention drinking more than two servings of alcohol per day for men and more than one serving per day for women. Can decrease sleep quality by 39.2%. A sleep foundation survey reports not even mentioning all the indulgent food and late night effects that often come along with it.
And as we know, sleep is the key to your body's rejuvenation and repair process. It controls hunger and weight loss hormones, boost energy levels, and impacts countless other functions. A good night's. Sleep will improve your wellbeing much more than just about anything else I can possibly think of on the planet.
Uh, you know, I'm biased, but gotta say that. And sleep is your major to focus on as we head into the fall season and hopefully beyond. And that's why I recommend that if you're going to start taking some supplements on your sleep often, magnesium is a great place to begin, but not just any magnesium supplement.
I do recommend getting the Magnesium Breakthrough by Bio Optimizers. Magnesium Breakthrough contains also. Seven forms of magnesium designed to help you fall asleep, stay asleep, and wake up refreshed, which isn't that what we're all looking to do. The sleep benefits are really remarkable. I use it every night, and once your sleep is optimized, you'll find it much easier to tackle all the other major aspects of your health.
And trust me, it is a game changer. To test it out, visit mag breakthrough.com/sleep is a skill you can enter code. Sleep is a skill for 10% off for any order. This special offer is only available@magbreakthrough.com slash sleep is a skill. I will also include this in the show notes as well. Welcome to the Sleep is a Skill podcast.
Many of my podcast episodes, I have this inkling that there's gonna be a lot to unpack in a relatively short period of time. And this is another one of those. I mean, before even hitting record, our guest and I just were jumping to so many exciting different topics, so this is gonna be fantastic. And Mark, thank you so much for taking the time to be here.
My pleasure. Thank you so much for having me. I'm very, very grateful. Yes. Oh, I'm grateful as well and I'm grateful that we had the opportunity to meet in real life. The novelty of that in our modern society is like, it's a big deal often everything it is. So it's wonderful to have also met you in person, seen that you walk your talk and excited to discuss the many different.
Aspects of areas of expertise that you have that could be supportive for people with their sleep. But maybe we can begin at the beginning how you found yourself kind of as an expert in this space of health and it's kind of far reaching corners. Sure. Perfect. Okay. Well, I, I, I know we're very short on time, so I'm gonna keep it very succinct.
Okay. Sounds good. As most people in this space, I have had my own Hero's health journey, as I call it. So obviously we've got the Hero's journey from Joseph Campbell. This is just the health version where we find ourselves having our own issues that we have to address, and unfortunately, Western medicine didn't provide the answers that we were after.
And so in my own experience, I then had to take matters into my own hands and being something that's very data-driven and very kind of like. I need to know the why. The what, the how. It then meant that I was gonna be diving down those rabbit holes in the sense of like finding out the answers for myself.
And then using that N of one experiment kind of approach. Where will this work? Will with me personally, does this work with me? And that led me down so many paths. So I started off as a personal trainer. I then went from, well, I say I started as a personal trainer. I've, I started off kinda getting into the coaching world by working for Apple.
I was one of their leadership and development, uh, kind of coaches. I did their mentorships. I taught their staffs, their regional directors, all that kind of stuff, and how to basically be Apple. And I just loved coaching. And then when I left Apple, I was like, said, what am I gonna do? I was like, well, I love, I love coaching and I love health fitness.
So I was like, well, I'll, I'll be a personal trainer. So I went down the personal trainer route. I did that from 2011 to 2019. And then obviously when lockdown happened, well, I say 2020, should I say, then my lockdown happened. That meant I had changed my model because I couldn't be coaching people in person anymore.
Um, but during that long period of time, being a personal trainer, it taught me very much about. The mindset of how people wanna kind of improve themselves and the different types of people that wanna do that. You've got the people that wanna be told what to do and how to do it and they'll just go off and action it.
And they're very kind of type A driven, all those types of things. Um, and they're actually quite hard to coach. I'm me being one of them because the fact that we think we know better. So we want to kind of stockpile everything and we don't just habit stack a few things. We have it stack everything and we wanna be able to have like a morning routine, which.
It takes three hours, but we do it in one. So it's all very, very, very quick. You know, we're getting up and having coffee first thing in the morning without eating anything. All those kind of things. And then you've got, I guess you've got like the type B people that want their handheld and they wanna be told what to do, how to do it, but they want you to do it with them and that.
Made me very quickly realize that just understanding the body in the sense of nutrition and exercise wasn't enough. I needed to know how the mind was gonna work. 'cause I was listening to a, a, uh, an audio book by Zig Ziglar where he said that anybody can make anybody lose weight off their body, but they won't keep it off until they lose their weight off their mind.
Mm-hmm. And that when it, that's when it triggered. And I was like, right, I need to learn psychology. So I started self-studying Freud and young and. Cognitive behavioral therapy. My mom and my stepdad are trained hypnotherapist and life coaches, so I basically stole, you can't see my bookshelves, but I stole all of their like EFT books, all the hypnotherapy books, all their EMDR books.
Um, I stole their, um. NP books, like I studied the there NLP as well. So I studied all of that by myself and started to apply that into my training and that's when I started seeing really big results with people where it wasn't about the body change necessarily, because that's a byproduct of doing the right things in the right order at the right time, in the right way for that individual.
It allowed me to then tailor everything to that particular individual because if there was trauma or if there were roadblocks, hand brakes, which they were basically self-sabotaging, I'd need to know how to handle that. That turned my business into this most incredible, profitable business. I was doing 75 hours a week of coaching.
I was oversubscribed for like five years. I always had a waiting list of clients, but then as I say, when I got into, um, into lockdown, I had to change that. And over this period of time, I had my own things I had to work on. So. I had meningococcal septicemia when I was nine weeks old, which is meningitis that affects the brain.
Um, and I almost died. And luckily, luckily for me, my mom got a second opinion and that's what kept me alive and that's how they found it. And then from that point on, having been pumped through with so much antibiotics, I had a very. Poor immune system. Gut microbiome wasn't a thing at the time, and so it was just all destroyed.
And so I had every illness that a child could have. My mom's got like a big ass book like this, which basically says everything I've ever had in my life. And that meant as I grew up, I had these other problems. Unfortunately, then I had multiple. Injuries not due to myself, but through accidents. Like at, at school, my, my PE teacher did a static rugby tackle and dislocated my leg quite bad, my knee quite badly.
He put my knee cap around the back of my leg, tore my ACL, my MCL, my cartilage, all that kinda stuff. So then I had to learn how to rehab properly and all of this stuff. And then when I was 20, 24, 2 5, they wanted to put a metal rod in my spine and fuse my spine. Um, because at the time they said I had shaman's disease, which is where the discs degenerate.
And they said by the time I was 30 I would be bent over like a 9-year-old man just looking at the floor. Well, here I am with no metal rod in my spine and everything is perfect and. These were just highlights for me where I was like, okay, so Western medicine's great. Don't get me wrong. You know, they've just like a year ago they saved my dad's life with open heart surgery.
So they are great when you need those types of things. You know, if you need open, if you've got something wrong with your heart like that, you're not gonna go and see a homeopath. You're not gonna be able to rub anything into your body to be able to or take anything like that, which is gonna heal you. So it has its purposes, but also had its limitations.
And that's something else that I realized as I was going through my, my coaching kind of program. I then got into this very high charging CrossFit functional bodybuilding thing where I was just like two hours a day training, plus the 75 hour coaching weeks, four hours of sleep, as I say, like black coffee, first thing in the morning when I'm waking up, going to bed at midnight, waking up at half past four.
Like all these things were just wrong. Mm-hmm. And then during lockdown, when I was reevaluating what I wanted to do, which is when I went into functional medicine, yeah. I. Won a competition with a company called Glycan Age and they test your biological age based off your glycans in your body, which are IgGs like sugar molecules.
And this basically tells you the age of your immune system. And I was 22 years older than what I should be. And it was so bad that the owner of the company called me up and said, we've never seen this before. Uh, we need to have a chat. And so after a big conversation, they said, well, actually. We'll help you.
You help us. Come on as a consultant. And I was like, fine. So I was studying the functional medicine at the time. Hmm. I was able then to apply that with their clients and start to learn as I, as I went along. And that then took me into the place where I could build my own business. I was like, right. I'm more confident with what I can do now.
I can do functional blood reading, I can read Dutch tests, stool tests, uh, toxicity tests. Organic acid tests, what have you. And I started to then attract those types of clients because clients that are online are very different to clients in person. So the ones that are online were the ones that, again, wanted to be able to be doing it without any handheld handholding, so to speak.
And so I opened up my business that way, and I started doing the functional blood work and realizing that everything else I've been doing up until that point, just the training and nutrition. Was literally just like a stone skimming the surface of the pond. There was so much more nuance to the body than what I ever realized, you know, the whole calorie and calorie out.
I was like, that's wrong. I was like, okay. So that needs to go deeper and okay, the mindset's great, but we also have to then go into the psyche of the person, the mindfulness side of things, looking at the central nervous system, vagus nerve tone. All these other types of things, like are they cortisol driven?
How's their cortisol peak? Are they kind of like that inverse cortisol spike where they're too high in the evening and too low in the morning hormones? It just started unpacking all of this stuff and I was like, wow, we are literally like every underground train map from every country in the world laid on top of one another.
And it's just all complexities. And the more I started to study that, the more I realized that. This is root cause. We need to get to the root of all these types of things so I can make people change anything, but if I'm not getting to the root of the thing that they need to change, nothing's gonna stick, nothing's gonna hold.
And so that then dove me into peptide therapy where I studied with Dr. William Seeds, then I went to. Quantum biology, that's when I discovered Jack Cruz, Sarah Pugh, Kerry Bennett, and people like yourself and Danny Hamilton. And I was like, wow, okay. There's so much more to all of this than just calories and calories out, 10,000 steps a day, um, and all that kind of stuff.
So. I didn't start applying it all myself because I wouldn't use it with people unless I've done it myself. I mean, I draw the line at using like, like estrogen and stuff like that, which I'd use for women because I don't need that. Right. But I, I, I would try everything else. Basically. As I say, I'm the biggest n of one experimenter in the world, and I will want to always do something before I actually advise or recommend somebody else to do that thing.
And so, yeah, that, that's my journey in like 10 minutes. Very, very kind of short. Oh my gosh. Well, fantastic. And I love how you found yourself looking at the root. So looking at the root, when you think about sleep now, what are some of the first things that you might go to? I know before we hit record, you mentioned some, you know, exciting areas that you are a part of and, and exciting conversations you're in.
Of things that can really be helpful for people with sleep. So I know you touched on a conversation around peptides, quantum biology. I know we also spoke about things like red light and different kind of wearables, and I know these are a lot of different paths, but when you hear, think about this topic of sleep, what are some of the places that you might wanna have people begin?
Okay, it's a great question. So I think the first thing that came to mind there was. If you're not testing, you're guessing, and this is where, again, I learned this from the function medicine side of things, as much as I, I don't like cheesy kind of things like that, it's true because if you are just literally throwing everything at the wall and seeing what sticks, you are gonna be taking a very, very long time to get to the main point of what it is that you're trying to do.
And the thing that actually works. And it's the one thing that I've noted, and again, I'm not, I'm not sidetracking, I'm just gonna bring this back to the point. A lot of the people that come to me that are Type A, they're taking like 500, 600, 700 pounds worth of supplements a month. And so the first thing I'll ask 'em is, okay, so what's working?
Right? You know, 'cause they, they've got this sleeps stack, you know, they've got the, the no disrespect to 'em. They've got the Huberman sleeps stack, you know, glycine and magnesium built by glycine. And they're taking like chamomile and, and lavender and lemon balm and valerian root and blue lotus and dah, dah, dah, dah.
Okay, cool. So, out of all of those things, what's working? Oh, they're like, oh, I don't know. Right. Okay, cool. So the best idea then would be to stop taking them. Well, then the anxiety goes through the roof because they're like, I can't function without my supplements. Well, of course you can, because they're supplements.
They supplement something. They're not. The main thing, right? So if you are not testing, you are guessing, and this is where a wearable will come into play. So I was one of the first people that got the whoop strap in the UK look back in 2017 'cause all the CrossFit athletes were using it. I was like, I'm a CrossFit coach.
Yes, I'm a kind of CrossFit athlete in a way. I need to track everything. So I wore that all the time. I never took it off. And then I got gifted an aura and I was like, okay, I'll wear that at the same time. So I've, now I've got an aura ring and I've got a whoop strap, and they're both slightly, slightly different.
You know, aura was very, very good at tracking the sleep. Uh, whoop was very, very good at tracking activity, but I noted something that was very, very similar between the two, which was, yes, okay. It taught me my sleep patterns, like when I go to bed, when I wake up, and the amount of deep sleep I got on the REM and all those types of things.
I was very, very good at that because it taught me that. If I wasn't getting good enough, deep sleep, I wasn't recovering, and if I wasn't getting any rem, I'd get depressed. And this is the same with everybody because if you're not getting REM, you don't consolidate. And so when you wake up, your emotional kind of experiences aren't put into order and so your brain can't make sense.
And so all of a sudden you start having these kind of, these negative loops where your kind of like past tense all the time, like you are, as Paul Check will say, you are pasteurized. You are in the past, and anytime that you pasteurize something, you are removing all the good things. So. You are pasteurized, where if you're anxiety driven, you are worrying about the things that haven't happened yet because of the past.
So you are now still pasteurized, but you're now stuck in the future tense. And so what I noted with that was these patterns. But what I also noted with these trackers, and there's no disrespect to them, is. They were very competitive. Whoop, was very competitive in the sense of you were in leagues. How, how hard had you pushed that day?
How many exercises had you done that day? How much ice BARTing had you done? How much this and this, da da da da and are you recovering? What's your HRV? You've got some guy like an HRV of 200 and you are stuck at like 80 and you're like, oh my God, no, I've got push myself harder and I've, you know, if I've got a green, that means I've gotta go ham at the gym.
Wrong. Aura was also the same thing, that it wasn't competitive with other people, it was competitive with self. What's my readiness today? Oh, I've got a good readiness score today. Okay, cool. That means I can now again, hit it hard challenge myself, hormetic stresses, and all of these times when these things are coming out, you've got Whim Hoff, and you've got.
Ice baring, and you've got, I say like CrossFit or functional bodybuilding, and you've got saunas and you've got, um, hyperactive oxygen chamber, and then you've got all these other things that you, you are, you're adding in as hormetic stresses. We're not realizing that you're not supposed to stay in a sympathetic state all day.
That's not the point, because that's all catabolic. It's breaking you down excess cortisol all the time, which we need. But the reason why cortisol is getting spiked is 'cause it's in, it's, it's anti-inflammatory. It's supposed to be bringing you down, not constantly elevating. And so the two things I noticed there with those two things was it was too competitive.
What you were referring to, which is the ring I'm wearing here, it's different. It gives you a longevity score based off your recovery and what you've done the day prior. So it's saying to you from what you've done, what state have you put your body in? Are you in homeostatic balance or are you in absolute chaos?
Hmm. When you are competing all the time and you're hormetic stressing all the time, you are in chaos all the time. You are constantly breaking down or no recovery happens there, no growth happens there, nothing happens there. It just capitulates into entropy. But when you've got a longevity score and it's saying to you, right, you've done some good things where you've stressed yourself enough, but you've also spent enough time in a parasympathetic state to signal to the body, you are safe.
All is well, you can now recover. Mm. That's the biggest learn I got from wearables is don't compete. It doesn't matter which ring you wear, whether you wear my ring, my company's ring, or whether you wear whoop or aura. Don't compete with yourself or others. Use it as a benchmark to learn. That's the most important thing.
What are the things that you are doing, which are taking you too far, and what are the things that you are doing, which are being too little or not enough? Because we need to have that as the Daoist say in the Da de Jing. We have to have that middle path. One foot either side. We're not too far in either direction because that goes into extremes.
We need to stay centered. And so the first thing I say to people that are looking to fix their sleep or, or change their sleep habits is track it, number one and number two, look for the things that you can do that are easily applied and free. Mm-hmm. Which I'm sure you've spoken about loads of times on your podcast.
Cold room. Yes. Pitch black room. Regular consistency of sleep, hygiene. Go to bed at the same time. Wake up at the same time as best as you can. Monday to Sunday. Mm-hmm. Not just Monday to Friday. And then sleep in on the weekends. Do it consistently because success in everything is just consistency over time.
Absolutely every day do the same things. They're the easiest things to do. Cold. So you should be chilly when you get into bed 'cause that promotes deep sleep, dark. So no little red standby lights on. Nothing plugged in. Phone, not in the room. Sleep is bedroom is for three things. Sleep, reading a book and sex.
That's it. Yeah, exactly. You couldn't do anything else in there. So they're the, the first low entry level things I would say to people is darkness, cold, nothing in the room, and then a tracker, which helps you monitor your progress of doing those things. Okay. Yeah. I love that. And I liked though that you're speaking to some of the evolution that we're seeing with wearables because we do have some of those individuals that have been a rough run with their sleep.
So maybe they're dealing with things like insomnia, difficulty falling asleep, staying asleep, and there are times where those certain trackers that some of the limitations or the challenges that you spoke to, kind of that competitive nature or. Kind of that no SIBO effect that they might experience can be sometimes problematic for those people, or at least for that stretch of time, that season that they're in.
And knowing and pointing to the fact that there's other things out there that might better serve them or maybe not elicit some of those responses is great to hear about. Can you share the name of that company if you didn't already mention that? Sure. Yes. So my company's course says my company, mine and my business partner's company we're called Signs.
Signs Beat. Okay. So S-I-G-N-S Beat, um, and it's company coming up Singapore. It's a preventative. Health tracker basically. So it monitors inflammation in the system, which I believe is a, is a world's first. And it also monitors homeostasis in the body. But when the practitioner uses the ring for their clients, they get a backend system, which they can look at, which gives you different metrics to what the client gets.
And it allows us to see things that are going on. So I, I'm gonna rephrase this. Mm-hmm. My body in 2022. Came down with an autoimmune condition in September of 2022. In February of 2022, my business partner who owns the algorithm that runs this ring, messaged me and said to me, mark, you are moving into an autoimmune state.
Mm. And so I said to him, well, mm, we need the data, don't we? He's like, you, you can't do that. I was like, well, let's see what happens. Maybe it's not right. Yeah, I bet if it's right. That's incredible. And obviously eight months later there was a result. So it's preventative in nature and it's also predictable in nature as well as monitoring inflammation as well as all the other things that, or, and whoop do we do step body temperature.
SPO. Count all that kind of does everything that they do in that sense, but it also has a place where you input all the things that you do. So whether it's medication, drink, diet, supplements, biohacks, whatever it is that you do, plus it's got its own journal. 'cause it monitors psycho-emotional stress at the same time.
And you do that for 14 days. Everything that you take. So it gets a baseline. And then our algorithm runs through deep seek and it basically then has an AI health assistant, which will then report to you the next day. Like it was say, it said to me today, mark, you did an ice bath, you had a positive result.
Although. That result is starting to diminish, either increase frequency or duration. Mm. So it is telling me what to do to make me better, and then it will list at the bottom saying, these things impact your sleep in a positive way. These things impact your sleep in a negative way. I recommend you don't do these things.
Mm. So it gives you the ability to tailor your day based on the feedback that this system is giving you. Now, granted, it's an algorithm so. Some things, you know, like as example, it never likes me taking magnesium. Yeah. But I know that it actually helps me cognitively wind down in the evening. So I don't take the BG glycinate, I take the the um, three N eight.
So it helps my 'cause that crosses the blood brain barrier. It calms my brain down. Yeah. Being very analytical in that sense. I need something to slow me down. So as much as it says to me, it doesn't respond well in my whole body. I know it does something good for my brain, so I'm using my own ability to my interoception to know me.
Yeah. Over the algorithm telling me what I should and shouldn't be doing. So it's, it's not like a a, this is how you have to do it. Sure. It's a recommendation as all things should be. Yeah. Absolutely. Has that been helpful in managing the turn on of that autoimmune disorder or, or stage? A hundred percent.
Yeah, a hundred percent. So we were able, we were able, luckily I've been using the, the, the algorithm for a few years beforehand and obviously been using it after. So I've got from 2020 to now five years worth of data. So I've been able to track the whole thing. Any peptides I've taken, any quantum biology stuff I've added in supplementation.
Um. Even walking like a, a sunrise walk. A sunset walk. Grounding, sunbathing doesn't ice baths. It doesn't matter what I do, I can input it in there. If I've had a, an emotional day psychologically speaking, I can input that in there as well. And then I can track back to those days and see the trends. When was my heart rate variability going up in a good way and I resting heart rate going down in a good way.
And when did it switch? What happened, and I can go to that specific day and go, okay, on that day these things happened. So I now know there's a trend there. Mm-hmm. And so I, when these things start to happen again, if it's like a lifestyle thing, I can make a change. Or if I've gone to bed later or eaten later, or if I've had a, I dunno, like a simple sugar at night, like a banana or something as part of my last meal.
If that's had a negative impact, I'll know. 'cause I'll be able to go back and see 'cause all these things are impacting our sleep. As you know, your sleep starts in the morning. Yes. Like how you start your day, how you're gonna end your day, and how you end your days. How you start your day. It's invest. So the bookends at either end shape everything.
And if you can go back and track that, well that's incredible And it's, Hey, it's made such an impact for me, so I know. The best times that I need to go to bed. I know the times that I need to wake up because I know how my body responds when I have a certain amount of sleep. The stages of sleep that I go through, like how many different stages of REM and deep sleep I go through the times that I spend in those zones, it just helps me understand all of that, which enables me then to tailor my sleep even whether if, if I'm in my own environment or if I'm in an a, a alien environment in the sense of like when I came to Austin in somebody else's house, in somebody else's room.
Yeah. How do I adapt it to make it suit my. Uh, physiology. I love that. Okay, fantastic. Okay, so for people that are struggling with their sleep or want to optimize, you would have them begin with the tracking and ideally, specifically trackers that could give that much, kind of expand the aperture on how we're thinking about this and looking at this versus just like a couple metrics.
We're really getting the whole world of things and really getting us involved. So it's almost just like a means, or not just, but it can act as a means of kind of self-awareness and. Kind of panning out to see what are some of the habits and behaviors and, and supplements and protocols that might be serving or not serving us, and kind of course correcting along the way.
So I love the sounds of that. And then I know you also pointed to things like peptides, red light and beyond. So what might be the other things that you might have people explore for sleep? Okay, so. Red light, definitely. Because when you expose yourself to red light and the type of light you're exposing yourself to is important.
Yeah. So obviously we know sunrise is the most important timekeeper. So seeing the sunrise and seeing the sunset, even if it's just for 10 minutes Yeah. Is important to set that circadian rhythm. But obviously living in the United Kingdom. We get sun for like 5% of our year, and the rest of the time it's gray and cloudy.
So we don't get that same level of luxe brightness as what we would want. So the red light's still there, that's great, but we also need the brightness. And without that brightness, we have difficulty knowing what time of day it is. Because if I was looking out my window now for 10 minutes. I will not see the change in the light, but my eyes will, and my eyes will tell, start telling my super charismatic nucleus.
This is the time of day, and so we need to have certain brightness or lux at the right times. So if you've got a red light panel and you are putting it on full brightness, red lights before sunrise, well that's not good because it's now giving the body an early luxe signal. Same principle if you use it at night.
Don't use it bright at night because again, you are extending the day out by doing that brightness and infrared. So the, the, the frequency that we can't see is available from kind of daybreak until night fall, and that happens just before sunrise and just after sunset. Once that's gone, we have no infrared and we have no red light at all.
So you can use the infrared in the morning at daybreak and you can use the infrared at night. At nightfall, but either side of that, we don't have it. So again, we don't see the infrared, but our non-visual photoreceptors on our skin do, our visual photoreceptors do. So this is another way to what's known as end train, your circadian rhythm to say, this is where the start of the day is.
This is where the end of the day is. And that's important as you know, and you've probably spoken about multiple times in your podcast about the production of melatonin because it's light. That produces melatonin, not darkness. Yeah. So we need to see as much light as possible, daylight as possible, or the equivalent of daylight as possible to create that melatonin subcellular.
And then at night when everything should be going dark and more like a fire light. That's when it starts getting released, and that's when we start getting those signals to start getting tired and starting to go to bed. And that's when autophagy and anti, um, the anti-inflammatory properties and all those other types of things start happening from the production of melatonin.
Beautiful. Oh, I love that. Okay. So certainly bringing in red lights strategically and light in general, and making sure that that is a part of our practice. From the moment we wake up, depending on our when, if we're waking up before the sun or not, but having a structure in place until bed and being mindful of our light environment.
And then I know you also pointed to peptides, any awesome peptides, and I know of course bioindividuality and lots of nuance there, but any general hollow outs. Yeah, so there are, there are two peptides that are normally spoken about when it comes to sleep. One is called dci, or Deep Sleep Inducing Peptide.
This comes, if I remember correctly, from the brains of rabbits. Mm-hmm. Um, and then it's synthesized. Well, that's how they found it. And then it got synthesized in a lab. And this is where the individuality or the precious snowflake ness of us that we are makes a difference. So. I used DCP to retrain my circadian rhythm, and I did that.
During and after the autoimmunity because autoimmunity disregulates your circadian rhythm because you don't sleep. And if you do, you're not deep sleeping, and if you do, it's not the right times because the body wakes you up and what have you. So I used it to retrain my circadian rhythm so that my body knew when to start going to bed.
So that would then it knew when to start. Waking me up in the morning again. And I also paired that with temperature. So that's something that a lot of people don't speak about when it comes to sleep is temperature makes a difference. And we have a temperature minimum about two hours before we wake up.
That's when we, that's when our body's the coldest. And you can use that time to, basically, you can shift it. And so by exposing yourself to cold earlier on in the morning will shift that temperature minimum. Exposing yourself to cold at night will shift that temperature minimum, which means you'll wake up slightly later or early, depending on when you're placing it.
So I use temperature plus deci to retrain my circadian rhythm. Now, that's the only benefits I got from a peptide called Deep Sleep Inducing Peptide. You would think it would've given me more deep sleep, which I didn't note. However, I've given this to clients. And they have noted a change in their deep sleep.
Mm-hmm. So this was a telltale sign to me that it wasn't a. Physiological issue with my deep sleep cycles. It was a psychological or central nervous system difference that was changing for me, which is why I wasn't getting that deep sleep. So my body has to feel, our bodies have to feel safe and regulated to get deep sleep.
That only happens when you're in a parasympathetic state. So as much as I was going to bed and sleeping, my body was still thinking I'm about to get attacked by a tiger. So I was in a sympathetic state all the time. Mm-hmm. This links back to what I was saying about. Type A and or people that are called all driven or what have you, they're always in a sympathetic state, which means their sleep's always gonna be rubbish no matter what they try and do, until they realize that only maybe 30% of your day should be sympathetically driven and the rest of it should be parasympathetic.
Yeah, the, and the timing of dey matters. You can only really use it two or three times a week, and when you take it before bed matters. Some people respond an hour before bed. Some people respond three hours before bed because if you take it the wrong time, it actually wakes you up. So. Weird again for the name of the pep, the peptide.
And whether you take it, some people respond to it. If they inject it, some people respond to it if they, uh, do, uh, a nasal spray. 'cause it goes straight up into the brain. I tried both. I got the same response from both where some clients tried, the injections have got nothing. Some clients tried the nasal spray and they got something.
So it just depends on the person. Okay. It's always gonna be trial and error on that one, but the biggest. Biggest lever pull when it comes to peptides is, uh, it's got two different names, either epical or epical. Hmm. That's predominantly known to help with the lengthening of tel, which is like anti-aging.
Right. So that's great because it has that benefit. But epical from a peptide perspective, whether it's injectable peptide, synthetic signaling peptide, or whether it's from a, the other class of peptide, which is known as a bio regulator. That's the one that I noticed. The biggest change when it came to my sleep was using the bio regulator.
It took longer, but the change was quite profound. Where with the injectable epitol, which was more synthetic and signaling that was more instantaneous, but I noted that it would work better for me if I took it in the morning than if I took it in the evening. It just gave me some funky dreams, like very lucid.
Yeah. So I don't mind, I don't mind that, but that can also be very disruptive when you're trying to retrain your sleep. Mm-hmm. So for people that don't want that. They want that more long lasting change because bio regulators work on, they're basically like epigenetic switches. They go into the, into the, into the DNA and they start changing switches.
That's the better one to go for, where if you want something that's quick and can kind of have an immediate impact, I would go for the more signaling kind of peptide, which you'd you, I mean, you can inject bio regulators, but mostly they're all oral. But there is a difference between the two. But epical for me is if I've got anyone.
Anyone, insomnia, anything like that where they've got issues with that, I give them that because it actually directly works on the pineal gland and the pineal gland interacts with Arcadian rhythm. So that's really important one to use. And that would be the first one that I'd go for with anybody that's got any sleep issues in that regard, is go for epitol, start taking that at a high dose.
So with the bio regulator, you'd be taking two tablets a day for maybe 60 days. Then you would bring it down and you'd do two tablets a day for 10 days, then take a break and then come back to it in maybe three months time if you need to. That's how I would. Tartrate that in and out. Um, but that's, um, epitol is massive.
It's much, much more than anti anti-aging. It's incredible. Well, thank you so much for sharing about that, and so happy to hear in your sharing that you were able to discover also for, in your world, your autoimmune issues. And then as you pointed to, you've been able to sound from the sounds of it work through then.
So now you're no longer mm-hmm. With the autoimmunity. No, no, no. Been healed since 2023. 2023. That's incredible. Ugh. Okay. Well, having said that, I know people are gonna be curious how you're managing your own sleep. So we do ask mm-hmm. Four questions of every guest that comes on. And our first question is, what does your nightly sleep routine look like right now?
Okay, perfect. So about. At sunset, these glasses change. I will put the, these other little things that, you know, the Veeva Rays put the extra ones on. So I'll put the orange ones on round up. So right now sun sunset's about half seven. So at half past seven I'll put the orange ones on and then around about an hour and a half before I go to bed, I put the red lenses on and.
Uh, in between that time I will put my phone on do not disturb. I've done all the things I need to do. Everything gets locked down, so I stop work at seven. I make all my calls to whether it's my parents or my friends, or get back to messages until about quarter past seven. I go out to do sun Sunset. I.
Stand there, getting the sum in for a good 10, 15 minutes. Grounding grounding's, very important because again, we need that electron flow when we sleep. Um, sleep's actually quite energetic, so we, we need to have that as well. We need to have the power to sleep, so to speak. Um, and then when I get back, I'll then do the nighttime journaling, which is nowhere near as in depth as my morning journal.
It's a lot shorter. It just allows me to bookend that day to give that signal to my brain that this is when I'm gonna obviously be. Calming down. I stop eating about an hour before sunset, so that way then I'm not digesting while I'm asleep. I stop about four hours before sleep. 'cause our digestion actually should be stopping around about seven, eight o'clock anyway.
We shouldn't be eating after that because that's actually what's known as a zeitgeber, a timekeeper food tells our body that we're still awake and we don't want that. I don't have any blue lights at all, ever. Anyway, but I'm, I'm not watching tv. My phone is always on red mode anyway, so all of that's already done.
So once I've done my journaling, I will do one of two things. I'm either going to do some form of breath work. I do like heart coherence. I think that's an incredible, uh, meditation to do or breath work to do. That's through heart math. You're just gonna basically gonna breathe in for four seconds and out for four, or in for five, out for five, in for six, out for six, whichever method you wanna choose.
And while you're doing that, you're just imagining the breath coming in through the heart and out through the heart. And then you just think of things that you're grateful for for that day. That's it. You do that for 10 minutes or something that I've got into very, very much recently is either some form of, um, yoga nira or, or non deep sleep.
Rest as they say. Um, and I'll do that for 20 minutes. Laying down, I'll, I'll have a grounding mat that I'm laying on. Again, getting that charge, laying on that, either doing that or the thing that I've been doing more recently is I, my speakers, I bring them down onto my floor so they vibrate through my floor and I put on a sound bowl, um, meditation for an hour.
Then all I'll do is I'll, I'll put my hand one on my, my right hand on my heart, my left hand on my stomach, and I'll say to myself, right, soul, what things are in the way of you communicating with me and me communicating with you? Mm, whatever's in the way. Remove those blockages so that we can communicate.
And when you are done, wake me up and it'll wake me up at either 30 minutes or 40 minutes or 20 minutes, or last night I was there for an hour and a half, I didn't even know. And then I wake up, go to my room. I've got a little, um, there's little kind of red light book readers. Yep. So I'll put that on my book.
And I've got either, at the moment I'm reading either a Light Bringer or Miss Born or something like that. I always read, never read. Logical books at night, read fiction. Yeah. Get the creative juices going so that way then you can start imagining and you're not as Tom Bi, you said, you're not thinkitating, you are imagining, right?
Yeah. So you are allowing the parts of the brain that create dreams to actually start coming to life. And the more I do that, the more I actually dream, which is really, really good. So I'll then be in my bed for however long I wanna read for. I don't put a time on it 'cause I know I've got a good 40 minutes before I really wanna be gonna sleep.
So I might read for 10 minutes, 20 minutes, half an hour, whatever the case may be. Once I'm ready to go to bed, book goes to the side, red light goes off, mouth tape, nasal strip, eye mask. And then I listen to a Ben Greenfield podcast with a sleep expert. About three years ago, he said that you should put your, your duvet only up to your waist.
It's only your feet that need to be warm. The rest of you can be cold. Have you, did you listen to the same one? I did. Yep. Exactly. So I've been doing that ever since. So again, I just put my blanket over my, my, my quilt over my waist. I'm, I sleep naked. I don't want it to be warm in any other way. So my feet are warm, but I'm covered by the waist and then I, I fall asleep.
Some people like to sleep on their back left or right, but if you have digestive issues, sleep on your left. If you actually want to increase, increase your HRV sleep on your right. If you want Wicked dreams. Sleep on your back. Mm-hmm. Or fall asleep on your back and then you'll have really crazy dreams.
And that's basically my night routine. It sounds a lot, but it doesn't take me that long to do. I love it. Okay. And then what might we see in your morning, quote unquote sleep routine and as you pointed to with the idea that how we start our day can impact our sleep? Yep. Okay. So morning I wake up naturally, so no alarm.
I'm always up probably about 15, 20 minutes before sunrise bathroom, brush my teeth. I do that, uh, a, a vda 10 soaks of cold water on my face to wake me up. Um, if you don't do that, you're not happy with that. Just, just put your wrists into the water. So that way then you get that, that spark to wake you up.
Then into the kitchen, I'll do a shot of glutamine, colostrum, and a product by a company called Thera Nordic called Healthy Bowel, which is just got, um, some partially hydro gu gum and some prebiotic fibers in there. Do a shot of that into my room. Get my trackies on and my, my zip hoodie shoes on, my grounding shoes go because at the moment the grass is wet and cold.
So I don't bear bare at the moment, but I will do in the summer, walk to my local park and I'm that weird guy at the moment, at half six in the morning with his hoodie open or off depending on the temperature. And I'm sunning myself with the sunrise, whether it's cloud, your or, or not. And I'm just getting all this raised in 10, 15 minutes max.
I walk home. Then I'll do HeartMath again for another 10 minutes. Or I'll may, I might, if I've got longer on, on the weekends, I do longer. I do Joe dispenser on the weekends. And then after I've done that, I do my Qigong and my yoga flow. So I learn the Qigong flow from, um, what's his name? She, he, uh. Great guy on YouTube.
Incredible. He runs Shalin Temple Europe. He's literally like the next Bruce Lee. He's incredible. Um, so I do his Qigong flow in the morning, and then at the end of that I do a Tai Chi that I learned from Paul Czech, not directly, but from one of his videos. All grounded on my mat to make sure that I'm getting all that in.
And I'm doing it staring at my window where the sun's coming up. Um, and then I get on with my day. So that will then be breakfast time. So then I'll cook my breakfast, sit down, have my breakfast, and all of this is done with no rush. So one of the greatest gifts that you can give yourself if you can, is a slow morning.
And I don't mean take your time. What I mean is very much like wwe, effortless action, the art of doing without doing. Mm-hmm. So don't have that. Stuck on the top of the pond looking nice and chilled, but underneath it's all fast as as hell. That's the, that's us inside. We have that internal just. Chill. You can move quickly without being ero.
Like, not erotic, erratic. You can be erotic if you want. You can have erotic mornings if you want. Exactly. But just be, just be calm. And also, the other thing that I'm doing while I'm doing this is I have positive affirmations playing while I'm doing all these things. So I'm either listening to Louise Hay.
Or, um, Abraham Hicks, or there's another guy that listened to at the moment who basically just has like an hour long positive affirmation thing that just loops continuously. And I've got that playing all the time while I'm doing this whole thing, like the Qigong, the Tai Chi, and cooking my breakfast. So it keeps me calm and it sets my day mentally for the right things.
Like, as Tony Bins says, it's a primer, it's primer priming my day. Right? And that's, that's all I do in the morning. And then once I've had my breakfast, I go out for my UVA walk. Very important. That's about 20 minutes just to help me digest. And that sit, and then I'm back home for about nine o'clock, and then I'm ready to go work time.
Love it. Okay. Beautiful. So inspiring. And what might we visually see on your nightstand or in your environment? Oh, in my bedroom? Yes. I should clarify exactly in the bedroom. Yeah. Okay. So on my left Bedstand, I have my Shungite, which protects me from all the EMF and everything that's around. I also have my other kind of EMF mitigating pendants that I wear.
So I'll have like an eye pyramid there. I've got the, the, uh. Uh, Lela Tech one that'll be there as well. Um, and I've got a, uh, nag tamper incense sack, which basically just, just gifts off nag, tamper all the time, that smell, which is nice and calming. Um, I have a grounding sheet on my bed, which I, it's one of those ones you don't have, you have to lay on it.
You can put a sheet over the top of it, so I've got that, which is on my bed. Um, my bed's very, very close to the floor as well, so I've lowered it right down. So that would then, it's more like a, uh, sleeping on the floor kind of thing. And that brings more safety and it allows kind of more, um, more connection to the ground, like that kind of feeling.
Um, I've got a gravity. I've got a weighted blanket, gravity blanket, um, which I have on my other side. I've got all my kinda my Buddhist statues and my. Positive affirmations. So I've got a big thing which says today is the day, and I've got Buddha statues there and everything like that. And then in front of my bed I've got candles and I've got another Buddha statue and a Buddha head.
And then pictures of my family, because obviously that's people that I love and I get to see them. The first thing that I wake up, and most importantly, is I have blackout curtains. Hmm. So my blackout curtains are my favorite thing in my bedroom, more so than my bed because it just makes everything so black and I love that.
So that's. My room. Perfect. Beautiful. And then the last question would be, so far to date, what would you say has made the biggest change to the management of your sleep? Or said another way, maybe biggest aha moment in managing your sleep. There was a song that I used to listen to back in the nineties. Uh, it was an r and b song and the guy used to sing about.
Not going to bed mad. He said, don't go to bed mad baby. He's singing to his, his girlfriend, like, don't go to bed mad. Let's, let's sort this out now. Sure. And it's always made me realize that, or, or kind of think about that. I can't go to bed if I have things on my mind. Mm-hmm. So get out of your head onto paper and then once it's on the paper, leave it.
Yeah. You can't do anything about it. In that nighttime, if you've got emails to get back to or a work deadline, none of that stuff matters because nothing can happen and nothing will happen between when you sleep and when you wake up. Mm-hmm. When you go to sleep, the day ends. There's a hard stop when you wake up.
Everything is a new Mm. The day is a brand new day. What happened yesterday doesn't even exist. Quantumly speaking. It's, it's never happened. So put all your thoughts onto paper. Get it out of the way. This is what Tim Ferris always says. Let's get it out of your head, onto paper. Get it out of the way. Do something.
It calms you, whether it's drawing, reading, singing, whatever the case may be, just do something that brings you some peace and joy. Do that in the evening so that way then you are forgetting that and focusing here so that when you go to bed you are literally mindless, and that way then you're not mindful in the bad way.
Yeah. So that way then when you go to sleep and you shut your eyes, there's nothing that's stopping you from sleeping and you can just go to bed and sleep and be like, okay, whatever happens now, it doesn't matter. I can wake up in the morning, so. Everything pen to paper. That's the biggest thing for me. I love it.
I could not agree more, so well said. Now for the people listening that are saying, oh my goodness, I want to be more part of Mark's world and some of the things that he discussed, what are some of the best ways to do that? Okay, so I'm most active on Instagram. That's just Mark Dini official. You can find me there on XI am at Mark Dini.
Again, I'm not as active on X as I probably should be. Um, but then also, uh, YouTube. So. My own personal YouTube, which again, which is Mark de Official, that's the Scott podcast like this on which I've been featured on or any talks that I've given. Um, and then I've also got my new podcast, which you young lady are gonna be coming on very soon, called the Decentralized Health Podcast.
So, uh, please, it's brand new. I only started it at the beginning of the year. Come and subscribe. Come and watch the videos, leave your comments. Let me know how you, how you find it. And it's all about people like us discussing our health hero's journey and how we can help others through the action of a story telling our story.
Oh my goodness. So good. Well, thank you for sharing your story and providing so many, you know, practical takeaways for people in the area of improving their sleep. So thank you for your time and then certainly we'll have more to come. I know maybe IG lives and beyond. I'd love that. Thank you, Madan. I appreciate you.
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