Dr. Leland Stillman studied Biology and Environmental Health at Connecticut College and received his medical doctorate from the University of Virginia. He then trained in Internal Medicine at Maine Medical Center. He practiced as a Hospitalist for three years following his residency training. He went on to found his own practice just before COVID. He has a longstanding interest in alternative medicine, and now focuses on functional and integrative medicine in his practice.
Dr. Leland Stillman studied Biology and Environmental Health at Connecticut College and received his medical doctorate from the University of Virginia. He then trained in Internal Medicine at Maine Medical Center. He practiced as a Hospitalist for three years following his residency training. He went on to found his own practice just before COVID. He has a longstanding interest in alternative medicine, and now focuses on functional and integrative medicine in his practice.
SHOWNOTES:
😴 What does real wellness truly mean beyond just the absence of illness?
😴 How shifting your focus to cultivating vitality can change everything.
😴 Why is sleep so often ignored in both conventional and holistic medicine?
😴 Improve your sleep and vitality: Actionable steps you don’t want to miss.
😴 Feeling overwhelmed by health and sleep advice? Learn how to integrate practices without burnout.
😴 Hidden stressors silently wrecking your sleep and health.
😴 What are the essential components for a perfect night’s sleep?
😴 Is your sleep the ultimate barometer of your life’s health?
😴 Could high iron levels be wrecking your sleep? Learn the simple fix you need.
😴 Discover the secret to balancing sleep, fitness, and health goals...
😴 What was Dr. Stillman’s biggest AHA moment about his own sleep?
😴 And many more!
SPONSORS:
🛌🏻 Transform your sleep with Eight Sleep’s cooling mattress—personalized temperature control for deep, restorative rest every night. Code: sleepisaskill
😴 Recharge your sleep with BEAM Minerals —essential, bioavailable nutrients for deep, restorative rest. Code: SLEEPISASKILL
🪟Ublockout— Can you still see your hand in front of your face when you are in bed? Well, you NEED to know about this company that will get on a Zoom call with you and help you measure your windows for a custom AND affordable blackout solution! Enjoy 10% OFF. Code: SLEEPISASKILL
💤 Upgrade your sleep with COOP Sleep Goods adjustable cooling pillow—customizable comfort and temperature regulation for the perfect night’s rest.
Code: SLEEPISASKILL
GUEST LINKS:
Website: https://stillmanmd.com/
Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/stillmanMD
Twitter: https://x.com/stillmanmd
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/StillmanMD/
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 looks.
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 to the sleep is a skill podcast. If you've tuned into this podcast for any length of time, you know the massive impact that light can have on your sleep. Well, today we dive into this topic with the respected MD, Dr. Leland Stillman, someone who is on the cutting edge of quantum biology and circadian health.
A little bit about our guest, Dr. Leland Stillman studied biology and environmental health at Connecticut College and received his medical doctorate from the University of Virginia. He then trained in internal medicine at Maine Medical Center. He practiced as a hospitalist for three years following his residency.
He went on to found his own practice just before COVID. He has a long standing. Transcripts provided by Transcription Outsourcing, LLC. If you're listening to this podcast, you're likely looking to improve your sleep. And one of the first places that many people begin when they talk to me about sleep is they want to know what's the supplement I can take.
Well, I got to say, I honestly don't take that many supplements nowadays for my sleep. And I'm very grateful for that. A lot of things you can do for free. However, one of the supplements that I do consistently take and have taken for ages is magnesium, specifically magnesium breakthrough. It's an all natural supplement that helps you reduce fatigue and sleep more peacefully.
It even strengthens muscle and improves your heart and brain function. So while most magnesium supplements aren't full spectrum, magnesium breakthrough is the only magnesium supplement on the market that contains the optimal ratio of all three. All seven essential types of magnesium. So imagine having the strength and energy to get out of bed every morning and face the day boldly, courageously to be able to show up as your best self and keep that energy up throughout the day and into the night.
So if you want to give it a try, go to bio optimizers. com forward slash sleep is a skill and you can use the code sleep. Sleep is a skill to get gifts with purchase up to two travel sized bottles of magnesium breakthrough. So you want to act fast on this. It's a limited time offer. Again, go to buy optimizers.
com forward slash sleep is a skill. And I think you're going to be pleasantly surprised by the results. We all know that temperature regulation is key to getting those deep restorative stages of sleep. But how many times have you woken up in the middle of the night tossing and turning because you're too hot?
Thanks to your subpar bedding materials. I know I've certainly been there. And now this is where Coop sleep goods comes in. They've designed a line of cooling products, including sheets and pillows that are specifically crafted to help you stay cool all night long. Okay. Coop Sleep Goods products are made with breathable moisture wicking materials that ensure you maintain an optimal sleep temperature so you can rest easy.
Literally what I love most about Coop Sleep Goods is their attention to detail. Their cooling pillows, for example, aren't just about the fabric. They also feature adjustable fills, allowing you to customize the firmness and loft to your liking. Remember, Coop Side sleeping tends to be the position of choice from a sleep optimization perspective with back sleeping, potentially putting you at risk for blocked airway, increased mouth breathing, et cetera.
Additionally, coop sleep goods has award winning cooling sheets that are silky smooth, incredibly soft and designed to keep you cool without sacrificing comfort. Even my husband likes them and he is a complete picky baby when it comes to fabrics and usually thinks everything is uncomfortable. So whether you're a hot sleeper or just someone who wants to optimize every aspect of your sleep environment, coupe sleeps, goods has you covered.
I personally use their products myself and because they are durable and easy to care for, which means. There'll be a staple in your sleep routine for years to come. So if you're ready to upgrade your sleep experience, head on over to coop sleep goods. com forward slash sleep is a skill. So it's spelled C O O P S L E E P G O O D S dot com forward slash sleep is a skill and check out their range of cooling products.
Important question. Can you see the hand in front of your face in your bedroom? If so, you need to hear about our next sponsor who is revolutionizing the blackout shade space and finally making it easy and affordable to get a truly blacked out bedroom. So challenging in the past, right? So introducing you block out the ultimate solution for creating the perfect sleep environment, ensuring total darkness, comfort, and control.
So why you block out in particular? Well, a hundred percent blackout guarantee comes with this product provides temperature comfort all year round. So you keep your room warmer in the winter and cooler in the summer. You block out helps in enhancing your sleep quality by maintaining a comfortable temperature, regardless of the season.
Acoustic noise reduction. Enjoy a quieter sleeping environment with uBlockout Shades designed to minimize external sounds that can disrupt your peace. Ideal for urban dwellers or anyone looking to reduce noise pollution. Customizable and easy to install. Tailored to fit your space with a simple 30 minute installation process, uBlockout makes it hassle free to achieve the perfect sleep setting, ensuring your bedroom is a Sanctuary for sleep.
And for listeners of the sleep is a skill podcast, use the code sleep is a skill for exclusive 10 percent off and embark on the journey to unparalleled sleep quality. Remember, light is the number one external factor affecting our sleep. With you block out, you're not just investing in a blackout shade.
You're investing in your health, wellbeing, and quality of life. So again, go to you block out spelled the letter U block out, and use code sleep as a skill for a discount and welcome to the sleep is a skill podcast. Now I have a lot of episodes on my calendar that when I look at them, you know, I'm always excited to have these episodes, but today's guest was particularly excited.
I've been following him for quite some time. I highly recommend checking out his newsletter, lots of offerings, courses, all kinds of things to kind of get into his world, understand his unique vantage point and health and certainly sleep. So check it out. Thank you so much for taking the time to be here.
I really, really appreciate it. Thank you for having me. It's a pleasure to be here. Oh, fantastic. Well, maybe we can start at the beginning. A little bit of how you came to be in this kind of position where you are helping to support people's sleep, but from, I would say, a unique vantage point to say the least, right?
Like a unique approach that is a little different than a lot of other physicians might take. Absolutely. I became a doctor because I was really fascinated by why modern people were sick. Yeah. And, you know, eventually if you follow that thread of questioning, that line of questioning, you will arrive at the inescapable conclusion that many modern people are sick because their sleep is trash.
Yeah. And if you're going to get their health on track, you would better pay close attention to not only how solid their sleep is, Or how it isn't and then how you can optimize it beyond where it already is. So sleep as my practice evolved, really, it's always been at the forefront, even if I'm not always talking about it on podcasts or social media.
Sure. And some of that is because, you know, I think people, one of my greatest criticisms of the health and wellness, Industry, whether we're talking about conventional health care or integrative health care, natural, holistic, functional medicine, whatever you want to call it, people get sucked into focusing on their illness.
But the reality is that success leaves clues. And good health is not just the absence of symptoms. It is the presence of an abundance of vitality. And when you focus on your wellness, illnesses tend to just kind of fade away. So we often don't talk about sleep. We don't talk about circadian rhythms as they're formally known or studied.
We don't talk about these things, but we kind of Baked into the cake of what I've found works to get people well are all these recommendations that help people sleep better. So I'm reminded of a really funny conversation that our our strength and conditioning coach Jim had with a client not long ago.
She said something like, well, you haven't been telling me about my macros and I really want to dial in my macros because I've heard how important they are for weight loss and sleep and energy and all the rest of it. He says, I told you to start by eating a protein at every meal and eating some green leafy vegetables.
And some starch and I want you to do fistful quantities of each at each meal, at least what he's doing with that is he's actually baking into the cake of that recipe, the macros that the average person, generally speaking, needs to at least approximate for optimal function, health and well being, particularly for her goals.
And so it's. It's inherent in everything that I do. We're always talking about sleep, even if it's tangential. Yeah. Because if you don't optimize sleep, you will never optimize vitality and anything that affects sleep negatively affects health for the worse in the long run. Ugh, I couldn't agree more.
Granted, I am very biased to be pro sleep and circadian health, and, but I love what you said there because that's actually one of the things that we find to be, to almost really calm the nerves of a number of people that have fixated on sleep. sleep and it's not working for them, right? One of the things that seems to be empowering is as we shift the game to a bit more and how we're living our life day to day and then sleep kind of falls into place.
It's this weird paradox that seems to emerge in that relationship. So I love what you're saying there. It's really a mindset shift of not focusing on the outcome, focusing on the process. Yes. Jim says that all the time in our coaching calls, don't focus on the results, focus on the process. I mean, you have to have a goal.
We always start with goals. What's your goal? Okay, now we have a goal. Let's work backwards from that. What are we doing that's maybe preventing us from getting to that goal? What can we do to help us get to that goal? Now, what's a game plan, an actual action plan that's. We can get done in the next five days, two weeks, whatever, as I'm sure you realize there's so much people can do to optimize their sleep.
They have a tendency to get unbelievably overwhelmed and the next thing they know, and these are all valuable things. We use all of these, the practice, but I'm just, you know, saying people will wind up in there. They've got their neurofeedback in the morning and then they've got their, You know, sleep cocktail of herbs in the night and then they've got their sleep cocktail of vitamins and minerals, and then they've got, um, you know, massage and then they've got their breath work routine and they've got their biohacking gear and their red light therapy and their sauna.
And then they're, yeah. You know, becoming well or getting well can turn into a full-time job. Sometimes it needs to be a full-time job. Many people are unrealistic about that. Yeah. But you know, you, uh, you don't, you know, it becomes sort of. Sometimes get it being and being well and optimizing performance kind of gets in the way of you achieving what you actually find meaningful in life, which is such an interesting, I feel like I have that conversation with patients every day, you know, they say, I want to go out and climb this mountain.
And I say, I know that. But where are we with your health? You know, maybe it's time for you to go climb that mountain and maybe it's time for you to sell your company, exit the market, yeah. Take a couple years to relax, spend time with your family, get your health on track. Fascinating. I never thought I would get into, so deep into every aspect of people's lives, you know, but you, you, you, I'm really, uh, I'm a general practitioner, not a specialist, and I, I love that about what I do.
And that's part of why we tackle so much sleep in the practice is it's just such a foundational piece of health. Oh, well, I couldn't agree more. And I love that you really expand the aperture so widely to support so many things that could impact sleep. So, so wise. And well, one of the things that we commonly see for people when they're struggling with sleep that maybe if they are going down a more traditional approach and they go to their GP or what have you, they might be met with some common recommendations.
So go have a sleep test in lab or at home. Maybe bring about C. B. T. I. Cognitive behavioral therapy for insomnia. And if those things don't work, then potentially starting to go down the path of medications for sleep. sleep. I think you're giving my colleagues a lot of credit. A lot of them are just like, here's the zolpidem.
Oh, good. That's an Ambien. I know. That's the concerning thing. We know that out of you know, preferred med, two hours on average of training and sleep, the thing we do a third of our lives, like just wild. Okay. So to your point, right? We're lucky probably if we are offered those things before the medication.
So how do you think of this? differently if people are coming to you with part of their primary concern being sleep. Now I know this is overly simplistic and that there's a lot more going on, but what might you have people look to or what would your approach be that might be different? Well, that's such a good question.
Wherever we start with someone, we always start by talking about their goals. And funnily enough, I have actually found that no one, no one cares most about their health. or their well being or even their vanity. That might sound shocking to people, but the truth is they don't even care about their sleep.
Here's what they care about. They care about the fact that staying awake all night leaves them feeling horrible the next day. They care about the fact that when they're not sleeping, even if they're on their phone or they're reading a book, they don't actually feel good. They don't feel right. There's something, there's a hamster going on a wheel.
There's a thought they wish they could get out on Out of their body, there's something bothering them and it's getting in the way of their goals. Maybe it's causing them to be overweight or not achieve their desired results in the gym or they can't perform at work the way they want. So there's always a goal and we always have to figure out what the goal is.
How do you want to look? How do you want to feel? Well, I want to look and feel good. Okay, what does that mean? Well, you have people coming in who are former powerlifters, bodybuilders. They want to look very differently than say, someone who says, well, I want to look like a runner. If you want to be a world class runner and a world class powerlifter, it's not possible.
Uh, I was reading a book, I can't remember which book I was reading the other day. He said, uh, and they quoted someone, he said, you can't win a gold medal in two sports. Right. You can beat Michael Phelps and win multiple gold medals in the water, but Michael Phelps is not out there crushing it on the track.
He's in the water. He's a creature of the water. And we actually take that to what I would say is sort of the next level in large part thanks to the fact that I have a team that includes Jim Laird, who's our strength and conditioning coach. Because Sure. You know, you take somebody like Jim Laird, Jim Laird and I are built completely differently.
And we're pretty good examples of the two extremes. Jim is like a fire hydrant and I am like, um, he says I'm like a straw, but I'm long and thin and I rotate really well. I would have made a fantastic golfer. I wish somebody told me that I would have gotten. Yeah. I, you know, like my body's built for things like tennis, racket sports, long, lanky can cover a lot of ground, but I'm really terrible at generating a lot of force.
Jim is built like a fire hydrant. He's incredibly powerful and he was a world class power lifter. He held records in power lifting, uh, when he was at his peak and people don't have doctors out there who start by asking them, how are you actually wired? And the more I look at this in my clinical practice, the more I think, how do you even do this?
How do you coach or treat anyone if you don't get to know them and their goals? And that might sound like, Oh, we all want to sleep. We all want to look this way. I want to do that. It's not really true. You get people who are like, come in and they say, I don't really feel like I look good if my body fat's like this.
20 percent and you get other people coming in and they're like, I want to have curves. I want to look voluptuous or whatever, completely different versions of what beauty is. Sure. Same thing for performance. Some people want to be really strong and powerful and other people want to be lean and lanky and be able to run for long periods of time.
And believe it or not, I see this happening in the professional world too. You know, there's people who are like, look, I've just got to be able to really focus and zone in. A lot of people don't realize this, but if it weren't for prescription stimulants. The whole sport of things like baseball would be wildly different because prescription drugs for pitchers have a radical impact on their performance.
And the same thing can be true for people in sales. marketing. I know that if I'm, for example, using caffeine, which I do use, uh, I'm much more focused and I'm much, I'm much quicker, I'm much faster. But one of the reasons why I stayed off of ADHD medications my whole life is that I had this feeling like, Well, maybe I'm supposed to be sort of a space cadet some of the time.
Maybe that's my, that's allowing me to be creative. And um, it's funny, I joke when I'm, when I space out around my family and friends that I'm off in Leland. I love it, but it's kind of a real thing. And people have always joked about like, Oh, Leland kind of spaced out there for a minute. And I'm just thinking about other stuff.
And I know that this is part of how my brain's wired. Great book and a great interviewer, interviewee for you, um, Doug Brackman. Oh, okay. Look up Doug Brackman. Okay. He wrote this book called Driven. Mmm. We tend to work with a lot of driven people. And, uh, that's also part of why this approach really appeals to them.
They understand that they're different. They're not, you know, they're not, they don't feel like other people. And sometimes they feel ostracized from society because people don't see that. And a lot of these people end up struggling with their sleep for a wide range of reasons. But back to the goals thing, you've got to start with goals because if you don't have a really clear goal.
Then it's really hard to actually track progress and make changes and then make judgments on what changes you made and whether or not they've worked. So it starts with goals. And then you have to look at the whole picture. You know, what's everything that goes into someone's sleep? Arguably, everything affects sleep.
Um, we use, and I've actually kind of put together my own surveys for things like sleep because I found that things like, say, the Epworth sleepiness scale, they have value, but there were other questions I wanted to ask. One of my favorite questions in one of our questionnaires is, do you feel like your current stress in your life is impacting your sleep negatively?
Believe it or not, that actually does have a big impact On people's sleep. And if someone is freaking out because they can't make payroll or they have giant credit card bills or their wife is, you know, going through a lot of stress or their husband or their in laws or whatever, guess what? You may not be able to fix their sleep problems without a change to that other area of their life.
Yeah. And that's why we get so deep into just about everything with people. We don't. I mean, if there's not a problem somewhere, if something's not broken, we're not going to go looking for trouble. But you know, we find that when you don't address everything, sometimes you'll hit a wall and then you won't make progress.
And this all just evolved out of a desire not to obsess or fixate on a specific problem. I don't know why I was never interested in being the doctor for mold or the doctor for lime or the doctor for anything. Hmm. I just wanted to understand how do we get people to really the next level? How do we take someone who's really sick, we get some really sick people in the practice because I'm an MD, because of the podcasts I've done, because of the kind of content we put out.
A doctor actually told me, he said, you need to take your content down a few notches because You're making content that's so high level, you're only going to appeal to the toughest cases.
Anyway. Are we okay with that? I mean, I feel like it seems like you're up to the challenge. I don't know. Uh, you know, for me, and this is actually kind of a principle by which I, I practice, there, there's a, you have to have a really healthy respect for your body's You have to learn to really listen to yourself and get to know yourself.
Mm. Yeah. A lot of stress in people's lives is because, if not all stress, is because they're living out of alignment with their innermost self. Mm. They're treating a Ferrari like it's a 4Runner. Yeah. They're treating a 4Runner like it's a Ferrari. You've, you're all wired differently. We're all wired differently.
You can't treat everybody the same, you know, treating people the way that you want to be treated works great. If you only want to be surrounded by people who are exactly like you, really interesting to think about. And, uh, so you have to get to know this. And one of the things I've found about myself is that while I do love those cases, if you only take on really difficult cases, you've already seen four or five other doctors and you've already tried all the things and done all the supplement protocols.
Well, you know, first of all, every day is going to be, well, how are we going to tackle this one? The funny thing about that is it always starts with the fundamentals. You have to make sure they have them dialed in and you have to make sure that we haven't missed things. The strangest stuff comes out when you start really working in depth with people.
I've also found it's a lot better to have a team. People will tell Jim things they won't tell me. Because Jim's this big, tough, maybe on a bad day, scary looking, former power lifter, security guard, personal security. agent. I don't even know what you call it. Um, who's done everything from like bounce at nightclubs to do, you know, high end security work.
And like, I'll never forget this like four or five months ago, we were eating something somewhere and he said, Oh yeah, this reminds me of, uh, the food in Russia. And I'm like, when were you in Russia? He's like, well, I was doing this personal security work for some kind of billionaire, millionaire, whatever we were looking at oil rigs on the North sea.
And I'm like, Really? Happened to have a story like that? Love that. Yeah. Well versed. Amazing. Well traveled. But people will tell Jim things that they would never tell me. Sure. Yeah. Because I'm you little Dr. Stillman. And so, it's really funny. Anyway, so, but people come out with all this stuff. I mean, just people have all kinds of problems.
So. Anyway, it always starts with the fundamentals. It always starts with going through just making sure you understand what is this person's day look like? Yeah. People say things like, I eat a lot of protein. What does that mean? An 85 year old woman, two ounces of chicken breast is a lot of protein to a 250 pound, you know, bodybuilder.
A lot of protein is like eight ounce, not even it's big 12 or 16 ounces of steak. Right. Very different realities. Very different realities. So, you know, those cases are really tough. You always start in the same place. You got to put in a lot of time, a lot of work, a lot of diagnostics. But more than that, I actually think more than the testing.
And I think people in the functional integrated medicine world get this wildly wrong. More than the diagnostics, it's the time, clinical time. You know, I mean, it's so, it's so funny when we come back to a team meeting and somebody's like, yeah, I finally figured it out. You know, so and so is drinking two gin and tonics every night at 10 o'clock.
Yeah. Well, how about that? You know, no wonder your sleep is trash. No wonder we can't get your minerals and vitamins and blood sugar under control. We got to stop that somehow, right? And we've had people come out and confess things to us that I don't even want to say out loud on a podcast. Yeah, sure. So anyway, but I also have a, uh, in my, in my experience, if you just take on those cases that burns you out.
And so you've got to have a healthy diversity of cases in your, in your practice. And so we actually have a lot of people who are healthy and well, they show up for one visit a year, group coaching calls every once in a while, check in, say hello, say hi, make sure they're on track. Um, and then we've got, uh, we've got people who are healthy and well, but they say, I want to really achieve that next level.
And I, and if that's the case, then I want to do a program where we really get deep into it. And we sort of. Whereas with someone who's really sick and they're operating at maybe 10% of their capacity, we wanna get them to 50 to 90% in three to six months. With that high performer who feels like they're already at 80, we wanna try and get them to 85, 90, 95.
The better somebody is, the harder it is to get them like, like to take a high performer from 85 to 90%. Right. It's huge. And sometimes they don't even notice it. Mm-Hmm. . And that's part of why you've gotta have things like we talked about before we came, came on the air. Or before we started recording, like the aura ring, you know, and people are just, oh my gosh, such a difference.
Yeah. Having numbers. That's also, we want to have goals, you know, I want to lose weight. Well, what does that mean? Well, I want to lose 10 pounds, but what would you look like and feel like if you lost 10 pounds? Well, I would be two dress sizes smaller. Okay. Stop. You don't want to lose weight. You want to lose two dress sizes, right?
And that's something we battle with women all the time. We've been sold weight loss because weight loss. Truth is nobody should care what the scale says. The scale we've had women and men. Well, we've had women come in and gain weight and lose dress sizes. Yeah. Gain weight. Body composition shift. Yeah.
Wild. So, you know, would you rather. lose weight and gain dress sizes or gain weight and lose dress sizes. And it's because they're becoming more dense. And that's actually what women really want. They want to look dense. That's why young women look the way that they look. Beautiful women look the way they look because they're dense.
They have a lot of muscle mass. They have some subcutaneous fat where it counts, which is because of healthy hormonal balance largely. And then they've got lots of bone mineral density. And Exactly. No, a hundred percent. We were talking about sleep though, weren't we? Yeah. No, but I mean, as we know, those things all show up in our sleep.
That's why sleep is such a cool equalizer, or as we'll often say, a barometer of the workability of your life because you know, when your sleep is off, right? I like that. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, I don't think I actually shared with you part of my story, but one of the reasons I'm so passionate about this topic is because I went through my own sleep breakdown years and years ago.
Yeah, imagine that. Exactly. I was living in Manhattan, you know, the burning candle at both ends. I wouldn't know anything about that. Exactly. Oh, God, you know, the lessons were hard one. But you know, not only that, I got to juxtapose that with seeing my mom, she dealt with some mental health issues. And went down the path, unfortunately, of pharmaceuticals and high dose annex and a lot of these things, right?
And so I feel like I thankfully dodged a bullet because to your point, I went to the doctors and I did leave with sleeping pills and that was how that went. So there was no sleep lab, CBT, other recommendations looking at your stress. It was just sort of, uh, here's a prescription. Bye. Right. And so part of my mission on the planet is to give people agency with their sleep and remind them that You know, this is an opportunity when our sleep isn't working, something about our life isn't working in some particular way, and it's an opportunity to kind of go in deeper.
So I hear you from what you're sharing of kind of panning out of how we can shift, you know, kind of what we're looking at. And one of the ways that I discovered you over the years had been around some of your approach with quantum biology, circadian rhythm optimization. foundational components, For I think in maybe in our conversations, we might be automatically putting some of those components there, but maybe not everyone else is necessarily depending on where they're coming into this conversation.
So I'm wondering if maybe that might be an interesting place to, like, what for you kind of are some of those foundational pieces? Right. Well, let me flip that around. What's the best way to trash your sleep? Oh, there we go. Perfect. Okay. Because if we sleep one on one, if I see these things in a case, yeah, if the sleep's not off, either they're in denial or they're basically living on, uh, vitality, their vitality, their, their youthful energy.
Yeah. Uh, or they're already compensating in some way. They haven't told me about yet, like drugs, whatever. Right. So how do you really trash your sleep? You don't get any light during the day. You get an abundance of artificial light at night. You don't eat a wholesome, healthy nutrient dense diet with an abundance, particularly of the aromatic amino acids that get transformed into the neurotransmitters that are essential for sleep.
You have a lot of stress and I count stress as, because the thing about stress that people really I think don't, it's such a buzzword. I hate how stress gets thrown around and it's also such a, it's such a convenient scapegoat. It's my stress and I hate to say this because like Jim and I will kind of butt heads about this sometimes.
He'll be like, what's your stress? You got to control your stress. I'm like, Jim, what if it's not the stress? What if it's something else? We've got to focus on something else. But there's also these weird interplays where. For example, somebody who's got a ton of, say, mercury on board, which you'll see in their labs.
Uh, once they've gotten rid of some of that mercury, their anxiety, i. e. their stress, may get way better. Mm. And it's because, you know, our toxic environment, these toxins have a real effect on the brain and they can create a mindset of stress. and anxiety, even when there's nothing in your life to really focus on and worry about.
So all of this gets people really turned around and confused. And they're like, is it my metals? Or is it my pesticides? Or is it the artificial light? Or is it a lack of sunlight? Don't worry, just focus on being well, help you figure it out. But those things that I just mentioned, if those are off, sleep's either in the trash or it's headed there fast.
And the more you can fix those things, generally, the better the sleep gets. You'll occasionally, I've found, been blindsided by something. I'm actually going to share a story from a friend of mine because this, this, I just love, I love really good clinical anecdotes. Yeah. And Dylan shared this one with me.
He had this, Dylan Petkis, he went to med school in Miami, graduated a couple years behind me. And he, all he does is Or was doing at the time was like sleep coaching and not even doing labs, not even doing prescriptions, just coaching. And he had this case that came in and this woman says, I can't sleep, my sleep's not getting any better.
She's doing all the things. And he says, well, get this EMF meter. And he finally convinces her to buy the EMF meter. She takes it into her bedroom. She measures the radio and microwave radiation at the head of her bed, where her head is at night. And that's it. And lo and behold, there's a high level of this radiation coming out of the headboard because it's like some kind of smart bed.
Oh, yeah. I'm so over this whole like smart everything. Smart couches, smart chairs, smart desks, smart I would prefer all my stuff be dumb. That way it can't break on me. Exactly. So anyway, they work out this lady's bed is basically microwaving her skull. If you go back to the literature, you will see that there's an effect on sleep architecture from radio and microwave radiation.
The researchers who put these studies together kind of say more studies are needed and we're not exactly sure of the clinical significance of this finding. Sure enough. She gets into a different sleep environment. Her sleep gets back on track. Now that I'm thinking about it, I'm reminded of a case where a pharmacist had the same problem.
Bunch of food allergies too. It came to me, I said, where's the smart meter? Oh, it's, it's on the other side of the wall from my bed. Okay. Move, sleep in the guest bedroom for a couple nights. I know your husband's going to think I'm crazy and so are you. Just trust me. She moves across the house. Her leaky gut goes away.
Her, her, uh, her insomnia gets better. Oh, man. And, uh, of course, then we found out that her well was contaminated with bacteria. So that's a whole other thing. Oh, man. Yeah. Well, that's the thing is you just you find all this stuff. Of course. Yeah. Um, which is why it takes time.
Yeah. I mean, stress. It can be your cell phone, it can be your Wi Fi router, it can be your smart meter, it can be your spouse, it can be your dog, it can be your jerk job, it can be your whatever, um, and it's, so, yeah, I mean, you just have to get into all the different potential sources of stress, and then, the thing I think people really get wrong about stress, and I did write about this in my book called Dying to be Free, available at Amazon.
com. Stress means in Latin to pull apart. And what's interesting about that is that this idea of pulling apart is that when you subject a body of an organism to use stress, it gets stronger. That's going to the gym, lifting weights and seeing your muscles get bigger and your deadlift get better and your personal record get better in any lift you want.
Distress is when you've exceeded the body's capacity to respond in an adaptive way. And you're just tearing the body down that looks like going to the gym every day for an hour and a half until you've catabolized your muscle and you're starting to erode your bone mass. That's the difference between, you know, I had this, we had this case, young lady didn't want to talk about her workouts.
Jim was the one who figured out that she was exercise addicted. When I took her history for her workouts, she was doing more in the gym as a five foot two woman weighing about 80 pounds than I was doing as 180 pound six foot man. She was trying to gain weight and come back from 80, 80 something pounds to a more healthy weight of about 120.
And I'm telling her you have to stop working out this way. It's way too much for your body. And you've got to eat a lot of food. Yeah. And, um, you know, I probably wasn't even putting away as much food as she was. And I was doing work, working out less. And I put on 20 pounds in six months when I started lifting with Jim.
Wow. So, you know, it's all about having the time to get to the bottom of what's really going on. And people know this. There particularly hasn't been often to talk about the thing that is the biggest problem getting her to tell me exactly what her workout was, was like pulling teeth. It was so hard. I mean, it was almost like an interrogation.
What do you do? Just a few things, right? What do you start with? How much weight? How many sets, how many reps, lots of deflections, lots of let's get distracted by this thing over here. But what about this? Yeah. So yeah, I don't even remember what question you asked me to got me. No, that was so good because we're really identifying what is the easiest way to trash your sleep.
And as we go through all of those different ways, we kind of can get into some of this nitty gritty of things that. While they can juxtaposition, have the juxtaposition of seeming like a positive thing to bring in, oh, working out and what have you. But anything tipped to excess could be problematic and can certainly, of course show up in our sleep results.
Did we miss anything in that list of trashing your sleep or do we kind of cover some of the main points there? I think I gave you kind of the highlights reel. Totally, totally. Just there with the cases. Perfect. Yeah, because exactly like so many people of the things that you just itemized, so many of us can further optimize those or some of us might not even doing any of those.
So the bread and butter stuff, it's so important that I have to remind myself not to forget about it. Yeah, because we will occasionally get that person in who hasn't been listening to Huberman or hasn't listened to Ben Greenfield or whatever. And so they just don't know this stuff. And I get it. That's why we have this process where they fill out these questionnaires.
So once you're done with the questionnaires, we know everything we need to know short of taking actual measurements of things. Like or a ring data or getting, for example, really fancy with things like electromagnetic, uh, uh, detection gear, you know, for EMS and things like that. But not a lot of people get into that with us.
Okay. Got it. If you've tuned into the show or followed any of our content here at Sleep is a Skill, you may have heard that everyone that we work with wears the Oura Ring. And as a result, we have amassed a very large database of Oura Ring users and get to see what really moves the needle for people when it comes to their sleep measurably.
Now, because we have so much data around sleep optimization, many ask what they can do to improve their sleep quality. And for years, my answer has been that one of the few things I've seen make such an overnight difference is the use of a quality cooling mattress topper. Not just any ordinary topper that claims to be cooling with like gels or what have you, but an actual cooling topper that uses water and can be dynamically adjusted to suit your unique needs and preferences.
Now, this is why I am so excited to announce that 8 Sleep is now an official sponsor of the podcast. I have tested various cooling mattress toppers and fan systems over the years, and none of them have come close to the innovative and customizable, seamless nature of the Eight Sleep system. Not only does it have an autopilot feature to intelligently adjust the temperature of the topper to work in alignment with your body's needs, but it also has additional features that truly set it apart.
So with eight sleep, you can enjoy advanced sleep tracking, allowing you to monitor key metrics like heart rate, heart rate variability, and sleep stages, all integrated seamlessly into the app. It also has a dual zone temperature control, which means that you and your partner can each set your own ideal sleep temperature.
Plus the gentle rise wake up technology uses temperature and vibration to wake you up gently and naturally avoiding the jarring sound of an alarm, but it doesn't stop there. There's more, more, more. So the system even includes a smart alarm feature that wakes you up during your lightest sleep phase. I know a lot of people have asked me about this and this is included in here within a customizable time zone.
Window ensuring you wake up feeling refreshed and ready to start your day. And for those of you who struggle with snoring eight, sleep has an anti snore feature that adjusts your sleep environment in real time to help reduce snoring and improve overall sleep quality. So this is truly a game changer for anyone serious about optimizing their sleep.
So if you're ready to take your sleep to the next level, head on over to eight, sleep and use the code. Sleep is a skill, all one word at checkout for a discount. Today, I want to talk to you about something that often flies under the radar, but is absolutely crucial for great sleep minerals. Now you've heard me talk about circadian rhythms, light exposure, temperature control, and more, but let's dive into the foundational elements that fuel our body's ability to sleep deeply and restoratively specifically minerals.
Our modern lifestyle with its processed foods and environmental stressors can leave us depleted of essential minerals. This depletion can mess with our sleep quality, leading to issues like restless legs, poor sleep initiation, and waking up in the middle of the night. Enter Beam Minerals. Beam Minerals are designed to replenish your body's essential mineral levels, providing the building blocks your body needs for optimal health.
And this includes better sleep. What I love about Beam is that they use 100 percent bioavailable liquid minerals, which means your body can actually absorb and utilize them instantly without any fillers or additives. Magnesium, for example, is known as nature's relaxant, helping to calm the nervous system, support muscle relaxation, and some argue by extension can promote deep restful sleep.
Beam's magnesium is sourced in a way that ensures maximum absorption and effectiveness, making it a key part of my sleep routine. But beam doesn't stop there. They've created a comprehensive blend that includes other vital minerals like potassium, calcium, and trace minerals that work synergistically to support your overall health.
And of course your sleep, the result, you wake up feeling more refreshed, more balanced. and ready to take on the day. So if you've been struggling with sleep and feel like you've tried everything, it might be time to look at what's happening on a cellular level. Beam minerals can help fill in those gaps and give your body the support it needs for truly restorative sleep.
So head on over to beam minerals spelled B E A M today and use the code sleep as a skill, all one word at checkout to get a special discount on your order. Your body and your sleep. We'll thank you. And any call outs to before we shift over to how you're managing your own sleep, which I'm so fascinated to hear how that might be going for you.
But before we shift over to that, anything else to share in? I know this is like a huge topic and really just scratching the surface, but anything else in how you're uniquely thinking about sleep that might be a little out of the norm of what average doctors might be doing? Aside from everything I've already talked about.
Yeah, exactly. Absolutely. I mean, there's a lot, you know, I mean, we totally, but it's, it's all out there in different places. Yeah. What kind of light therapy to use, why wind down routines, breath work, sick building. I mean, there's just so much. Yeah. Yeah. So much. Totally. Real quick. One thing I thought was really interesting in one of your newsletters was you were touching on high iron, which I thought was really interesting because I feel like I don't see that as commonly, right?
No one talks about it. No one talks about it. And I'm just curious how you might think of iron because so many people, of course, when they're checking for sleep, maybe hormones, thyroid, et cetera, but. iron for overall health and well being and potentially showing up in our sleep results. Any call outs there?
Just because I thought that was really unique that you were diving in there. Yes. I have to mention that this is a big topic for me. I have had international invites to speak on iron and it's one of my favorite topics. Because it's so impactful for the people it really affects. Yeah. So if people want to learn more about what I think about iron, I can't pack it in right here, but I've got YouTube videos on that.
We've got some behind the scenes or behind the paywall, um, uh, videos on this that are memberships at Stillman Wellness, which is my education coaching practice. But 50, 000 foot view, iron's a nutrient, but iron is also, shockingly enough, a poison. Uh, this sort of started with a, um, I can't remember his name.
He was a physician who lived in central Florida and he proposed essentially what's been termed the iron, uh, overload theory of heart disease or the iron accumulation theory of heart disease. You'll find it called different things in different places. And his basic premise was as total body iron increases.
free radical in production increases to the point that then it can overwhelm the organism and create what we call heart disease as well as metabolic disorders and things like that. True iron overload, hemochromatosis, fluoride iron overload is rare, always due to a genetic mutation. Fun fact, I actually have one of these gene mutations.
And for that reason, about two years ago now, I think I was trying to remember when I started donating blood every two months, like clockwork. Now I look forward to it every two months. I get the email from OneBlood, you're up, and I'm like, there. Because I feel better. And as I've donated blood, I've seen my health improve overall through various different, in various different ways.
And, uh, and so far no anemia, no low ferritin, and that's one of the biggest things I have to kind of bust for people is this myth that if they donate a lot of blood, they're going to lose so much iron that they become anemic. Now I'm set up to never become anemic because I have this mutation. Sure. But a non trivial percentage of the population has these mutations.
It's actually a significant proportion, particularly of the Northern European, uh, uh, populace. And our iron is, or our food is so fortified with iron, uh, you have to really have absorption or loss issues. That's almost always menstruating women who have the loss issues, uh, in order to actually become iron deficient in my experience.
Why is that important? You will not see and there's a real, a real, it's actually a very big academic question. How do we judge total body iron? And I want to people to think about this and in a very, uh, visual way because I think it's helpful to understand that, right? So on the one hand, we have iron deficiency and iron deficiency anemia where you don't have any iron.
But what that means is you don't have enough iron available to make new red blood cells. Okay. and to fulfill your body's needs in itself for iron. You need a certain amount of iron to run a muscle cell or a brain cell or a kidney cell. Okay. But iron is not distributed around the body uniformly and it tends to get locked away in tissue and it needs certain nutrients to be mobilized from that tissue.
And so if you've got say hot, you could have total high liver iron and actually have low iron in your blood and the blood markers for iron are notoriously unreliable. Right. So it's pretty common for me to see men in the practice and it's men and it's men more than women because women have 30 or more years where You know, short of hormonal birth control, they're losing iron every month or they're losing iron as they're making a child or children.
So women have a huge demand for iron, whereas men today don't. We did, right? You think about our past, we were very violent. There was a lot of, um, I mean, blood sport, violence, war, whatever you want to call it, traumatic injuries. We had much more physically demanding lives. And with that came the possibility of blood loss.
But men today have never been so insulated from blood loss, uh, as they are now. And so what ends up happening is that men tend to accumulate more and more iron. It doesn't wind up in florid iron overload, but we may wonder, well, what would happen if we dropped men from a really high iron up here? And to give people some numbers here so they can think about this, your minimum requirement for iron for your all your bodily processes is something like three grams.
Well, you might have five grams. What's that two extra grams of iron doing? That's 40 percent of your iron in your body. Your body actually has to spend a lot of time and resources policing that iron and diffusing Or neutralizing all the free radicals it creates. And this is why when I started to read about this and learn about this and I started to recommend that men who were iron overloaded or who just had relatively high total body iron, I started to tell them to go out and donate blood and a non trivial proportion of them came back to me and said, this has changed my life.
My fatigue is better. My energy is, my energy is better. Same difference. I feel better. My mood's better. And you know, is this every man? No. Have I donated, recommended blood donation for people who came back to me and said, I feel really tired after this? Yes. So it's very much a judgment call. It's very much based on the history in the labs.
taken together and that it's also a, I would really describe it as a shared decision where I say, Hey, you know, you're a 55 year old man who's struggling with fatigue and weight loss. You certainly don't have iron deficiency, and you may be one of those men who responds beautifully to blood donation. And if you look at the literature on this, it's actually pretty It's small sample sizes and it's not a lot of data, but the data we do have on iron, on blood donation, which is the only way to get rid of iron meaningfully, by the way, for people who don't know, uh, the data we do have is unbelievable, drops in cardiovascular morbidity and mortality, drops in cancer incidents.
I mean, these are really important things. For some reason, the academicians are not spending all of their time and money. Verifying all these amazing possibilities. Sure. I wish they were. Same. But you know, even if I'm wildly wrong, a lot of my patients swear by it and You get to save lives. So exactly, which we know that donating population is going down.
Yeah. So in part of what I was researching, apparently, so the older population had been more prevalent in donation and kind of having a routine with this and what have you and our younger generations. Apparently it's just hasn't gotten into the ethos of like, Oh, this might be a nice thing to do or what have you.
So they're really so many of these blood banks are really struggling to how to incentivize and here in Austin there's ones that will give you like points and you get sweatshirts and you know all these ways. I didn't actually go get the free pint of beer but the last place I was at there was a free pint of beer if you donated blood.
I know there's like cookies and oh my god. It was something catchy like pint for a pint like we get a pint of our beer. I thought that was so I mean it's like on the one hand it's like I don't know if I feel This is a little gimmicky. I don't know how I feel about this, but whatever. I just need to get my, I just need to get all this iron out of my body because I have to.
Yeah, exactly. Whatever it takes. Exactly. I know. And I, there's, and you're right too, there's so many exciting, you know, to your point, not a robust, large number of studies, but there are some intriguing things that are point to even some surprising things. Like one study I was looking at, had pointed to some of the removal of some of these forever chemicals that we're talking about frequently and to kind of make sense, you know, if you are, I know, right.
So it does. I feel like you're really on to something very exciting with this area. So, so glad you're sharing this and be respectful of your time. Also, really excited to hear how you're managing your own sleep. So we do ask everyone for questions. The first one, what does your nightly sleep routine look like right now?
So I. have been blessed just like my father with rock solid sleep. You have to really, really mess with us to ruin our sleep as a rule. Yeah. That being said, I know, I know a lot about how to optimize sleep and I, you know, I, I hear the pain in people's voices when they're telling me about how bad their sleep is.
So I, I, I do my best to keep my sleep on track anyway. So, uh, number one, I tend to eat dinner three to four hours before bed. You know, you don't want to be eating a lot late at night that really wrecks sleep quality in my experience. And there's rare exceptions of where I'll compromise on that. Lighting at night is dim, warm, low Kelvin, uh, not a lot of blue or, or green light at all.
I'm less strict with blue blockers now than I've been in the past. Yeah. I sometimes wonder if I'm kind of cheating myself of better sleep by relaxing that. You know, I, even when I had an aura ring. I had one for years. Sure. It finally died on me in Nicaragua in January. . And I, just to be truthful, because I've got so many different things dialed in Yeah.
And I'm so consistent with them, and because I'm a 36-year-old man Sure. Nature has built the 30 something year old man to be about as bulletproof as possible. Mm. Uh, and we can just get away with so much before performance starts to significantly drop. And so. I don't worry too much about blue blockers.
I go to sleep. I usually have a pretty short sleep latency if I remember my Oura Ring data correctly. But even when I, I would do things like wear blue blockers, not wear blue blockers, eat earlier or not eat earlier, the things that wrecked my sleep or changed my sleep scores were eating late at night or drinking.
Ah, totally. So alcohol is usually maybe once, twice a week at most. And I really prefer to keep it even below that. Personally, and this is something I got from my mother, I'm very sensitive to alcohol. Same. So other people may see that their data is not the same. I'm very sensitive to it. So I just avoid it as a rule.
I'm not terribly strict with it with patients unless they're trying to reverse some kind of chronic illness or disease. And then, um, Usually the whole evening is just some kind of wind down or really not. I might be tempted back to my computer to do a little bit extra work or think about a problem or even check emails, but generally speaking, it's winding down and spending time with my wife and family, uh, and then going to sleep, um, after a nice hot shower, which helps me relax.
And then I hit the, my head hits the pillow and I'm out. And then I'm out generally speaking until just before dawn the next day. And there's a couple, every once in a while I'll wake up, uh, particularly if I go to sleep earlier. Sure. I'll wake up in the middle of the night to use the restroom, uh, and then I usually go right back to sleep.
Occasionally I'll toss and turn, have some kind of sleep disturbance. Usually it's not that bad. Usually it's maybe 30 minutes, two hours, something like that. And then I'm back to sleep. And, um, my morning routine is just as important, right? Cause we know, I really believe sleep starts the minute you wake up.
Yes. And so we wake up with natural light, uh, I get up and I freely admit that I am at least low key addicted to coffee. Oh, I love my coffee. We can still sleep well and have our coffee. It's true. And also people will be like, well, you've got to like wait two hours for your dopamine receptors. Oh, right, right.
Like, that's great. If you want to do that, knock yourself out. I don't see a difference. I just go ahead, have a cup of coffee, It's become a morning ritual with my wife. We go to the same coffee shop with the same thing. It's our, some of our quiet time together out of the house. I find that working from home I have to be out of the house once or twice a day or I go to a little big cabin.
I get a little cat fever. And I actually believe that's part of that sleep routine as well. People might wonder how I draw that conclusion. This actually goes back to what I said about my practice, I actually think you need a diversity of things in your day. I don't even think I finished making that point, but you need a diversity of things in your day.
You need to cook, you need to clean, you need to do some mindless, repetitious boring stuff, you need to use your brain, you need to turn it off, you need to rest, you need to slow down, you need to speed up, you need to go outside, you need to come back indoors, you need to do these different things because the brain needs different stimuli, different settings.
In order for it to remain in balance. And that's one of the biggest things we find that's wrecked people's sleep. Is there's some imbalance in their life. Sure. Yes. So I love that a real quick just one book that if you might feel like this might be interesting for you if you haven't read it, the power of the downstate is one of the few books I've found that look at HRV and sleep.
So what they're looking at is research around how HRV can be such a, you know, powerful metric for understanding how people are sleeping and looking at the power of both the rev state, the upstate, and then the downstate. These are like the language that they use and that in every single day we require kind of like, you know, brighter days, darker nights that we require that upstate and then equally so the prioritization of that downstate and that so many of us have forgotten that piece and I love that.
So well said about the diversity. It's true. And we do a lot of coaching around HRV. We do a lot of coaching around taking time off, taking time out, taking time for yourself, slowing down purposefully, breath work, sauna, float tank. We have a lot of different things that we teach people along the way to help them.
Really what we're doing is we're optimizing their nervous system. We're optimizing where it is day by day on balance, really. So, like I was saying, my ordering data, my HRV was almost always the same. I could make it go up if I did, for example, a lot of breath work. Sure. That was very relaxing. I could make it go up if I went to do a float tank.
And I could make other things change if I wanted to, but generally speaking, my data was so, so stable and so good. Yeah. I just didn't feel compelled to spend a lot of time trying to fix it. Yeah. Or, or change it, manipulate it, you know what I mean? Sure. I'm spending my time instead with patients, with clients, trying to figure out, well, what do they need to do in order to get these numbers back on track?
Oh, I love that. No, I think there's so much value to that. So spending kind of an immersive period of time tinkering, optimizing, and then often we kind of then have some of the awareness of some of those things that really work. I mean, can kind of take a step away from some of that for, for a period. So good.
Yeah. And then the third question would be what might we see on your nightstand or maybe in your environment? The only thing on my nightstand right now is books. I love, see, we have such a theme on this podcast where some of the people with the least issues with their sleep, it's the most minimal, you know, it's like, right?
And I think from building biology and so much we know that there's power in that simplifying that. Lack of, you know, maybe stimuli, EMFs, all the things. So good. Okay, beautiful. And then the last question would be, so far today, I'm sure it sounds like you're, you know, kind of forever curious and improving and doing all these things.
But right now, what would you say has made the biggest change to your sleep game? Or maybe said another way, biggest aha moment in managing your sleep? Well. That's really funny. I would say it had to be six or seven years ago now, maybe even, gosh, I can't believe it's been almost eight, but seven years ago, I just fell down the circadian rhythms, quantum biology, rabbit hole, got really serious about artificial light, EMF, grounding, earthing.
My sleep was, it's funny, I actually didn't bring this up earlier. My sleep was Destroyed by residency. Mm. Artificial light at night. And I would wake up three, four times a night and I would just keep going. I mean, I actually was looking at photos. My mother sent me a photo of, of us when I was at my residency and I looked at myself and I thought, man, I look terrible.
I, I worked, we have all things on our side. Yeah. Yeah. So I just, you know, sort of force my way through residency. You know, keeping it together with adrenaline and willpower and, and some coffee for sure. Of course. Yes. I remember getting, getting the coffee stand at the front of the hospital. I was there every morning and, uh, anyway, that's a whole nother story, but when I got into the circadian rhythms and quantum biology stuff and really started to earth and ground and block blue light, even without any kind of supplementation, sure.
I went from waking up, I don't know, four or five, six times a night sometimes to once a week. Yeah. Huge improvement in overall sleep quality. And that was when I woke up and said, Oh my gosh, I've been talking about diet and lifestyle since before I went to medical school. I knew it was important. Yeah. I had no idea how artificial light, EMF, I mean, at that time, you know, I think that the, the podcast and the, and the, the, the podcasting world and the internet have been so interesting in that how they've.
They allow really great ideas to go really far really fast when they're articulated well. I mean stuff that people are talking about like Huberman is just started talking about light and people might think well he's been talking about that for a long time. He just showed up on the scene like two years ago.
Exactly. People are talking about light in ways that Huberman hasn't even talked about. Six, seven, eight years ago, and then you get into their work, like Jack Cruz, he's the life. I know, same for me. I know. I remember getting my uvex blue blockers for 10 bucks, uh, back in like, I don't know, 2015 or something.
And some of the things that he was sharing, just so mind blowing. Uh, yeah, absolutely. And I've heard you mention to some of the growing pains that can come about on, you know, different podcasts of, you know, maybe sometimes we can get so excited about these things and, or I can speak for myself, we get so excited.
And then, you know, maybe we go kind of to the extreme side of the spectrum. And now we're. or burnt, uh, you know, just hanging out under the sun a little too much or what have you. So finding that equilibrium and also getting a, maybe a diversity of thought leaders that can share kind of how to have this as a healthy relationship and, but really prioritize this is hopefully one of our first and foundational steps for our health.
I totally agree. And, you know, I really appreciate Jack raising awareness about these things. 100%. But I'll also see people taking his advisor's recommendations to this extreme where they're having problems because their family's not supportive and now they have no social connection. Right. They're living in the middle of nowhere and they have no, they're not fulfilling their purpose.
Yes. They're, and we've actually had a number of cases where we just saw these sky high levels of mercury in people who really loved fish. And it's obvious to me that you can eat a certain amount of fish and get away with it. But you know, we would see these people coming in and, um, you know, their mercury levels were just crazy.
And, you know, we had a guy who came in and he was eating a pound of fish every day. Wow. And that's, you know, it's one thing if you're a Scottish peasant in the 1700s eating a pound of fish a day. Yes. Before we'd pumped Lord only knows how many tons of fossil fuels into the atmosphere laid in with mercury.
But I see people who, you know, they just have a tuna roll once or twice a week with their friends at the, at the sushi bar and you know, we'll get their mercury level down 50%, 70 percent and a lot of their problems go away. Wow. And so, you know, we just. We, I love taking care of people, I love being a generalist, I love putting all these puzzle pieces together because there's so many of them and I really resonate with people who feel like they're overwhelmed by the information overload.
They don't have time to crunch all the numbers and look at all the data and they're tired of sort of going it all in on this protocol or that protocol or this paradigm or that paradigm. There's a lot of room in the middle where you can live and be comfortable and be happy. And uh, that's always a shared decision with patients, you know, and when I say shared decision, what I mean is I'm just giving them, I sell, tell them sometimes, you know, I'm not here to tell you what to do.
I'm here to inform you of the likely consequences of your actions based on my experience. Because that's really all I can do. And I really, one of the things that bothers me most about the way that medicine is and continues to be is it's very paternalistic. Patients are treated like children. You're the child.
I'm the adult. I'm here to tell you what's best for you and how to treat your body and how to treat yourself. This doesn't really honor their sovereignty, their agency, their autonomy, and the fact that I can't possibly, as someone external to you, know what's best for you. Perhaps going to resonate with you, your values, what you want out of life, all those other things, and the only way that I can authentically engage with you is for me to empower you with information to the best of my in the limits of my own knowledge.
Beautiful. Well, I love that really just wise and holistic approach. So I'm sure for anyone listening that now is saying, Oh my gosh, I need to be in his sphere, you know, work with him, read his books, follow his blogs, be a part of his courses, et cetera, et cetera. What are the best ways for them to do that?
Thanks. So if you'd like to become a patient at the practice, you must either live in Florida or New York. Or if you are outside of one of those states or you can't claim domicile in those states, You've got to come see us in Naples, Florida. We're only a plane ride away. It's not a big deal. Yeah. You also get a couple of calls with us to make sure you're a good fit for the practice before you have to book a flight and jump on a plane and get a hotel and you have to spend a weekend at the beach.
Yeah. Rough life. I know, right? The medical, there's a reason I live here. The medical practice is stillmanmd. com and there's an apply for consultation tab. You click that name, email, you'll get a series of emails. Those emails are actually really important to me. They're all about testimonials from people who we've helped in the past.
The cool thing about my testimonials is I take all of them myself and I actually get my patients to tell you what the secret of their success was. And that is really fun to, uh, I have, I actually have a good time watching my testimonials. Um, from time to time, just to make sure I'm keeping my feet on the ground, a good way to say mission driven to, to see the other thing, though, that I found is that, you know, I tend to be the fireman people are calling things are going wrong.
Ah, yes. So in order for me to actually keep a balanced perspective on my life, I have to keep in touch with the, okay, you know, look at all these great results we've gotten over the days and years, um, even though this person's not doing well, or this person's not getting the results they want. You know, I still know where we stand and I still know what works and so anyway, uh, and then if people want to engage with us with our education courses, coaching, we've got some new memberships.
They're monthly memberships. They're, they're awesome. You get a lot of content access and you'll get some Q and a's with us every month. And that's me and my team is when I say us and that's at Stillman wellness. com and we've got an email newsletter that goes out from that, um, from that website three times a week.
And then if you want to subscribe to my personal blog, it's stillmanmd. substack. com. The sub stack is a little bit more geeky, a little bit more high level. A lot of the people subscribed to it are either information junkies or practitioners. Mm. And so there's not as much, it tends to be, it's not like the other health and wellness blogs.
Oh, yeah. I can, acting as a testimonial as someone that has read that. Um, I can absolutely attest to that and in such a positive way from, so if, if someone is looking to go deeper, then that's a fantastic place to make sure you're a part of getting these regular routine emails to your inbox. So you're staying well versed on some of this kind of, uh, latest and greatest ways that you can impact your health or, you know, the health of the people you're working with.
If you are a practitioner, highly, highly suggest so rich in content and information and thoughtfulness. Thank you. I appreciate that. Yeah. Add it to your testimonial. There we go. Uh, well, I so appreciate you taking the time to be here. I know we went a few minutes over. I'm so sorry about that. I so, so value your time and just, you know, the thought leadership that you're putting out there and helping to really dismantle, dare I say, a bit of some of these, you know, mainstream approaches to the limitations by which we can impact our health.
When you hear from someone like yourself, we realize that there's a. whole other worlds that we might not even been tapping into. And we're getting a little more nuanced where it might not just be so simplistic. You might want to always keep some of your things in checks and balances. You know, the fish load that you're having, well, let's check on your mercury.
Well, how much sun are you getting? Let's make sure it's at the optimal times, et cetera, et cetera. Yeah, absolutely. Yeah. You know, what's funny is I mentioned before we, we started recording that I would love to talk about the, what is the proper place for therapeutics and sleep aids. Yeah. I would love to talk to you about that.
Yes. Please. So maybe we can have another episode. That was my bad. Yeah. To not touch on that because it's such a big topic. There's just so much to talk about. I know. Maybe we'll have to do a part two then, potentially. I would love that. Let us know. Okay. I would love that. Fantastic. And so, so thankful. So grateful.
And absolutely more to come. And I will be adding in the show notes, all of those links that you shared about ways that people can be a part of your worlds, read your book, et cetera, et cetera. Awesome. Thank you. Thank you. You've been listening to the sleep as a skill podcast, the top podcast for people who want to take their sleep skills to the next level.
Every Monday, I send out the sleep obsessions newsletter, which aims to be one of the most obsessive newsletters on the planet. Fun fact, I've never missed a Monday for over five years and counting. And it contains everything that you need to know in the fascinating world of sleep. Head on over to sleep as a skill.
com forward slash newsletter to sign up.