Transcript #375 Top 10 Tips to Reprogram Sleep with Light, Temperature, and Stress Reduction with Tara Youngblood

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1. Find out what’s in store for this Myers Detox Podcast with Tara Youngblood, founder and CEO of ChiliSleep and author of Reprogram Your Sleep, The Sleep Recipe That Works, who joins the show to talk about the top 10 tips to reprogram your sleep, using light, temperature, and stress reduction!
2. Being a poor sleeper and always wanting to sleep in different temperatures than her husband, Tara and her husband set out to design a product that would allow you set your own temperature while you sleep. Learn more about what inspired ChiliSleep.
3. There are many reasons that you could be having trouble getting good sleep, but usually the main reason is stress. Find out how you can address stress for better sleep, and why the temperature you sleep in is so important for adequate sleep.
4. In order to optimize our circadian rhythm, we must be aware of our body clock, creating a schedule around when it is optimal to go to sleep and wake up. Find out more about the best ways to optimize our circadian rhythm to experience deep sleep.
5. During sleep your body detoxes and even cleans plaque out of your brain. That’s why it is so important to stick to a sleep schedule. Learn more.
6. Temperature communicates with your hypothalamus, the unconscious part of the brain, which then signals to your body if it should go into deep sleep. Learn how the chiliPAD helps communicate to your body to optimize sleep, and how it is a great tool for those going through menopause.
7. Lack of sleep can have a huge impact on your cognitive abilities and even your immunity. Learn more.
8. The idea that everyone needs at least 8 hours of sleep is actually a myth and many people get restorative healthy sleep by either sleeping a little less or a little more. Find out more about why this became a myth.
9. One of the best ways to improve sleep is by setting a nighttime and morning time routine, that will reduce stress as much as possible, and get you mentally prepared for sleep or waking up. Find out about some of the best routines you can set up.
10. Eating and drinking alcohol before sleep can increase your metabolism and make it difficult to get restorative sleep. Learn more about how this works.
11. Find out how the chiliPAD works to optimize your sleep.
12. Creating an optimal environment before bed by reducing expose to blue light is essential for good sleep. Learn about how light can overstimulate your brain and prevent the production of melatonin, as well as some other tips to optimize your before bed environment.
13. You can learn more about Tara and her work at thesleepgeekcoach.com
14. You can learn more about ChiliSleep and their incredible products at chilitechnology.com
15. You can also find her on instagram and twitter @the_sleep_geek And on facebook @sleepgeek.me

Wendy Myers: Hello everyone, I’m Wendy Myers. Welcome to The Myers Detox Podcast. My website is myersdetox.com. We have hundreds and hundreds of podcasts there. We also have hundreds of articles on the topic of detoxification, the best supplements for detoxification, all about how to detox and prep your body for detoxification of heavy metals and chemicals. If you want to get our newsletter, we give you lots of specials and keep you up to date on all the latest research on how to properly detox your body. Go sign up to get our newsletter at myersdetox.com.

Wendy Myers: Our guest today is Tara Youngblood. We’re going to be talking about the top 10 tips to reprogram your sleep, using light, temperature and stress reduction as well. I know you guys out there are struggling with sleep, especially during this absolutely unprecedented crazy time. I certainly was in 2020, my sleep just went out the window. I was just reaching for everything. I revisited sleep, revisited what are the top themes out there right now that are going to help me? I got an Oura Ring and was trying all these different things. Then I discovered the chiliPAD. The company sent me one and I tried it. It was unbelievable. It completely changed my sleep. I stopped night waking. I just love this thing. I wanted to have Tara come on the show to talk about the research behind it, why it works and why temperature regulation is so important when you’re sleeping. We talk about many other things regarding how to optimize your sleep, too.

Wendy Myers: This is a really, really good show. Tune in if you want to optimize your sleep to optimize your health. I know you guys tuning in are also concerned about detoxification. Believe me, you have to sleep if you want to detox. It’s one of the things I work on when I’m working with clients. I prioritize getting them to sleep. If you’re not doing that, you can’t detox. It’s not going to happen. I know you guys are concerned about toxins and the level of chemicals and heavy metals that you have in your body. That’s why I created a quiz at heavymetalsquiz.com. This quiz will help you figure out your relative body burden of toxins.

Wendy Myers: After you take that quiz, you will get your results, which are interesting. Then you get a free video series that answers a lot of your frequently asked questions. Things like, how long does it take to detox and what kind of testing do you do? It answers a lot of different questions that you guys have when you’re starting out with detox, or even if you’re an old pro and have tried a bunch of different things. Go check it out at heavymetalsquiz.com.

Wendy Myers: Our guest today, Tara Youngblood, is the co-founder and CEO at ChiliSleep and author of Reprogram Your Sleep, The Sleep Recipe That Works. She is a highly regarded international speaker. Tara has extended her expertise to a wealth of high pro profile platforms, including TEDx, Skookum Tech Talks and the National Sleep Foundation’s sleep show. You can learn more about Tara and her work at the sleepgeekcoach.com. You can learn more about the chiliPAD, that her husband developed, at chilitechnology.com. Tara, thank you so much for coming on show.

Tara Youngblood: Thanks for having me. I’m excited to be here.

Wendy Myers: Why don’t you tell us a little bit about what inspired you to create the chiliPAD? Just so you guys know what this is, it’s a pad that you put on your bed that cools you down while you sleep. I have one, it’s unbelievable. I’ve been using it for about a year. It totally changed my sleep because I’m a hot sleeper and I wake up a lot. I wake up if I get hot and it ruins my sleep. If I get hot, the chiliPAD is just beyond amazing. What inspired you to create this?

Tara Youngblood: It’s interesting. Todd is my husband and the co-founder. His uncle invented the waterbed. In 2007, people were adjusting pressure in a slick comfort kind of bed. I wanted to be able to adjust the temperature. I wanted to be able to do it like in your car, where the driver and passenger get different temperatures. We have always slept at different temperatures. I think statistically, most partners in bed do that. We’re not unusual. He would love to sleep on a slab of ice and I want to warm up to sleep. It was an opportunity for us to each have our own remote control. That’s the genesis of where it started. I’ve never been a good sleeper and I think it expanded into how this temperature thing is way more than that of comfort control, but it actually does a lot of magical stuff for sleep as well.

Wendy Myers: My husband’s the same way. He grew up in the Amazon and Columbia, so he likes it really hot. He likes to sweat and I will die. I have to have it really, really cold. I like the chiliPAD at 72 degrees, to get it nice and chilly. It prevents me from waking up. I might wake up once, but if I’m hot, I’ll wake up three or even four times. It’s really, really disruptive. This is a brilliant technology. So many people have sleep issues. I’ve certainly suffered in the past from sleep issues, but millions of people have disruptive sleep. It dramatically impacts their weight and their immunity. It has such huge ramifications on their health. Can you talk about why people are having so many problems sleeping?

Tara Youngblood: There’s all sorts of reasons. I think one of the biggest ones is stress and it is one of those biggest factors that we don’t assume is going to have an impact on sleep. Our stress that we carry around, is a big impact on whether we can fall asleep, whether we stay asleep and even how our metabolism reacts in our own bodies. When we think about stress, it’s about managing that throughout the day. Stress was designed to help us if we’re being chased by a lion. Despite all the other stresses we have in our lives, we’re not about to have our arm ripped off. All those physiological responses that stress does for us, can prevent us from sleeping because obviously if a lion is about to attack us, we want to prevent sleep. Stress is really the first enemy to manage and to keep manageable.

Tara Youngblood: I have four boys. We talk about stress in terms of monsters, but the hormone cortisol is actually a good hormone. You wake up in the morning and you want to have a reasonable amount of it. It’s a cute, friendly monster when it gives you that boost in the morning and you’re working out. You get that burst of cortisol, you feel ready to go and do your day. That’s a good, friendly monster. If he gets out of control with the pandemic, financial stress, relationship stress, work stress or whatever it is, your lion in your day. If that gets out of control, by the time you go to sleep, it’s a really big, ugly monster. That’s when it’s really hard to sleep with.

Tara Youngblood: The first impact is trying to manage your stress. That can be easier said than done, but it is worthwhile to take those moments and take those time outs to manage stress. These days, all of us feel stress. In 2020 and 2021 now, with COVID stuff, it’s a different world. There are stresses that it’s hard to escape. But even just one minute of breathing can help. When I say breathing, it’s like taking a shorter breath in and out and taking 60 seconds to yourself. For me, I try to tie it to every time I go to use the restroom, because I have to do that anyway. Just take an extra minute. It does an amazing job of flushing out that extra cortisol. That’s, I think, number one. As far as temperature, our lives are nothing like we evolved in, living in caves or outside where the temperature is much more like being outside.

Tara Youngblood: We don’t live that way now, with central air or central heating. It’s the same temperature all day in our office and in our homes. We’re not spending the same amount of time outside to basically trigger those changes in temperature. It has a unique role in triggering changes throughout your day. You can see this, if you look at circadian rhythms. You’ll see that your core body temperature does a roller coaster throughout the day. Different times of the day it will be up and different times of the day it will be down. When you want to go to sleep at night, it drops just like the temperature outside does. When you figure that we have foam mattresses that are absorbing heat and not letting us get cooler, we cover up with blankets because that feels warm and snugly, but we’re basically insulating ourselves as these engines at night and not allowing that ventilation of cooling to happen. We have to be able to give that heat off.

Tara Youngblood: That’s really what our product does is to help maintain that cooling part. Temperature is a really big part of that sleep switch. Clifford St. Pierre, out of Harvard, was the first person to coin that. It really is a switch in your brain that is triggered, it’s not a conscious one even. If there’s a change of temperature in the evening, when you’re trying to sleep, it’ll help release serotonin and melatonin naturally and help you fall asleep.

Wendy Myers: Yes, we need to recreate our ancient environment. How we developed over millions of years, how our bodies evolved, that is recreating our environmental cues that set our circadian rhythms. I think when people get out of sync with nature’s circadian rhythms. That’s when they start having problems with sleep and all that stuff. How can we best support optimizing our circadian rhythm? We’re tired, getting sleepy, it’s time to go to bed and stay asleep. That facilitates us being able to be alert and productive during the day.

Tara Youngblood: The first thing is it’s helpful to know the “when” part. We’re all a little bit different. You’ve probably heard of being a morning person or a night person. There’s those of us that like to wake up early in the morning or those of us that like to stay up late. That part of our personality is actually a genetic trait that we were born with. That gene governs that. You can take a chronotype test, that’s called a chronotype. That’ll help give you a perspective on your clock, of when your optimal time is to go to sleep and when your optimal time is to wake up. You can get a benchmark. What you need to be thinking about is similar to how we talked about that switch, that light switch. You need to make sure in that window, you really are trying to activate sleep because your body clock is going to keep going, with or without you.

Tara Youngblood: If you decide to stay up two hours later, that means your body clock has been clicking away for those two hours of sleep. That makes it harder to get especially deep sleep, because that tends to be the first half of the night. If you start two hours late, you’re just missing out on two hours. There are some ways to hack through that, but in general, we want to be conscientious of doing that all the time. Everybody stays up late and hangs out with friends occasionally. If it happens occasionally, it’s not a big deal. On average, we want to be trying to think about our clocks and when is the right time to go to sleep and wake up. It’s fun to want to sleep in. Today in North Carolina, it’s cloudy and rainy, it’s that day where you want to stay in bed, pull up the covers and sleep longer. Just like you want to turn on sleep, you want to turn it off as well.

Tara Youngblood: If your sleep schedules wildly swing, like you’ll see in healthcare workers or shift workers. You’re constantly in a state of flux and your body likes regularity. It likes a system, it likes a plan or a recipe, whatever you want to call that methodical nature. If you’re all over the place, where you get up at 5:00 during the week and then sleep until noon on Saturdays, that swing can cause you to feel exhausted all the time. Your body can’t figure out which way it’s supposed to go. Understanding that if you can wake up fairly consistently as well, there’s always exceptions, but try to keep the on and off switches in their buckets of time.

Wendy Myers: I would love to be able to sleep in, but that just doesn’t happen. I don’t know why, for my whole life I wake up at 6:00 or 7:00 AM, no matter what time I go to bed. I know I’m waking up at 7:00 AM. I’ve just learned that if I want to get a good night’s sleep, I have to go to bed by at least 10:00 PM, or it’s not going to happen. Sleep is so important for recovery and regeneration and I think people don’t realize that, they’re like, “Oh, I’ll just sleep when I take a daily nap.” The problem is if you short change yourself, you go to bed really, really late at midnight or 1:00 AM. That has devastating effects for your body’s regeneration and for your ability to detox. Your liver starts detoxing around 11:00 PM and you’re missing out on all of that if you short change yourself on sleep. Can you talk a little about that?

Tara Youngblood: Sleep is all about that recovery time. I really think about it in terms of a retirement savings plan. We teach our young people, at twenty-something, start saving up now for the time you’re in retirement. You’re investing in your future. Really, sleep is a long-term play like that. Everybody can miss a night or be short sleeping, and you can survive. It trains us to think this isn’t a big deal, but if we never put money in that bank account, we never ever save up. That equation, especially when combined with stress is now leading to autoimmune diseases and they’re seeing it in Alzheimer’s. Your brain actually cleans the plaques out that are attributed to Alzheimer’s every night during deep sleep. Your spinal fluid will rinse your brain and help maintain the health of it. Again, if you’re never in deep sleep, it cannot do that.

Tara Youngblood: Over time, that builds up. They’re now attributing every disease of the elderly to a lack of deep sleep, at some point. It’s really important in that long-term play. It’s super easy. It feels like when you give up time for sleep, you feel like you can’t do anything, you’re not productive. Actually it’s the opposite. Your body’s very productive during that time. You may not be crunching it out on your computer, but that time is invaluable for your body to recover and rejuvenate in every aspect, from your liver to your memory. It’s all really important for sleep.

Wendy Myers: I think just because your eyes are closed, doesn’t mean you’re getting quality sleep. I got an Oura Ring, a couple of years ago. I started tracking it and I was really surprised. I was testing what was working, what would help me get deeper sleep, especially with 2020 and that whole nightmare. My sleep took such a nose dive. I was looking for every single thing I could find to optimize my sleep. Then you guys sent me a chiliPAD and it was revolutionary. It was amazing. I saw much improved sleep scores with my Oura Ring, with my heart rate variability. It was a huge, huge change for me. I saw it also with CBD. Now I’m using CBN, which also helps with sleep. I was trying all different kinds of things like melatonin, et cetera. I was really surprised by how big of a change I saw, just by adjusting my temperature.

Tara Youngblood: It’s amazing honestly. I talked about the reason why we invented it. In all honesty, when we did, it wasn’t with the knowledge of even how much of a role temperature plays in sleep, how it activates and changes. What’s going to change about your sleep is you’re unconscious, there’s only so many things you can do. You can do stuff during the day like not eating as late, cutting out caffeine later in the day or alcohol and all those other influences, even the stress one. There’s only so much you can do. Once you close your eyes, how do you keep telling your body that you really want that best sleep?

Tara Youngblood: Temperature talks to your hypothalamus, which is your unconscious part of your brain. This is the measurement for your thermostat. It doesn’t exist in your conscious mind, as much as we like to think it does. It’s a little wonky then, that’s where some people will feel warm or you feel warmer or cooler if it seasonally changes. It’s pretty subjective if you let your conscious mind do it, but your unconscious mind actually takes those cues and says, “Oh, it’s cooling down. I’m going to sleep deeply.” My core body temperature is able to drop those two degrees and in that process, it’s basically telling it, “Yes, deep sleep. You can get deep sleep. It’s nighttime, it’s the right time.” You’re cueing yourself. We are faking that sun going down and the cooler part of your night, or emphasizing it, if you’re actually sleeping at night. For shift workers, you can basically fake the nights and tell your body, “Hey, it’s really time to get deep sleep now.”

Tara Youngblood: Despite how long you spend in bed, it really does boil down to good quality sleep. I talk to people all the time that have taken an Ambien or they’re taking some sort of pharma to help them sleep. All of those are hallucinogenic drugs, and so, yes, you’re unconscious, but it’s kind of like you don’t feel rested after surgery. An anesthesiologist will tell you there’s multiple levels of consciousness, but that’s not the same as sleep. You’re not sleeping while you’re in surgery, you’re knocked out. That’s really the equivalent of what’s happening with those drugs. So you’re still not getting deep sleep, you’re still not getting the rest you need. Your body will slow down and that might be helpful for a short period of time, but the sooner we can get people off those drugs, the better.

Wendy Myers: Yes, with the sleep meds, you’re not getting a deep restorative sleep. Just check it out for yourself, if you have an Oura Ring or any other tracking device, you’re not getting a restorative sleep. For me, what was so incredible about using a chiliPAD was I went into menopause last year and I’m 48. I started getting really hot at night when I was sleeping, because estrogen helps you regulate your temperature. It is part of the mechanism that helps regulate your temperature. I was getting hot flashes, I was sleeping much hotter at night and I was waking up three and four times a night. It was driving me nuts. The chiliPAD really helped knock all that out. It was amazing. I think it’s really imperative for women that are going through menopause, maybe aren’t able to control their blood sugar or they’re just starting trying to figure out how. If they can’t control their body temperature, this is going to really, really help change the game for you, with sleep.

Tara Youngblood: The female body, there’s perks to it, but temperature is something even throughout your cycle that will change, for all of those reasons. It’s obviously magnified during menopause or even during pregnancy. You’ll see some of the same fluctuations and wild temperature swings. Throughout our lives as women, sleep and temperature is a bit of a mess. That’s one of those things we just need to be a little bit more thoughtful of, and plan. Even throughout your cycle, you may find yourself adjusting your temperature slightly to be a little cooler, especially as you’re right about to get your period. You’ll find that you start to heat up a little bit for some people, so it’s really important. Unfortunately, any studies on sleep because of those cycles, have not been done on women, for the most part. As a gender, we sleep way more poorly than men do. It’s really important that as women we take care of ourselves. We carry more stress and we don’t sleep as well. That’s not a good combination as we get older.

Wendy Myers: I find that because our brain is built to multitask, we’re thinking about work, cleaning the house, taking care of daddy’s stuff, taking care of the kids and all this stuff that we have to keep track of. I find that women’s minds are just going, going, going. They get that tired but wired thing, going on. It’s really important to work on those external cues like temperature and whatnot, to help facilitate sleep better.

Tara Youngblood: I was just going to say one more thing on the menopause because we’ve done some studies. It is really important to know the power of sleep. If you can mitigate hot flashes at night with temperature, you’ll actually have less hot flashes during the day as well. By sleeping well, by investing in sleep, especially during menopause, pregnancy or when you’re going through changes in our lives. It’s mostly when you’re under stress that you think harder about sleep instead of being willing to give it up. It really has a healing impact and the symptoms of whatever you’re going through will be less, when you sleep better. Sleep is just really powerful as a mitigator for those extremes. It may not stop it altogether, but it will definitely take it down a notch.

Wendy Myers: That totally makes sense, what you said about if you control your hot flashes at night, it controls them more during the day. What happens when you don’t get enough sleep is you can have the blood sugar levels of a diabetic the next day, if you get five or less hours of sleep. If you can’t control your blood sugar and if your blood sugar shoots up, you’re going to have a hot flash. That’s what precipitates that. What are some other things that happen to us when we don’t get enough sleep?

Tara Youngblood: When we lost our son, one of our sons passed away suddenly. I didn’t sleep for almost a year, really very little. It’s really the equivalent of being drunk. The CDC has done studies and the military has done studies on fatigue science. If you’re not sleeping, your cognitive ability is like having drinks and driving home. If you let someone do that, you’d be socially ostracized for letting someone drive home drunk, but we do it with sleep all the time and we think it’s okay. We really need to get to a spot where we understand that it leads to depression and a very bad cycle with mental illness. There’s so many ways in which the sleep factor contributes, but it is horrible for our cognitive abilities. You might as well just have six drinks, if you miss five hours or less of sleep. It’s crazy.

Wendy Myers: That’s interesting going through the whole nightmare of 2020 and whatnot, the pandemic. I was reading that the number one thing that you can do for any kind of illness is sleep. That’s the best thing for immunity. They noticed that people’s immune responses went down dramatically if they didn’t have enough sleep at night. I was looking at this research, which is amazing, the number one thing is sleep to improve your immunity.

Wendy Myers: Let’s talk a little bit about if we really need eight hours of sleep every night. That’s the rule of thumb, it seems. Where did that idea come from? We are all different. I seem to just need seven hours of sleep. My eyes pop open after seven hours. Even though I’d love to sleep more, it just doesn’t happen. What’s going on there?

Tara Youngblood: That is one of my favorite questions. I really feel like it’s become this myth, but eight hours actually evolved during the industrial age when factory workers petitioned to get eight hours off for rest time. We’ve done that, but you’ll see in cultures like in Spain, there’s a different culture of eating later at night. In literary references from the 1800s, Dickens or whatever, will talk about first sleep or second sleep. We often did more polyphasic sleeps, we had naps. The siesta is a real thing. In hot cultures, resting in the heat of the day is pretty acceptable. You’ll actually see a little dip in that circadian rhythm of your core body temperature during the siesta hour. It’s a great opportunity, if you’re a shift worker, to match that as well.

Tara Youngblood: But we’re all different, there’s billions of us and the thought that we all need to sleep eight hours on the button, is crazy. It’s about being smart. If you’re tracking it and you’re sleeping 10 hours or more on an average basis, that’s probably too much. You need to look at that. If you’re sleeping six hours or less all the time, you probably need to look at it. It’s a benchmark, but it shouldn’t be the ultimate deciding factor. It really is about quality. It’s like dieting as well, you can just eat less calories, but if you’re smart about what calories you eat, it’s actually way more effective than just carte blanche, taking everything off the table.

Tara Youngblood: It’s about being smart about what you’re doing and really finding out for yourself, for example, if you know seven hours is good for you, don’t beat yourself up about not being at eight. Listen to your body. That’s really the most important part. Your recipe is yours. No one should be able to say, “This is the one way.” I do feel like diet and fitness is finally getting to that same conversation of, there’s no one diet for every person on the planet. There’s no one fitness plan for every person on the planet. There’s not one sleep plan for every person on the planet. We’re all different, but it’s our responsibility to know what’s right for us.

Wendy Myers: It takes some time to figure it out. It absolutely takes time to play with different things and track things, with an Oura Ring or other type of gadget out there. That’s really, really helpful. Let’s talk a little bit about what are some of the biggest factors in getting quality sleep? There’s a lot of things you have to check off to make sure you’ve got to have some sleep hygiene, so I like to create my little cloud. I have my really nice sheets, my really nice pillows and my silk mask. There’s all these little things that I’ve done because I have been, at times in life, quite desperate to get adequate levels of sleep because of stress, a moldy house or whatever’s going on. Beyond what I just mentioned there, what are some other things that people need to do to make sure they’re getting optimal sleep?

Tara Youngblood: I think it is going to be very different. Most of the things you talked about were part of that bedtime routine. When you think about sleep, there’s multiple times where you’re influencing sleep, whether you realize it or not. What you do first thing in the morning for a lot of people can impact that. We want to be able to move our bodies and get sunshine. That’s one of the best recipes, even for jet lag, is to make sure you start your day and turn off that sleep. You start your march towards sleep and your body clock starts ticking. I turned it off, now I’m starting to tick towards when I want to be able to turn it back on. It really depends on what feels right for you.

Tara Youngblood: Obviously, a morning person is going to be much more focused on turning off sleep and getting started on their day, versus a night person. If they’re having a hard time falling asleep, figuring out when they should ideally go to sleep and setting their bedtimes may be a more important factor for them. Bedtime is a lot about that psychological part. Stress, mitigating stress and having a routine does help us mitigate stress because it feels like there’s a pattern. I think the one thing to keep in mind with sleep, if people aren’t sleeping, your willpower and your ability to plan all lose their ability to have an impact. That’s where if you don’t sleep, you eat more calories and they’re bad calories.

Tara Youngblood: If you’re having a hard time sleeping, I would start thinking first thing in the morning, what do you want your bedtime to look like? Try to lay that out when you’re at your cognitive best and you’re not tired. I think moms do that horribly because by the time you tuck in the kids, put in that last load of laundry and do the six more things you need to do before you go to bed, we’re often too tired to try a new tea, get our masks laid out or things like that.

Tara Youngblood: As you’re looking to try to revamp your sleep and start over, the most important part is thinking about what’s going to feel good, but try to do it when you’re at your cognitive best. Put it next to your bedside, put it by your sink or wherever you need to go anyway. If you’re going to brush your teeth, put out your things right next to where you brush your teeth so you don’t have to go hunt down the mask, or figure out what you need to do with that. Try to get your sleep environment in order, so when you’re tired, you can just crawl into bed and it’s not one more source of stress.

Tara Youngblood: A lot of people stress about sleep. That actually causes more sleeplessness than the actual sleep itself. Figure it out, lay it out, get excited about sleep and give it it’s due. Anything that’s respected, we do it better, we treat it better. It’s the idea of a “she shed”. Get yourself ready for bed and make that environment so it feels snugly. I use a weighted blanket because the serotonin for me is fabulous. It’s great for anxiety. Again, it can’t be something that I have to go find at the last minute, it has to be there, right on my bed and ready to go.

Wendy Myers: Yes, I feel you on that one. People who can’t go to sleep, wake up and they get really frustrated. That used to be me. I’d wake up in the middle of the night and be like, “Ah,” because I knew that I wouldn’t go back to sleep. I was going to be up for a couple of hours. You get that cortisol rush and then you manifested not being able to go back to sleep. You have to manage that mindset. Also people get stressed about not getting enough sleep, that they can’t get enough done or they don’t want to sleep because they want to get up and workout. I think a lot of people come from this lack mindset, they don’t have enough time and they can’t get enough done. That’s not true. You have plenty of time. You have an infinite abundance, but you have to change your mindset about sleep and not be frustrated. You just have to check off all the boxes, all of these things that you need to do.

Tara Youngblood: Productivity will come if you get good sleep, you’re just more productive. You actually do get that time back if you invest in sleep. It really does come back around. I’ve had multiple conversations where people weren’t sleeping and you have two cups of coffee to compensate for not sleeping. If you actually sleep and get that half hour to 45 minutes back of drag or the post afternoon tired, where you’re not very productive if you’re sleeping, you get that time back. It is worth that investment.

Wendy Myers: I think it’s really important if you have emotional trauma, to work on that. That can create constant stress and constant cortisol that you’re not aware of, that affects your sleep. Then don’t eat before you go to sleep. I never sleep well if I eat right before I go to bed. You want it to be three hours, at least.

Tara Youngblood: That’s a temperature play again, because your metabolism ramps up. Alcohol is the same. During the pandemic especially, you’ll see the alcohol consumption rates for people is through the roof. A lot of people are basically self-medicating towards that sleep. Although alcohol will relax you to help you fall asleep, the problem is the quality of what happens after that. Again, your metabolism is raised and you don’t end up getting deep sleep. In essence, you pass out but you’re not getting great sleep. Try to keep it out of that three hour window before bed, it’s way better. Break the habit by making yourself a nice tea or make yourself a different drink that’s healthy for you instead of a “drink” drink. Then slowly work yourself out of the alcohol fix you want to do in the evening.

Wendy Myers: I’m so glad that you mentioned that. I know so many people are imbibing because it helps them to reduce stress but it causes more stress in the long run. I also knew that you raise your blood sugar with food or alcohol. You’ll raise your body temperature and you’re screwing up that circadian rhythm that your body is needing to stick to. Let’s talk a little bit about the chiliPAD. You have two different versions. One version that you have is really cool. You can set it to be colder at night and then slowly warm up towards the morning, when you wake up. Can you talk a little bit about that?

Tara Youngblood: I use buckets, and I joke that it’s probably because I have four boys and I have to put lots of things in buckets. I break sleep and your night into three different buckets, because they are messy. Bedtime is about what feels good. For some people it’s cool crisp sheets. For me, it is warming up to fall asleep, I want a warm bed. The Ooler product allows you to do that. It also allows you within that 20 minutes, we want to try to fall asleep within a 10 to 30 minutes window and then you can make it cooler. That’s what I do. When you do that, you’re facilitating that deep sleep. Even if it feels good to warm up, you don’t have to stay warm. In fact, that’ll often cause people to wake up in the middle of the night when they’ve stayed too warm.

Tara Youngblood: I did that wrong when I first started, I was like, “I like it warm,” but then I’d wake up in the middle of the night. This is a response to that. Then you can set it cooler. The other thing that happens in the second half of the night is that your body’s warming up. It’s the equivalent of the sun rising and warming up the planet, your body’s warming back up those two degrees, so it wants it a little bit warmer. Some people wake up and are too cold. It allows you, in that second half of the night, to use a feature called “warm awake”, which is when your body is warmed awake. It actually releases cortisol and helps turn off that sleep switch. It’s a great way to get you out of bed with a little bit of a burst.

Tara Youngblood: It sounds crazy because everyone thinks they’re a warm snuggly bed person, you’re like, “Oh no, it’s a warm snuggly bed. I want to stay asleep.” In the morning during that turning-off time, that sleep switch is looking for that warming up so it does turn off sleep. If your bed’s really hot in the morning, people will not be able to stay in bed, you’ll be fully awake.

Wendy Myers: It’s so interesting, all these little things you have to think about. There’s light, also. Light plays a big role in regulating our circadian rhythm. Can you talk about how to optimize light in our environment and the problems with light and smartphones, televisions and stuff in the bedroom, before you go to sleep?

Tara Youngblood: Light is very similar in the sense that we have receptors for light, that we don’t really think about. To your point, it also plays a role in that circadian rhythm. It’s important to keep in mind that temperature plays a role and maybe that’s a bigger factor for you than light or vice versa. Maybe light is a bigger factor for you and you need to mitigate it. It is really important, even with all the tips. For Todd, caffeine doesn’t affect him at all and so he can have a pot of coffee and go to bed. The receptors in his brain actually are not open for caffeine. It is really important as you listen to the tips, take away what works for you.

Tara Youngblood: For a lot of people, light does make a really big difference. If you’re on electronics, it’s something called blue light. What happens with that frequency is that basically it’s stimulating your brain, “Oh, I should be awake. It’s peak sunrise and I need to be awake.” It over stimulates your brain and doesn’t allow it to release the melatonin. What we want to do is we want to be able to basically start dampening the lights. That is one of the perks of some of those smart light bulbs, you can actually dim them or have a schedule to dim them. Try not to watch TV before bed. I know that in the pandemic with binge-watching, one more Netflix show is really hard to avoid.

Tara Youngblood: But if you think about it in terms of setting yourself up for success, if you’re having a hard time falling asleep, this is one of the ways in which you can really try to set that body into a good spot and be kind to yourself. Maybe instead of watching TV, read a book, have a nice warm bath and create that routine of what I’m going to do to wind down. In essence, the Netflix show, which feels relaxing and good, may not be the best thing for our bodies to help us sleep. There are lots of other ways we can do that.

Wendy Myers: I love taking an Epsom salt bath with some lavender essential oil. I always sleep so well because that bath heats you up, but then you cool down really quickly. Actually, the net effect is it cools your body down so you sleep better. There’s so much to this, but I think that using a chiliPAD is a great way to recreate our ancient environment, how our bodies were meant to go to sleep and stay asleep. I moved to Mexico and it’s going to be getting really, really hot here. I am ready. I am armed and ready because it’s going to be like a hundred degrees and 90% humidity, it’s just going to be really unbearable. I’m so happy that I have my chiliPAD here. Can you tell us a little bit about where people can learn more about the chiliPAD and the research that you mentioned?

Tara Youngblood: You can always visit our website at chilitechnology.com. We have a blog there so you can read articles. I publish one a week. There’s tons of information there on everything from menopause to pregnancy and all the things we’ve talked about, like circadian rhythm. There’s a chronotype quiz there, if you want to take it. You can also find me on social media as The Sleep Geek. You can track me down and ask me questions there. I always love getting questions, so feel free to reach out if you’re just curious or you want to know more about something. We have to fix this sleep thing together.

Wendy Myers: Yes, we do. Lack of sleep is such an epidemic. I feel like it’s just going to get worse and worse and worse with all of the stress and all the EMF, the rising EMF in the environment. We didn’t even go into that. I love it that you have a lot of people that I respect in health, like Chris Kresser, who I absolutely love. I saw an ad that he was recommending the chiliPAD. You have a lot of people that really are steeped in the research, recommending your product. I do too, I absolutely love it. I just thank you for developing this thing. There’s nothing else out there like it. It’s definitely unique and I highly recommend it. You guys go check that out. Tara, thanks so much for coming on the show.

Tara Youngblood: Thanks for having me.

Wendy Myers: Everyone, thanks so much for tuning in to The Myers Detox Podcast. I’m Wendy Myers of myersdetox.com. If you like what you heard today, we’ve got hundreds of other shows, we’re almost up to show 400. It’s crazy. I’ve been doing this for almost nine years. We’ve got so many different shows on detoxification and all different ways to effectively detox your body, how toxins affect your body and how if you don’t sleep, your body is not detoxing. When I’m working with people, priority number one is getting people sleeping. Your body will not work correctly, you will not have vibrant health if you don’t sleep optimally. You have to work on this if you’re not sleeping well and regenerating. Tara, thanks for coming on. You guys, I’ll talk to you next week.