Ep189: Optimizing Sleep, Productivity, & Creativity Using Ultradian Rhythms and Self-Tracking | with Dr. Azure Grant

Zack Arnold

My guest today is Dr. Azure Grant who's a researcher in metabolic and hormonal health, a post doctoral researcher at Helen Wills Neuro Institute, UC, Berkeley, a scientist in residence at Crescent Health, where she advises on measurements of energy levels and subjective sleep drive, she's an avid runner, and given all this what might not come as a big surprise to you at this point, she's also an avid self tracker. And in today's conversation, we demystify sleep, circadian rhythms, ultradian rhythms and how all three affects your ability to be more productive and creative. If endless sleepless nights and long hours have led you towards burnout, chronic brain fog, or you feel like you could just never catch up and feel rested again, Dr. Azure Grant is an amazing resource to help you better understand how you can both collect the proper data about your health, but also interpret it and make better lifestyle decisions. We talked about the specific rhythms and processes that each of our bodies are going through in a 24 hour cycle, which as you're going to learn are called ultradian rhythms, and how you can better organize your day to get more done when you have the energy but then you can use other portions of your day for busy work when you're just not feeling it. We also dive deep into how you can use self tracking to optimize your own unique daily rhythms by creating your ideal schedule of productivity, movement, creativity and ultimately rest. Whether you have been feeling the effects of too many tasks with too little sleep for weeks, or even decades, or if you just want to nerd out on self quantification. Dr. Grant is here to give you simple practical steps to bring you back to balance by resetting your sleep and your energy cycles. Her seemingly endless supply of information that comes from extensive science backed research is going to give you all the tools and the motivation that you need to become a sleep ninja. Alright, without further ado, my conversation with Dr. Azure Grant. To access the show notes for this episode with all of the bonus links and resources discussed today, as well as to subscribe, leave a review and more, simply visit optimizeyourself.me/episode189. I am here today with Dr. Azure Grant. She is a researcher in metabolic and hormonal health. You are a big fan of self tracking. You are a post doctoral researcher at Helen Wills Neuro Institute at the UC Berkeley, you're a scientist in residence at the company Crescent Health which we'll talk a little bit more later on. More importantly, and most importantly, according to your Twitter bio, you run cook and play with data. So Azure it is a pleasure to have you on the show today.

Dr. Azure Grant

Thank you so much for having me here. I'm very happy to be here.

Zack Arnold

So as as we were talking about a little bit before for we we officially got on the record, you and I are time nerds. And I don't even know if that's a thing. But we were talking a little bit more about what topics of conversation are really going to be the most relevant to our audience today. And I was saying that I really think it's important for any creative professional, especially in a high performance field, like Hollywood or similar industries, if you don't understand how to both maximize sleep, but also maximize the other hours in your day. So you understand how do I best use all 24 hours, you first of all need to understand the importance of sleep, which seems so basic and stupid. But I think we're at least going to need to cover the basics of why should you not only get four hours of sleep and I chronically. But then more importantly, I really want people to understand both how circadian rhythms work, which some people have heard of and know the basics. But then there's this thing called ultradian rhythms. And as soon as I mentioned that your face just totally lit up like we were going to talk about Santa Claus and Christmas, which means that we you and I are going to be a good combination. Because it was only It wasn't until I discovered the concept of an ultradian rhythm that I totally unlocked the capacity for creative problem solving and creative idea generating because it wasn't just Well, I'm getting enough sleep. But I'm just kind of bumbling about the day and on the hamster wheel. I really learned what it ultradian rhythm was and what my Chrono type was. So we're gonna nerd out on all of the following. But the first question I have for you is going to be a very interesting and one that's a little bit off the beaten path. And I'm going to address what's kind of an elephant in the room for anybody watching this, which is that you seem to be very young and vibrant. For somebody that has discovered the importance of sleep. Usually it isn't until you're in your mid 40s and crotchety and exhausted and living off of caffeine that you're like, maybe I should start focusing on sleep and for some reason you decided to make this your passion at a very early age and I'm wondering why.

Dr. Azure Grant

Well first, that's very kind of you and you've probably seen my face lighting up in the background as you say all of these things that we're going to talk about because I think it sounds very fun, but um, I guess the first thing is maybe I feel old and crotchety on the inside already. But I went to UC Berkeley originally wanting to go into pre med, like so many people grew up in a family that had Have a lot of nurses in it, in particular my grandma and loved medicine and biology and everything kind of squelchy, and, and organic. And I saw that all the people that I was studying with, would almost compete to sleep as little as possible work as hard as possible that the residents that I knew they would completed their medical training and moved on, and were working at very prestigious places were exhausted and being overworked. And then that the spouses a lot, a lot of my professors were medical professionals, and that they were chronically sleep deprived. And it seemed really sad that the people who are dedicating their life to promotion of health and caring for others were, at least in this country, forced to not care for themselves in the process. And I really didn't want to do that, I felt like there must be a way where a person that wants to care for others can show that they're able to do that, in part by trying to take care of themselves. And I definitely don't always succeed in that way. I was just talking to Lauren, the head coach at Crescent Health today about how I'm feeling like I'm finally getting back to sleeping enough. And I haven't been for a little while. So I don't think it's a complete success story. I don't sleep well and do healthy habits all the time. But I do try just because I see how much this impacts everyone around us. Even the people that care the most about it.

Zack Arnold

One thing that I can say from my own experience, similar to what you just mentioned, where you're somebody that's supposed to be quote unquote, a sleep expert, but I'm not necessarily getting eight hours of sleep, and I have unhealthy habits, too. That's very much a position that I'm in even like right now I spent years and years helping creative professionals learn how to both manage and avoid burnout. And I've just been going through a period of fairly intense burnout myself. And there's a part of me, especially earlier in my career where I thought, well, how dare I like I'm such a hypocrite. I'm like, like, I'm supposed to have it all figured out. And then I realized that the people that I really like to work with and learn from are not necessarily just the experts and their towers that have all the information. It's ultimately the ones that can empathize. And I would guess it's a lot easier for you to empathize with somebody that struggles with sleep, if you struggled yourself in the past or the present.

Dr. Azure Grant

Yeah, I mean, I think most people when you talk to them are not trying to pretend like they have perfect habits. And there's that old cliche about you study the thing that you have the most trouble with. So I think that was definitely a part of me going into sleep and biological rhythms are that they were very beautiful and elegant, from like a technical standpoint, very interesting and scientific questions. But they're also like, what underlies your lived experience every single day. And sleep was one that maybe I'm just like, overly sensitive here. But I really don't do all that I don't sleep enough. And so I think I'll probably always struggle to have healthier habits than I than I could or that maybe I could get away with if I were someone who is more robust against sleep loss. But

Zack Arnold

yeah, I can relate to all that. And I actually did genetic testing through 23andme. And did like all the, the, like DNA breakdown and everything to really understand what is my genetic code. And without going into too many of the details of which I did extensively with somebody named Dr. Ben Lynch, where we actually broke down all the pathways and genetics and everything, the short version is that the, you can go into this a lot more, because you're the scientist and the doctor. And I'm not. But the short version is that I just was not detoxifying and recovering during the night, the way that most other people do. I'm very inefficient with my sleep. So most people can get six, seven, even eight hours and they wake up and they feel great. I get six or seven hours, and I'm completely useless. And I found out that that was genetically, because the way that I'm wired, and it sounds like you're in a similar position where you just need more sleep than other people might need.

Dr. Azure Grant

It really helps to see it. It's neat that you it sounds like you in some way felt better and more accepting of this after you got your 23 and me results back. I kind of had a similar experience where at one point in undergraduate, I was lucky enough to have a pie that didn't mind if I like bought extra assays and spit in the tube and kind of like made a little bit of a sleep lab and the psych building. And I would I would go there every once in a while. And I would try to do as a sleep experiment where I would put on all the wearables in the lab devices we had, I would get a really good night of sleep. And then the next day, I would wake myself up either every couple of hours throughout the night or at four in the morning. And then once I could take all of that information about my heart rate about my EEG and sleep stages about my stomach activity and blood glucose, some other hormones back to the lab. I can see directly that when I didn't sleep enough, it just looked like chaos. And when I slept really well, all of these different biometrics just nicely isolated together across sleep stages. And they looked very orderly and that I found it very convincing to say, okay, like, I know that it's not just me hurting some subjective sense of self that I have. I see in front of me these numbers that like that that individual looks like they're hurting. And I don't want to do that.

Zack Arnold

Yeah, well, I want to get into all the the basic science and the technical stuff very, very soon. But there's something you just brought up that I think is so important, is that you saying and both of us going through the experience of seeing the data and realizing, Oh, this actually makes a difference when it comes to something like Sleep, sleep, and just kind of overwork in general and this burnout culture that we have specifically in America and not saying it's not other places, but boy, have we really perfected the burnout work culture. It's so esoteric that we just think, well, if I need more sleep, or I'm not recovering, or I can't put in the 20 hour days, like I'm sure you saw in the pre med field, it's a sign of weakness, right? But if I have the data that says that my body doesn't produce insulin, and I'm type one diabetic, nobody says, well, I need less insulin than you do. Right? It's just it would be asinine to think that. But when it comes to things like sleep, we think that it's a badge of honor, that I can get less than you and still function except you're really not functioning. So just that that cultural belief, I think, number one, let's just get rid of that. And let's just get down to all the data and the information. And it sounds like in the very early World of pre med, you decided, yeah, this is not so much going to be my life.

Dr. Azure Grant

Yeah, totally agree. And I think it also has to do with being nice to yourself, I guess, like there's a way to compete against others by pushing yourself to the limit, even beyond what's healthy. And then I think it can be a little bit helpful to go back and say like, what would I recommend, like for my pet, or what I recommend for, you know, my, my niece or my nephew, to do? And if you treat yourself like that, it's often a lot easier to be nice and a little bit lenient?

Zack Arnold

Yeah. It's funny how that works, isn't it? We're oftentimes our own worst enemy is the one that's between our ears. Right? So I have a multitude several hours worth of podcasts with other sleep experts where we are just beating a dead horse about why not sleeping is bad for you. And I don't want to go too deep down that rabbit hole. But just to kind of tee us off. Somebody comes to you that's never learned anything about sleep, other than I know I need it every night. Why do I need sleep? Give me like the very brief version to tee us off to get into some of the the nitty gritty details.

Dr. Azure Grant

What can I say that others haven't said before? Well, you live on the earth, and the Earth rotates around its axis once every 24 hours. And that means that every living thing on the earth pretty much, mostly at the bottom of the ocean, is going to be tied to the energetic changes across the day. And so that cycle is built into almost every cell of your body, every system. And you will live much better be happier, live longer. If you stay in tune with that natural rhythm that that you can't really escape because it's it's been evolved into every single part of you

Zack Arnold

Now, my understanding is that rhythm actually has a name, doesn't it? What does what is that rhythm called?

Dr. Azure Grant

What does that called about? It's called our circadian system or circadian rhythmicity. And so that being baked into every one of our cells is actually all the way down to a molecular clocks that live in our different cells that are coordinated by what's called the master like organizing clock sits at the bottom of our brain called the Super charismatic nucleus or SDN. And that means that we have systems in our body constantly talking to each other saying, What time is it right now? Is it my time to do my thing? Or is it my time to pull back and let another system shine. And when we sleep, we allow all these systems to shine and do consolidation of memories clean up, making sure that we can learn properly digest, it's actually a very active process. So it's not really us just powering down and being totally boring and useless for a third of our life. We're actually doing a lot of really important stuff for ourselves during that that period of time.

Zack Arnold

So what are at least a couple of those most important processes that if I'm not getting them, I'm noticing when I'm awake, so if I'm asleep, I don't get enough sleep or it's bad quality sleep, or I'm drinking before I go to bed, etc, etc. What is it? What are the processes that I'm missing that are going to affect me while I'm awake?

Dr. Azure Grant

It would be hard to name a process in your body that wasn't negatively impacted by sleep loss, but I think ones that are super salient Are you can think of it like taking the garbage out in your brain at night. So we have dilution of a lot of the channels in our brains that allow cleanup crews to come in. Pick up metabolic waste. and do what's called pruning of, of Neuronal Structures that aren't needed, do growth of ones that are needed, do memory consolidation. And all of that has to happen in a very particular order in order for it to work properly. So you can think of if, if there's a traffic backup on one of those roads, then the cleanup crew can't get in and do its job. And so when we sleep and have stable sleep cycles, so these are little sub, or ultradian, rhythms within a night of sleep, that we can only get really, really well structured when we sleep in an uninterrupted way, preferably at night. That's when we get that that cleanup crew doing its thing in the right order. And when we, you know, realize the next morning that we could actually remember what we learned before we went to bed and lose that feeling of grogginess,

Zack Arnold

I definitely want to get to ultradian rhythms in crazy, intense detail, but I'm gonna put a pin in it, because that's gonna be the star of the show. But I want to ease into it, because it might be the coolest concept of any what I would love, just like if you watch a great movie for the first time, and you can never watch it again for the first time, and you want to like erase your memory and experienced it again, that's kind of how I feel about my discovery of ultradian rhythms. I wish that I could go back to when I didn't know what the term was, and learn about and have that aha moment. And I'm hoping to get everybody on this call today, that same aha moment. But we're not quite there yet. So I want to go back to circadian rhythms. For most people circadian rhythm is a term that they've heard and they use it in the following context. Oh, yeah, no, I flew, I flew out east and came back west, and my circadian rhythms are all screwed up. That's kind of the extent of it. But I want to make sure that people really understand how these 24 hour clocks inside them are working. And it's not just about well, you know, it's, it's sunny, or it's not sunny. So why is it so important that I understand my circadian rhythm?

Dr. Azure Grant

Yeah, because your circadian rhythms a are necessary to maintain health across all of your life. There's something that when you disrupt them, it leads to poor metabolic, cardiovascular cognitive outcomes, on a very short period of time. And then if you if you chronically disrupt them, you're much more likely to develop all of those diseases. But on maybe a more intuitive level, it's something that you can schedule your life around to feel much better. So for instance, you can think of them as like waves on a calm ocean. So when we were growing up, maybe most of us kind of thought that we wanted to aim for stability in terms of a flat line. And that could be maybe our exercise performance is either staying steady or going up, or we were able to be highly focused and creative, all day long would be the goal. And we'd be drinking coffee and kind of like slapping ourselves awake in order to be able to do so. But that's really not how our bodies are wired. Because we have circadian are daily rhythms in pretty much every system, including our, our dopamine, or our motivation, our blood glucose, our cortisol stress and arousal hormone, our digestion, our serotonin, all of these things, we have to adopt this new framework where we can't expect ourselves to be aligned, we have to expect ourselves to be a wave every single day. And so the reason you should should care about circadian rhythms is if you don't, you'll be constantly fighting yourself trying to be a kind of creature that that doesn't really exist. And you don't need that added pressure. And it turns out that even though, by paying attention to your circadian and other biological rhythms, you might feel in the short time, like you're being less productive. In the long term, you'll actually be much healthier and do better creative work.

Zack Arnold

And I'm assuming this is why when somebody does fly, three, four or five, six hours across different time zones, or they decide to work a night shift, which is probably much more common thing, for anybody that's listening to this show specifically, they just changed that rhythm. Even if they're getting seven, eight hours asleep, they cannot figure out why they're just quote unquote, off like I just feel off. So I'm assuming that circadian rhythm Correct.

Dr. Azure Grant

Yeah, absolutely. And, and that when when you have a really abrupt change in the time that you're doing something, so if you switch from a day shift to a night shift, or you take a plane across the ocean, what's happening is that all of the different systems in your body so think your hormones, your metabolism, your cognition, they're all trying to catch up to the new timezone. Because what they're seeing in the outside world is, it's like at a different time, like my clocks must be wrong and I must be must reset them to the new time and food is available to different time I need to reset my stomach to a different time. But the issue is that those clocks can't all adjust to the new time at the same Right, so you end up with that Sen. That main clock in your brain that gets direct input from the light coming into your eyes making this fairly rapid adjustment. But all these other systems in your body that are a little farther away being kind of slow to get the message. And when those things are being slow to catch up to the new time zone, and they're all doing it a different rate, I think of it as if you have an orchestra, where all the players have suddenly gotten discombobulated from one another. Some are playing a little slower, some are playing a little faster, and all of a sudden, the song doesn't make sense.

Zack Arnold

I love that analogy. I was just in my mind trying to think what's the best analogy visually to explain this. And you nailed it, the fact that it would be an orchestra where essentially, each of them is in their own soundproof room, and they can't see the conductor. And they think they're all starting to play at the same time. But one started three seconds later, one started a minute later. And to them the part that they're playing sounds right. And somebody on the outside is like, what is this gibberish mess of noise. There's no consistency to it or rhythm whatsoever.

Dr. Azure Grant

Totally. I mean, you can imagine even like the conductor, like running around to each one of these rooms knocking on the door, or that each one of them is kind of like getting a call from him with the metronome. That's like playing at a slightly different rate, or there's like some static in the signal. And so they're all kind of trying, they've got a sense that something's wrong, and they're trying to listen, but But yeah, there's just there's no 100% Perfect way to synchronize everything immediately. I mean, people can generally catch up about an hour a day to a new timezone. But but anything more than that, and you're gonna feel it?

Zack Arnold

Well, it's good thing that caffeine fixes the rest of it that right, caffeine doesn't have any adverse effects. And it's the perfect fix for circadian rhythm problems.

Dr. Azure Grant

I bet you've talked about this a lot. Caffeine can be great in the right dose and the right timing like everything else. But because the half life of caffeine is pretty long. It's it's very variable based on individual and tolerance and, you know, time of day itself. But if you think of it as about eight hours, if you have a no, if I drink a cup of coffee right before this poor PM, my time call, I would definitely have have trouble falling asleep later tonight at 10, or 11. And that's because the caffeine is blocking those adenosine receptors that help you feel sleepy. And then you're more likely to do all these other activities that are going to keep you up as well like eating later or looking at Bright lights and all these things. So coffee is great. But I think everybody has to figure out their own shifting tolerance and timing that will allow them to fall asleep at the end of the day.

Zack Arnold

Yeah, the couple of things that I wanted to say about caffeine, you covered one already, which is the idea of the adenosine receptors. And the big aha moment for me for coffee was realizing that coffee doesn't make me feel more awake. It just doesn't let me know how sleepy I really am. That was a huge moment for me. Like I actually thought I had more energy. It's like, no, your brain is just tricking itself, it thinks it has more energy. You're just as sleepy and exhausted as you were before. You just kind of don't know what and I'm lying to you right now.

Dr. Azure Grant

Yeah. And you can kind of even feel it once you know that maybe some of the tiredness behind your behind your eyes goes away. Or maybe you feel like the jittery sense of alertness. But that that doesn't come with that sense of clarity of when you've really had proper rest.

Zack Arnold

Yeah, and the other thing that I discovered about myself similar to the knowing my genetic makeup, and the fact that I wasn't as efficient with my sleep, I also learned that I'm horrible at metabolizing caffeine, I metabolize it very slowly. So for example, I have a friend of mine that I do sport and training with and Ninja Warrior with, and he'll pound 300 milligrams of caffeine and an energy drink at 9pm and sleep like a baby. If I have one cup of coffee at 11am. I am up all night and like, Well, how could that be possible? And it's because I realized I just don't metabolize caffeine, and it's in my system for ever, which for me, I have to be very, very careful. Otherwise, I think I'm awake all the time. And then all of a sudden, I just massively crash. I'm like, oh, yeah, right, I'm actually exhausted. And I just didn't notice

Dr. Azure Grant

it that's so valuable to learn. Because especially when you know, you're more sensitive than maybe you're trained to think that you ought to be then you can have sleep problems for a long time and not identify the source and actually see this pretty often. Where people will, you know, be convinced by a coach that they should either really restrict their caffeine to the morning or massively cut back or even go cold turkey. And yeah, like those headaches hurt for a few days. Or it's it's such like a part of our ritual of feeling good about waking up that we really don't want to give it up but it helps a lot of people be able to fall asleep and you know, it's one of those surprisingly simple answers.

Zack Arnold

Yeah, another thing that I've noticed too, and we can maybe get into this a little bit later when we do I'm gonna basically try and steal myself a free coaching session at the end of this call. But you know, of course for the sake of helping you guys promote your services well One thing I've noticed is that if I drink coffee at all, that I still get a full night's sleep, but I wake up in the middle of it. If I don't drink coffee, I usually go the full night work without at least consciously waking up. If I drink the coffee, I consciously wake up for anywhere between 15 to 30 minutes. But if you were to look at the sleep rhythms on my oura ring, which again, we're going to get into later, you're not going to notice much difference. The difference is I know when I wake up when I have the coffee, I don't know when I wake up when I don't have the coffee. And I've never been able to figure that out. So I don't know if that's like a thing, or if that's I don't know,

Dr. Azure Grant

that's really interesting. Does your does your ring or you know, anyone else still tell you that you've woken up? Are you really sleeping all the way through the night without the coffee,

Zack Arnold

according to me, according to my own memories, I would wake up in the morning and say, Oh, I slept through the whole night. But then I'll see a very similar spike where it says I'm either awake, or I'm in light sleep, as opposed to REM or deep sleep and like, but I thought I slept through the whole night. So the map doesn't look that much different. But if I have coffee, I usually am conscious of the fact that I will woke up during the night. And sometimes it's as much as like an hour. Usually, it's only a few minutes. But I've just I've kind of noticed that it's very anecdotal. I don't have charts or graphs where I've mapped all that out. And maybe I should have, but just anecdotally, I've noticed that pattern.

Dr. Azure Grant

Gotcha. No, that's really interesting. I mean, maybe it's just bringing you that much closer to the threshold of week where you tend to get pushed over it and, and enough that you're awake, A and B have a memory of being awake, as opposed to maybe we're just tossing and turning a little more. And you know that that could have to do with a lot of things it could have to do with boosting your cortisol up just a little tiny bit, especially if you're really, really sensitive and then not getting that full crash at night. That would knock out harder.

Zack Arnold

Yeah, yeah. And cortisol is a whole other subject. And I've had my cortisol mapped and I had a doctor tell me at one point, they're like, You have no cortisol, when you wake up, it's like as close to zero as possible. And I'm like, is that I can't function when I wake up. Because everybody thinks cortisol is a bad thing. Oh, it's the stress hormone don't have cortisol, but you need it to function. And for me, my cortisol chart is almost the inverse of what it should be. So in the mornings, almost none in the evenings like I can, you know, do all kinds of crazy stuff. And that's when I find that I do my best exercise and my best creative work. But if you're trying to go with the rhythm of the rest of the world, that can be a little frustrating. Which actually brings me to the next topic of conversation, which is one that I have not talked about on the show yet, but I love talking about and reading about its Chrono types. Most people have no idea what a chrono type is. And I want to make sure this audience knows what a chrono type is, because there's so much stigma around being an early bird versus being a night owl. And I want to eliminate that stigma. So talk to me about what a chrono type is?

Dr. Azure Grant

Absolutely. Well, I think what you said actually means that people do have a little bit of a sense of what a chrono type is. So you know, most of us have heard of being a morning like the person who just wakes up in his chipper at 5am, my wife frustrating me, of the night owl, the person who, you know, is pretty ready to go at like 11pm to 3am maybe does a great work then. And then most people who fall somewhere in between. And chronotype is a really interesting idea, because it seems to be in part biologically driven, and then to also interact really strongly with what we're exposed to in our environment. So the kind of basic concept is that those clocks in our brain and in each of our cells, they don't run on exactly 24 hours on the mark. I mean, they're like squishy, like everything in biology. So they're approximate, but not perfect. And when people's clocks run a little bit faster than 24 hours, you can imagine they finish their cycle, and it's time to wake up and it's early. And so those people tend to be morning, people get up a little bit earlier. And the reason that they don't get up earlier and earlier every day like processing all the way around is because there are bodies listening to the cues from the outside world like sunlight. And so they they get a little bit more aligned every day. But they still have this early tendency. And then a night owl is the opposite, their clocks run a little bit longer than 24 hours. Meaning that every day when they get up, they're not quite done with that cycle. And they want to, you know, sleep a little more just to get it finished up. And so they're looking at the sun outside and adjusting kind of in the opposite direction. So that's like one of the biological bases and, and most of us probably have an intuitive sense of where we lie along that axis. But there are a couple other interesting added layers about Chronotypes that I think are really fun and salient. And one of them is that they they change really markedly across life. So you have kids, you probably woke it up earlier because of your kids. Kids tend to be more morning people. When you hit puberty, your clocks delay and tend to become more of a night owl that often Last into college, and then there's this stabilization of kind of gradually getting earlier very slowly across adulthood. And then after menopause and andropause, I think 50s 60s and beyond, people tend to become early again. So it's not something that's fully static. And then the last thing I would say about it is, there's an idea that one of the things that might make night people night people is not just that their clocks run a little longer than 24 hours, but also that they're a little bit more sensitive to light. So that means when a night owl sees a movie on a bright screen, is doing photo editing, like goes to a restaurant for a late dinner, they're going to be more kept up by that than a morning person would kind of like your your friend who was able to like pound 300 milligram caffeine drink in the evening, and then knock right out. They're not very sensitive, whereas you are more caffeine sensitive. So light sensitivity might also play a role in chronotype.

Zack Arnold

Yeah, and when it comes to light sensitivity, I feel like I'm a vampire at night, but not with sun or garlic. It's like with Oh, God get away at the television, the iPad, like I've had more than one discussion with my wife about just the phone in bed. No sensitivity to it whatsoever with her with me, I see the phone for three seconds, there goes my night asleep, right? It's like so I've been like the the geek with the right glasses and all the filters and done everything I possibly can to not eliminate but reduce my exposure to light in the evening. But my entire industry, my entire livelihood is looking at screens, I get paid very good money to look at screens all day and all evening long to create entertainment. So I can't avoid them. So you just have to learn to live with them. Right. But I've identified similar to caffeine, like we talked about light is something I'm very sensitive to. And I don't know if it's related or not. But whenever I go outside, and maybe again, it's just kind of the the joke of you know, the editor that never has windows. But when I go outside, a lot of times I need really dark sunglasses. Otherwise I literally get headaches. And I'm squinting. And I just I hate being out in bright light. And I'm super, super sensitive to it. And I didn't realize until now that might be connected to my chronotype.

Dr. Azure Grant

That's a super good insight. Yeah, I encourage other people to think about that, too. Because I've I've heard stories similar to this, I've experienced some similar things myself as well. But I think the light sensitivity is is totally real. And it's not normally a trait that we think about ourselves having. And I would be curious to know for you. But like one of the ways that this has been studied is take people camping. And it turns out, if you if you take even like a night owl out camping for a handful of days, you expose them to natural light and fire light, you know, phone off, then they actually pretty quickly adapt to waking up with the sun, going to bed after maybe an hour or two of fire light. And they do Okay, so it you know, does seem like there's this really strong effect of if you allow yourself to entrain to those natural stimuli, then you can be on that earlier schedule if you want. But the sensitivity to light is maybe a factor that wouldn't have come up so much before we had artificial lighting. And and now we really notice it.

Zack Arnold

Well, that's the perfect segue to my next question. And you answered it partially. And I want to go a little bit deeper into it, which is the use of the chrono type is a combination of biology and genetics, and environment. And a question I get all the time from the students in my program when they're having trouble sleeping, or they know that they're super productive at like 11pm to 3am. But they have kids or whatever it is. They say, How do I change my chronotype? I'm a night owl? How do I become an early bird? And I know that's probably one of the million dollar questions in your industry. Is it totally genetically wired? Or is there a way to slowly change it beyond just the gradual rhythm changes over the course of life?

Dr. Azure Grant

So I think this one is probably a little bit controversial. But I think most people would say, you can adapt to a chronotype that is different than your own. But unless you're going out and living completely with the with the natural cycle of the day and night and the seasons, which probably be optimal for everyone. And most of us can't do so unless you're doing that, you'll probably have slightly suboptimal to really suboptimal health. If you're trying to live on a prototype that's different than yours. What you can do is, is Wait, because it is going to change depending on how old you are. And you can try to do as much natural entrainment as you can. But I think this is one of those frustrating things where it would be really nice if we could change this about ourselves. But just as if you can build up that caffeine tolerance by having coffee on a regular basis, you're still going to experience some of those downsides of the fact that you have this natural sensitivity and it's it's really the same thing with Chrono type. So I think what I try to encourage as much as possible for people is to a like, except that it might never be perfect. And that's okay. And if you love what you're doing, and it's not at the complete optimal time for you, the fact that you get to do what you love doing probably outweighs the fact that you're messing with your rhythms a little bit. But as much as you can, it's good to find a compromise between being able to do what you love when you need to do it. And recognizing that if you organize that a little bit around, when your body naturally wants to do its thing, you'll, you'll probably be better across the board.

Zack Arnold

I love this idea of to get optimal health, we really need to balance ourselves with essentially the natural rhythms of the day in the season. So I think my policy going forwards is that essentially from late October until early spring, I'm just going to be done by four. And when my bosses say, Well, I'm gonna say, Well, what do you mean, why? Because that's when the sun sets. I'm sure they'll be okay with that, right, like modern society should have no problem with that new rhythm.

Dr. Azure Grant

How could they not be maybe someday, maybe in the, you know, maybe in the far north before it happens over here?

Zack Arnold

Yeah. So I when it comes to my own experiments with Chrono type, and trying to I don't know if it's the right term or not, and you can correct me if I'm wrong, but trying to like shift my own circadian rhythm, or Chrono type. So I'm a little bit closer to the morning side and the evening side just to function in society as both a parent and somebody that works for companies for a living, it's just not acceptable to say, hey, I really don't like to get up before 11. If you're a freelancer on your own, with no family, and you kind of do your own thing on your own time, that's totally fine. For me, I've never been able to develop a lifestyle whereby nobody's counting on me until that point, especially since I'm a dad. So that was when it really hit me like a ton of bricks. I've got to figure this out. Because until I had kids, I basically was useless all day. And then like clockwork, about 8pm, boom, my brain turned on, and I was editing like the like lightning until 12, or 1am. And I got an entire day's worked on it, like four or five hours, the rest of the day, it was naps, and it was email. And it was chit chat, like, because I just couldn't function to be creative. Then as soon as I had kids, that didn't work. And I had to start to figure out how do I shift these rhythms. So I'm not completely and totally useless in the mornings, which for the most part, I still am. And anybody that's listening to this has known me for a long time that thinks I'm lying. Ask my wife before 8am. Don't talk to me. Don't ask me questions. Don't ask my brain to process anything she's learned. If she asks like, we have a puppy now. So I have to wake up with a puppy when they leave. And she'll say, well, we need to do this today. Or can you do that or the other thing? And then when she gets home? Hey, did you these things? Do what now? She's like, Oh, yeah, I asked you to 615 and just doesn't even register. It's not even there at all. But I've gotten closer to the point where I can for the most part function with a level of energy that I have now by about 8am, which would have been impossible a decade ago. But the point being, that it was when I discovered even though I have a fairly limited of time where my brain is on. Once I discovered ultradian rhythms, I started to get way more out of my day. So now we get to the meat of the conversation. What the heck is an ultradian rhythm?

Dr. Azure Grant

It's something with a very strange name that that might use renaming at some point. It's basically a rhythm that happens multiple times within a day. And it's probably something that, you know, when I give you some examples, you'll go Oh, yeah, of course, I know that it's getting hungry a few times a day, I mean, breakfast, lunch, and dinner happened for a reason. That's a very common number of peaks to have within the day and blood glucose and insulin, triglycerides, even coupled with cortisol and motivation. So they're things that happen on several cycles per day. And while I think most of us think of these as totally volitional like, oh, you know, I got hungry because I needed food and I wanted something right, I wanted to get up and go have a walk, right, I wanted to work on this. They seem to also be controlled by clock systems, in some ways, similar to the circadian system. So this is something that's still being figured out. But there's some pretty good evidence that a part of the brain that's very close to the central clock, and the SCN is called the arc uit helps generate a lot of these ultradian within a day rhythms, the callback, pulse otile clock mechanism and there's also some work suggesting that one of the key motivational parts of our brain is making these ultradian dopamine rhythms every few hours and that those are talking to other brain regions and keeping them on and every few hour clock to and I mean it's it's pretty amazing so if you if you have the opportunity to measure something about yourself whether it's subjective so you keeping track of if you're a writer, like how many words you're typing per minute, all day long. When you feel your most energetic and like you're able to do good work, even when you feel hungry versus not or if you're if you're measuring something like your heart rate or heart rate variability, your temperature, your glucose, you'll see that it's not only that is one circadian wave where it goes up during part of the day and then smoothly down for the rest of it. You'll see us jaggy, and that jaggedness isn't just noise or randomness. It's very structured. It's these ultradian rhythms bouncing up and down every day. And so I'm wondering if one of the things that you learn to do when you learned about this concept was to find your ultradian peaks throughout the day of energy and then plan stuff that you need to get done around matching to those peaks?

Zack Arnold

Yeah, not only is it that, I mean, the key that I learned, and this was that huge aha moment, is that time management has nothing to do with managing time, it's about managing energy. And as soon as I heard that, that's when my entire world open. Because I don't have any more time in my day than you or anybody else listening or anyone else on the planet, it is the one equalizer. When there are so many other things that make us different, a lot of things that we cannot change, but we all have 24 hours. And most people that don't have Butler's and millions of dollars that actually have to work for a living and survive and support themselves and or their family. They've got about 12 ish hours per day where they're in work mode. And then they have 12 hours per day where they're trying to fit in family and life and other things, and hopefully, sleep as well, right. But I realized that once I turned time management into energy management, and I mapped my energy and my ultradian rhythms, that I could get way more out of those 12 hours than a lot of other people were getting out of those 12 hours. So that was the big aha moment for me. But the other thing that I realized, and you can correct me if I'm wrong, maybe this is anecdotal, and it's not scientific. But I found it was way easier to change and manipulate my ultradian rhythms versus my circadian rhythms.

Dr. Azure Grant

I think you're right. And this is actually something that's an active area of research. And what I think is super fascinating, because if we're kind of stuck with our circadian rhythms, we're kind of stuck with our Chrono type ultradian rhythms, maybe in part because they may be generated by this part of our brain that is, primarily our motivational sensor, when we're able to, you know, have some sense of control over when we feel motivated to do something different, we might be actually changing the phase of our ultradian rhythms. So phases, one of these things I thought you might say, which is basically your position along that curve going up and down throughout the day. But absolutely, I think they have, they have a little bit more intuitiveness to them, because we have a little bit more control over them. So I talked about the ones that in dopamine, but but cortisol is another great example of this. And like you said, it's not just cortisol, bad, we should drive it to zero. Cortisol isn't just a stress, bad response. It's also a stress, good response, or you can call it an arousal and a weakness hormone. And cortisol is is one of the key examples of these ultradian rhythms because it has giant spikes throughout the day. And they're they're healthy, they happen every couple of hours about, but they also vary from person to person. So if you want to be a person who maybe has five or six of these spikes throughout the day versus seven or eight, that might be something that you have a little bit of control over. It's actually a topic I would love to study. And I think there's needs to be a lot more work in this area. But there are some situations in which we know that the number of those peaks and valleys change in a very predictable way. And people can kind of learn to live in sync with that. And that has more to do with with obvious Satori cycles. But as far as how controllable they are, I don't know. I would. I would love to find out though.

Zack Arnold

Yeah, I mean, I would love to know scientifically if that's the case. But I know that for me, anecdotally, that I have found that with the changes in my schedule, whether I'm on a job, whether I'm off a job, whether I have clients, if I don't have clients, I'm able to relatively quickly kind of shift around my ultradian rhythm based on what I think is going to be the more productive way to organize my day. And I'll give you an example of that. I know that no matter how I organize ultradian rhythms before 8am I just don't put anything there like Sunday's it's until 7:58am I just can't function other days, it's seven o'clock, I can read for half an hour. Sometimes I Can Do light exercise, but I just assumed that is a wasteland. It just is what it is. And I just learned to accept it and work around it 8am comes there are different states that I can be in as far as my attention to my creativity. So in general, I'm usually on a zoom call and I'm teaching with my coaching and mentorship students from about 8am to 11am. But what I have found during like in between semesters and whatnot, is that when I have my students during the semester, I can't get any like deep creative work done because I'm on call so I can't be writing or whatever and all writers and productivity experts say eat your frog in the morning and do the most productive thing in the beginning of the day. And I don't buy any of that. I'm not saying they're wrong, but it's not for everybody. So what I find is that if I know I have client work from eight to 11 A 211 I'm talking to them, I may be checking some emails responding to Slack messages, then I give myself a break that I can convert to being in deep work focus creative mode in the afternoon, when I don't have clients in the morning, give or take maybe a week or two to transition, I can sit down and I can write 4000 words between 8am and 11am. And deep work, just by changing a few habits and triggers in my environment, where a circadian rhythm I've tried for years to get it to stick and I can't. And there's a quote that I always use. And I want to try and ascribe this quote creatively to the work that you do scientifically. And I'm sure you've heard it before. But I share this with all of my students. It's I only write when creativity strikes. But creativity happens to strike at 9am Every single morning, because it's become a habit. So talk to me a little bit more about the scientific side of all these things I've been experimenting with with ultradian rhythms.

Dr. Azure Grant

Yeah, I think you're really nicely describing the concept of entrainment, which is this idea that our bodies and our brains are prediction machines, what they do is learn what's happening in our environment and try to make structure out of it and try to learn if they can take something from the past and use it to predict accurately what's going to happen in the future. This is one of the reasons that biological clocks are so cool, is because so many different things can become what's called an in training cue. So if you're organizing your life to say, you want to be able to do something every day at 9am, you're probably putting different cues in your environment that help you get ready to feel in that state that you need to be in to do that work at 9am. And then have you heard the phrase zeitgeber before?

Zack Arnold

I have? Yes, if you were to ask me to describe it and define it on the spot, I would flail, but I've definitely heard the term. So remind me what it is and explain it.

Dr. Azure Grant

Sure. So it's, it's a, it's a timing cue. So zeitgeber is German for time giver. But these are accused that our biological clocks are a specially primed to listen into and talk about these is like light, food, movement, and social. So light, we already talked about this a little bit sunlight, goes through your eyes travels on the retinal hypothalamic tract and talks directly to that that central clock in your in your brain. Food, when you eat also is a really powerful cue to help set the phase of your circadian clock, but also set the phase of your ultradian rhythms throughout the day. Movement, when you get up and move around and do stuff is hugely impactful to the phase of your circadian and ultradian rhythms helps define them. And then social is just kind of a bucket that I put in for things that are very mentally engaging. And you know, one of the most engaging experiences we can have is talking to another person and really focusing on what they're saying and having a conversation. So zookeepers are these cues that we can almost like a toolkit use to organize and support our rhythms to be the way we want them to be. And to bolster them if they're, if they're a little bit out of whack. But one of the most amazing things is that it doesn't just have to be those four things that are time cues, if you do anything that you really like in a very consistent time of day, you might note that your body is able to anticipate it. So whether that's, you know, having a particular smell in your environment that tells you okay, where like work is coming now, or a particular song that you play. All of these things your body can learn to pay attention to you. And it will take timestamps that, that it will remember tomorrow at that same time,

Zack Arnold

yeah, what I've learned through all of my study, just anecdotally of myself, and reading all the books about habit formation, and everything else, it all comes down to we are all Pavlov's dog. We look like we're above the dog with the bell, we are all the dogs with the bell, you just need to figure out what the bells are. And it's funny, you brought this up, because I had no idea I was actually doing this consciously. But the two things that I play with the most, when I go between changes in my schedule that are long term where I'm on a job for six months or a year, then I'm off it. And I can totally rearrange my schedule, the two things that I shift are when I eat, and when I move. So for example, when I'm on a show, and I have to coach in the morning, I can't just say to them, Well, I'm going to start the job at 11. But my lunch break is at 1130 Because I've already been going for four hours. So I've had to train myself to not eat lunch until like 2pm. So I can get in a full morning just the way that everybody else is. And now I'm eating lunch at like 1130 or 12. But I always make sure that I'm changing when I eat and when I move meaning when I go out and take a walk or take the dog for a walk, for example, that changes and those cues are what like I said, get me to the point where I'm writing when creativity strikes, so to speak. So I had no idea I was actually doing the things I was supposed to but that's what I've been using for years to really shift my ultradian rhythms.

Dr. Azure Grant

That's so cool. I mean, I think this is where there's like a lot of hope in this is. I think people hear about biological rhythms for the first time and they think oh God, that sounds complicated. I don't want to deal with it. But it's really kind of just a framework in which to explain a lot of the things that we naturally do in our everyday lives. And then to help us use those tools a little bit more efficiently. I mean, the same analogy that we talked about earlier of your body as a symphony pertains to ultradian rhythms, you could just maybe think of, you know, the circadian rhythm as your quarter notes and the ultradian rhythms as your eighth and 16th notes of moving a bit faster. And, and the same kind of thing that can happen if you if you use your sight gamers as like the conductor of those faster rhythms, the more consistently you use them like a metronome, the more the players can keep in time on that particular schedule. And if you do want to tell them to slow down, well, you provide those cues on a on a slower schedule, or at different times of day, and then your body can say, Okay, we're gonna latch on to this new schedule, we can adapt around that.

Zack Arnold

Yeah, I love all that. The other thing that I want to bring up that's so important about ultradian rhythms, is accepting that I don't have to be, quote, unquote, on all the time, because in my mind, it was well, if I'm not actively editing or writing or doing something important, I'm wasting my time. And what I realized is that the brain just isn't capable of being on and being focused for every single waking hour of the day. And it allowed me to accept the downtimes and actually plan them. So an example would be mindlessly sitting in scrolling social media, if somebody had a camera in the upper corner of my office, and they saw me Mindlessly scrolling through Facebook and Instagram that said, What a hypocrite this guy's supposed to be Mr. Productivity and time management. But I can tell you, almost, I could almost set my clock to it, I'm going to be doing it right there about 2:30pm. Because I know at 230 I'm kinda sort of useless. So I would rather use that useless time to do somewhat useless activities that allow my brain to take a break. And then by three or 4pm, which is no coincidence that you and I are recording around 4pm I know the brain is gonna be back turned on. And again, it eliminates some of that guilt, or that remorse of like, Oh, I'm supposed to be productive, are always working are always in front of my desk, like, No, I just make sure that when I am in front of my desk, that I'm actually doing productive things at the right time of day that again, was like the huge aha moment for me.

Dr. Azure Grant

Yeah, I mean, that's great. I think the the idea that, like resting is productive, is a very silly sounding set of phrases. But I think a lot of people in like a very hard working culture need to hear it. I mean, I'm trying right now. And a lot of people I work with that struggle with the same thing are trying now to except that when you are on one of those down ultradian phases, or times of day, it's okay to like even go beyond doing some scrolling and like, go go sit down and do nothing for 20 minutes, like it's all right, or more longer, or, you know, right, doodle tidy, just go sit outside and stare at a tree like that, that is something that is a short term investment, that will probably make you more productive on the next cycle that you need to come in and really focus. And that that effort of trying to stay attached and just eke out a little bit more is preventing you from getting that mental sense of detachment that you need for, for later on again, when your body will naturally have another cortisol pulse and be more ready to go.

Zack Arnold

Exactly. Yeah, it's funny, you bring up the idea of staring into space, because I just had a conversation last week with my wife and my son, where he's like, Why does daddy stare out the window all the time? Right? And my wife is like, oh, boy, don't ask him. Here it comes. Here it comes. And I started well, how much do you understand about the brain's default network, my son and how creativity works. And he's 12. So he's just, I don't know, I don't know what that is, right. But I was trying to, to very clearly, but gently explained to him, just because I'm sitting here doing nothing on the couch, staring out into space, it doesn't mean I'm not doing anything. This is where I get my ideas. This is why when you're in the shower, or you're taking a walk, or you're boiling water, like Oh, my God, I saw this problem. That's why to me, rest can be so productive. But our culture does not like those ideas of, you know, rest and recovery and kind of doing these things. Because we got to be machines, we've got to be attached to our workstations all the time. But if you can really manage your day more towards your ultradian rhythm, as we've discussed now, and I hope at least given some people that insight, or that aha moment, that can really be the key to getting more out of your day without just totally exhausting yourself. But the next area that I want to go, which I think I hope is going to be one of the big questions people have is I didn't know any of this. How the heck do I start learning this about myself? And how would I track it? So now we get into this world of data gathering and tracking and wearables. And dear Lord, we could talk about this for hours and hours and hours. So let's talk a little bit more about tracking specific to sleep.

Dr. Azure Grant

Sounds good. I guess I would first say before getting into all of the devices and you know, the amount of money and time and complexity you can invest into this is I think self awareness is the ultimate goal of self track. Looking for me and they're kind of baby competing camps on this one says we want to use devices to offload the effort that it takes to be self aware and to have something else pay attention to my heart rate for me or something else to tell me how well I slept. So I don't really have to think about it. And other side of the aisle says, Actually, I want to use this as a tool to help me with my interoception. So that I have a better sense of what happened in my body objectively. And that maybe after a while, I won't even need this tool anymore, I'll just kind of have an accurate, intuitive sense of how I was feeling and an honest intuitive sense of how I was feeling. So I, it's not kind of obvious, I'm kind of biased towards the latter camp that says, when you want to start tracking something, or you have a sense that you want to learn something about yourself, the first step of the process is to try to come up with a question about what you want to learn, and a guess as to what the answer to that question might be. And it doesn't have to be a hypothesis with sub aims and something that you could, you know, submit to the science fair or write a paper about it can be something as simple as, why am I not sleeping? Well, and like, I think that I, you know, feel really, really awake at like two or 3am. And, and I'm not able to get to sleep. So I think writing out or even just mentally thinking about a few of those questions before you go and try to pick a kind of data to collect or pick a wearable to buy can be really helpful in setting up the relationship between you as like a thinking reasoning person, and this as a tool that's going to help you learn more about yourself.

Zack Arnold

But now, I gotta do work. Really. Like, I just want to buy three different wearables and I want it to tell me when to eat, I want to tell how much am I supposed to eat? What are my macros? How many hours should I be sleeping? How well did I sleep based on the exact number on the HRV? Should I be exercising at 730? Or 7:47am? I don't have time to think about all of this just do all the work for me.

Dr. Azure Grant

Yeah, I kind of wish the problem is that no one's good enough to tell you personal advice that will really work for you. I mean, there are plenty of things that you can buy that will tell you they can perfectly tell you what to do. And maybe they can give you some pretty good suggestions. But something that works pretty well, for the average of 1000s, or millions of users or nights of sleep often tends to have a pretty high error rate when it comes to how well it mapped you on a given night. And so I don't think we're at the point yet where, you know, people always like make the memes about the robots aren't quite ready to take over the world, but it's totally true. So I think reframing this idea of, of learning about yourself as work, and seeing it more as like, you know, could be an art, I mean, I see these things as like art projects, or curiosities or, or opportunities to make your life better. I think that's like the the first part is people think about a science project. And they think, Oh, this is going to be hard. But it really doesn't have to be that way. And pretty much every part of the process be that selecting a wearable watching the data role in thinking about what it means. Even if you're not coming to one direct answer and one, aha, okay, this is what I need to do now, you'll be in the background becoming smarter and more aware and gaining insights almost subconsciously. So there are ways to, you know, be as active in that process and learn more if you want to, but, but it doesn't have to be scary.

Zack Arnold

All right. Well, I love all that we're clearly on the same page, I was playing a little bit of the devil's advocate. But essentially, to sum up, tell me if I'm wrong. Step one, is to start asking yourself these questions about your behaviors. And the best tracker to start with is a pen and a piece of paper.

Dr. Azure Grant

Yeah. Or just sitting in, you know, using one of those times when you're staring out the window and not thinking about much to to lightly ponder this question. And you can like lightly ponder a question for for a long time before you stumble upon or think of a tool that you want to help you collect the type of information that will help you address that question. This is something that I really love about. I don't know if you've heard of the quantified self movement or so yes, yeah. So, Gary Wolf, I was like, lucky enough to get to go and work for Qs right after I graduated college for a while, and they have, I think, excellent philosophies. They call it personal science and to basically applying the scientific method to one's everyday life, in a very kind of low stress. High reflection doesn't require you to be a data master, but is very, you know, accurate and able to lead to good personal insights. So, you know, all the stuff that I'm saying now is learned with them.

Zack Arnold

Well, I only wish that I discovered you and All of that eight years ago, because I got sucked into the hurricane that was the wearables, and had the Fitbit and was doing all the tracking with My Fitness Pal and scanning all the barcodes and everything else. And what I realized, realizing very much right now during this call, actually, but also realized back then as well, is that I wasn't using the data, the data was using me. And I wasn't really developing awareness, I was just gathering all this information. And one of the times that I realized that I probably was going down the wrong path. And I was also going down the wrong path with multiple other people is that we had set this competition, where we were all going to compete to get the most steps during the day because Fitbit had these leaderboards, right. And the average we're all trying to get was around 10,000 or more, because that's what they say we're supposed to get. And there were multiple stories in our group of people that would be like at 500 or 9000 steps right before bed. And they're just right in front of their bed doing this. And I'm just like, how stupid were we, we thought the 10,000 steps was healthy, not knowing we were completely screwing up our sleep rhythms because we were being really active right before midnight, right before bed, because we had to hit that number. So the data was using us and not the other way around. I only wish I had learned this sooner.

Dr. Azure Grant

I mean, I think that's really easy. And I do that across different types of life, too. I mean, this is part of the whole phones are very captivating thing. But I'll sit on the couch with like a friend both doing Duolingo when the other one speaks pretty well, the language that we're doing Duolingo in and we would probably learn language more efficiently if we would just sit there and try to talk to each other. But it's very motivating to play the game and to you know, win the diamond League and all of that. But I think the thing that you get at, which is the data using you. And then also this idea of tracking fatigue of, oh, I'm putting all this effort in to track these numbers, but I don't really know why I'm doing it. Not really sure what to do with this information. And it's I feel like I've put in a lot of effort to get this. So you know, what am I even doing? I think that's part of the reason that starting out with a question. And then knowing exactly why you're using this tool in this way, can can, you know, prevent that, that cycle from happening? Because if you know, for instance, let's like use your coffee example that I think like caffeine is negatively impacting my sleep, and I feel like I'm waking up, I'm going to use my aura ring to see, you know, for how long am I staying awake in the middle of the night? Versus when I don't drink caffeine, you know, does that? Am I only getting into light sleep rather than waking up at that middle of the night point? I think having those the more specific question, kind of the more quickly, you can get to a yes or no answer. And the less likely you're to get sucked in to one of these cycles that ends up with you being tired and not quite sure what you learned.

Zack Arnold

Yeah, I agree with that, for sure. And when it comes to tracking, I do have an oura ring, I swear by the oura ring, I have an entire podcast episode with Chuck Hazard, who's one of the people at or we talked about it extensively what heart rate variability is we're not going to go into any of that. But just to summarize, I think it's so important that you're using your intuition first. And you want to see if the data supports the intuition, not the other way around. And that's now for the most part, the way that I use the aura ring where it's like, well, I wake up, I just kind of feel like crap today, which by the way, is almost every day, but it's different levels of crap with the way that I wake up. And I've been trying to fix this literally for two decades. And I've just come to accept this as my circadian rhythm. And I'm going to work with the ultradian rhythms. But there are some times that I wake up and like, I don't know, I'm just not feeling it today, your readiness score is 97. And your HRV is 90. I'm like, Shit, I got no excuse, I should probably go out and do the workout or do whatever. But then there are other days where my HRV is like 43. I'm like, okay, good. It's not just me, there's definitely something going on. So talk to me a little bit more about how we can use something like the aura ring very much to our advantage without kind of getting sucked into the trap that we already talked about.

Dr. Azure Grant

Yeah, I think when it's nice to you, using that as an opportunity to be nice to yourself is awesome. But I would say for the most part, it's not just aura, but with many wearables in general, the scores aren't yet great for most people. So don't necessarily rely on the scores. I recommend that people scroll down in the app, and that they look at the actual trace of the time series data. For the aura data in particular, I think looking and seeing, you know, was my heart rate relatively low compared to my average was my HRV. Pretty high. Did I see nice, clear sleep cycles and that and that, hopefully, roughly, you know, seven to nine hour trace of heart rate and heart rate variability throughout the night. Those are the kinds of things that I would use that sleep tracker to look for. But I think I think how you use it really depends on the question that you have about yourself and your background knowledge. So one, kind of the fun thing to do is to Run personal experiments and compare particular days. So even something as simple as, you know, how much did my sleep duration or my time to fall asleep? Those are things that the these wearables can measure pretty accurately, how much did that change, based on the bedtime routine that I chose to do, either, you know, taking a walk before bed or not sitting down to read for a bit. First, I think those kinds of simple interventions are things that these wearables are really good at helping us with. And if you really need it, you can you can go and work with a coach as well and have someone kind of walk you through the data a little bit more. But But I do think a lot of the bang for your buck with, with the sleep wearables, in particular, kind of the patterns that you notice slowly over time, that you kind of subconsciously process with the with the questions that you had.

Zack Arnold

Yeah, and I'm very glad you brought up the idea about the score, because I wasn't gonna say anything, but I do feel like it's kind of misleading. I don't remember what it was exactly, just for today. But I looked at the I looked at the data every morning, it's just become a regular habit. And I've always really upset when I forget to charge my ring, by the way, just because I'm a completionist. When I have that gap, like one every 37 days, like, I want the full data, you know, so working on that OCD level of wanting all the data, but I kind of, you know, take the score with a grain of salt. But like you said, that I think the two numbers that I look at the most, at least as far as general overall readiness or health are my resting heart rate overnight and my HRV. And what I noticed is that as I started to exercise more, and I do a lot of very intense exercise, because I went from no real exercise at all wasn't athletic and decided I'm going to train for American Ninja Warrior. So what I noticed was that over time, my resting heart rate has gone down considerably. And I always know if I've either overtrained or I'm sick or there's something wrong. If my resting heart rate didn't drop to a certain number. I'm like, ooh, something's going on. So I can't always intuit that, oh, you know what, my resting heart rate must have been high. But I can use that as data that I feel is fairly accurate to tell me whether or not Am I actually really rested? Or should I, you know, so like, one of the a couple of the things I've learned is that number one, my sleep is very adversely affected by late night exercise. And when you train with a bunch of 25 year olds, that all have massive add, and are all night owls are like, Hey, let's go training at like 10 o'clock at night. And I don't do it a lot. But I've done it a couple of times. And it just completely destroys me. Like I'm just getting too old for this. But I have the ring to back it up. So it's not just my intuition. The ring was like, Yeah, you shouldn't have done that. And I also learned that when I eat too heavy, too close to bed, it just messes up everything.

Dr. Azure Grant

Yeah, okay, so both of those things, these are awesome uses of the ring, by the way. So A, you're getting that feedback that kind of maybe confirms your intuition, but lets you pay attention to it a little bit longer. But B, you're seeing one of these really cool patterns that reflects your, your ultradian rhythms and messing up your circadian rhythm. So when you eat close to bed, as well as when you exercise close to bed, that's giving you either a big bolus of cortisol lert, this hormone preventing you from going to sleep, probably keeping your heart rate up over the first half of the night, and then kind of fallen off a cliff as you go down. And then for separate reasons, when you eat a big bowl of food, you have to digest that food, and you got to digest it when you went to sleep. And that means that instead of having these nice 90 minute cycles of about the same amplitude throughout the night, of your body's getting a massive wave of blood glucose, you know, driving up your triggers like driving up your your lactate. And that's also going to keep your heart rate up, make you have a harder time falling into deep sleep and kind of set the rest of the night up for for not so good. But there's one more thing you mentioned, which was like keeping the data gap free when you can. And although it does kind of speak to like our OCD. And maybe that's not great. It is really valuable, I think in the long term, because I don't know how long you've, you've had different wearables, but sometimes you go back and you look at two years ago. And you can say either well, like I'm demonstrably fitter than I was then and I'm sleeping better. And I, I believe my sense of improvement, or you say, man, it looks like I'm having a really hard year this year. It's like, I should really think about that because things were better a couple years ago. And I think those are the kinds of senses that you know, unless you're a really chronic journaler or you get bloodwork crazy, often you would just, you know maybe only have vaguely on your head of like, oh yeah, this was a hard year, that was an easier year. But when you can, when you can see it in the data, I think, at least hopefully it can allow a person to like face that reality a little bit sooner, and say, Oh, wow, this is a bad thing. I really want to make a change.

Zack Arnold

Yeah. And I think it ultimately brings up this idea that it really isn't about the data for any given day. It's all about trends and patterns. So I'm always thinking to myself, not that I eat perfectly today. It's how have I been eating over the last month like is the trend Am I getting better? Or is the trends that I've gotten worse as opposed to oh, I had this one bad meal or had this one bad night asleep? How am I Feeling and sleeping and eating and moving in a general trend versus this one little snapshot in time.

Dr. Azure Grant

I'm so glad you said that. Because it makes me think of there's this CGM company called Levels that basically takes continuous glucose data and makes it available to people who don't have diabetes. But I really feel like this company and I love them, I've had to do some work with them that they should be called patterns instead. Because what you're really Yeah, the the level of your glucose matters if it's if it's way high, you know, you need to pay attention. If it's way low, it's probably a sensor error. But but maybe you should eat a snack but, but what you're really paying attention to when you use a continuous glucose monitor, is the pattern of how high Am I spiking? When I ate a meal compared to my last meal? How long is that spike taking. And you're responding directly to this to this changing pattern by say, going and taking a walk to prevent your spike from getting too high. And those kinds of patterns, whether they're short, like the ones that describe like little ultradian meals within the day, or whether they're looking at your long term metabolic or sleep trends. Yeah, I think that's the, that's the main thing that you can get out of wearables.

Zack Arnold

Well, speaking of patterns, there's one other area that I want to dig into a little bit more. And my guess is you spent entire semesters if not years, studying this one concept, and there are people that probably dedicate their entire life to it. And I'm gonna ask you to summarize it in about three minutes. But it's this idea that we're not just awake, or we're not just asleep, while we are asleep. We have ultradian rhythms. And whenever somebody gets an aura ring on my recommendation, they always ask me the same thing two weeks later. So what is REM sleep and deep sleep and light sleep? And how many hours am I supposed to get every night? How in the world you answer that succinctly because it's so complex,

Dr. Azure Grant

I would say, don't worry so much about the exact number of hours and each one of these things you get per night, because you can't turn them independently, I'd say focus instead on something a little bit easier, which is to try to get a solid, long window of sleep at about the same time each day in a relatively distraction free environment, and then these things will probably take care of themselves. So yes, we we want to have an adequate amount of deep sleep, we want to have it that adequate amount of REM sleep. And we know that deep sleep tends to happen a little bit proportionally more towards the beginning of the night, the opposite for REM. But the fact is that sleep comes in cycles, like you said, where you transition through these different stages. And so you can't just conk out and say I missed REM sleep last night, I'm going to only sleep REM sleep and try really hard now it's it's more productive to say I want to focus on getting a good quality night of sleep knowing then that I will be allowing these cycles to progress through all these stages and the way that they're supposed to. And they'll sort out for themselves what I what I needed. So I that's probably a little bit in the realm of Grandma's advice. But I would tell people worry more about the whole night of sleep, don't worry so much about each one of these components. But you know, maybe if you do want to tune your REM sleep, let yourself sleep in a little bit later in the day, if you want to get more deep sleep, help you get yourself to bed a little bit earlier.

Zack Arnold

Alright, so for all those that want to go with grandma's advice, nailed it. Now you're going to have those annoying questioners like me that still want to go deeper. So if I've never heard of these concepts before, what are these different types of sleep? And why do I even need to care?

Dr. Azure Grant

Yeah, so people often and this isn't a this is completely accurate. But it's like a decent analogy talks about deep sleep as sleep for the body. And they talk about REM sleep asleep to the brain. In fact, both are for both. But but it's a decent breakdown. So the reason that you I think if you're a creative person, like one of the most motivating reasons to get sleep, is to allow yourself to do that cognitive taking out the trash, like we talked about earlier in the podcast, but also to consolidate things that you were thinking about consolidate new learnings. So there are different parts of for instance, during slow wave sleep, you have these events called sharp wave ripples. They're they're really cool. They're little fast, spiky events during which your brain actually seems to be replaying things that it experienced during the day, in order even going so far as to like release little bits of blood sugar when like remembering going through an activity. And it's, it's analogous to, you know, being a musician, practicing playing a passage over and over again, are practicing drawing the same shape over and over again. So when you're when you're in deep sleep and allowing your brain to get through many cycles of these sharp wave ripples, it's literally giving it practice to actively learn and remember something that it went through during the day. And then during REM sleep, we'll always hear about this as something where we're more likely to experience and remember dreams but it's also a place where a lot of learning takes place and consolidation of memory. So this is I think super important for our brains. And then as far as deep sleep in the body, we're also doing that cleaning out the trash, in terms of our muscles and our digestive system, and really all of our tissues, were going through and doing repair processes, as opposed to try to take in new inputs and, and use those body parts to do their functions and build up metabolic wastes. So I think when we wake up in the morning, that we see that we're looking a little bit haggard, or puffy, or, and then we get, you know, maybe nine hours of sleep on a very lucky night, and we feel like we looked five years or 10 years younger. That's possible 10. But anyways, at least a few. Part of the reason for that is because we literally let those cleanup crews go all around our body and, and repair our tissues during the night. So that was a little bit longer than three minutes.

Zack Arnold

All right, why wasn't timing you don't worry about that. That was exactly what I was looking for. Not too deep down the rabbit hole, but just enough to make me interested in want to go a little bit deeper if I want to start looking into the nuances all which is great. So I assumed until a certain point that once I got to I've got my aura ring, I've got all this data, I've got all these trackers, this is the best that I can do. Right. So I have a member of my team wrote an article recently where they referenced me and they called me sleeps number one hype man using her words, not mine, because I've been talking about sleep from the rooftops for years and years and years. But just because I talk about and promote it and how important it is it doesn't mean I've totally got it figured out. So I've got your ring, I've been looking at the data. I've been reading the books, I've been doing the podcasts, I've done all the genetic research, sleep still eludes me. And I didn't know until literally scheduling this podcast, there are something called a sleep coach. So this is your time for shameless self promotion to explain to me what a sleep coach is because you were talking to a potential client.

Dr. Azure Grant

Okay, cool. So I guess first full disclosure, I am not a sleep coach I'm I'm a researcher, but I work with a lot of really talented sleep coaches at Crescent. So Crescent is this service that I love, and I'm doing some research with them, and helped me build some new features. And basically, they take all the wearable data, whether it, whether it's from your oura ring, or a whoop or a Garmin in the future continuous glucose and a bunch of other things. And then they pair you up with a person who is probably an ex fitness trainer, Yoga Instructor nutritionist who's decided to go back and get a bunch of extra education and training in sleep physiology in particular. Who I mean, it's kind of like having a therapist for your sleep, it's someone who goes and looks at you looks at your data has, you know, uh, you know, empathetic and intelligent conversations with you and helps you identify where potential places for improvement in your sleep, what are some specific interventions that you can try helps you through them helps you a keep track of how you're feeling differently and pay more attention there. But But B looks at your data and helps you interpret was this really having the intended effect? And what can you do next? So I think they're, they're quite cool and very competent, both in terms of knowing the science and and having that human touch that we don't normally get when we you know, get a score from our wearable that may or may not match our experience, and may or may not be accurate. So that that's Crescent in a nutshell. And I guess the other thing that I would say about them is when you talked about mapping your energy throughout the day, I got pretty excited when you said that, because that's like one thing that we've been working on building are ways for people to more easily track how they're feeling throughout the day subjectively, as well as see based on research and based on that individual's past experiences, how an intervention is going to impact that energy curve for the rest of the day. So if you think about if you were to draw a picture of how you would feel throughout the day, maybe plates two or three mountain peaks and and two or three different valleys, working on building interfaces that let you see when those are and how you know, a cup of coffee is going to maybe give you a spike of energy now take you later and shift you a little bit later. In a way that's a little more intuitive.

Zack Arnold

Yeah, well, if you're looking for a hamster and you want to put the hamster in the maze, right here, hand up, because I've tried a couple of other apps that were in beta that were trying to map ultradian rhythms that were very clunky, they didn't work well. But essentially, I just want to wear a ring. And I want it to tell me what my ultradian rhythms are. So I don't have to do all the work because you want to have a challenge. Try getting a creative person with ADD to manually map in journal, their energy or their thoughts throughout the day consistently. There's a challenge for you. But this is something that I really would love is to go to that next level both with ultradian rhythms. I'm very, very interested in once where we go kind of offline, I'm gonna ask you very politely if you'll connect me with somebody at levels, because I've been very interested in continuous glucose monitoring, and would love to bring that idea to the show and just learn more about it myself. But also just really kind of emphasizing the importance of I love how you put it, a therapist for your sleep. Because I've used the term, I'm a therapist for your creative career and use a therapist for sleep. And it just makes total sense because it took me years to figure out what is it that I'm actually doing, I'm not, I'm kind of a career coach, but not really, because there's a lot of emotional stuff and mindset stuff. But therapist for a creative career makes sense. And a therapist for sleep that totally clicked. So I'm, I'm very much looking into if that's something that would make sense for me, as long as I have the bandwidth and the time commitment, because I've prioritized sleep, and I've done all the things. But I feel like I'm still not getting the results. And I need that outside perspective.

Dr. Azure Grant

Oh, I think it would be really neat to learn from you as well, especially with your background in ultradian rhythms. And I think you hit the nail on the head with this idea of, you know, it would be awesome if we could get people to like click several times a day and track how they're feeling. But like almost no one is going to do that. And the challenge for you know, what makes it hard to do that using the data is that most companies will not share their time series data all day long, or is one of them, they collect your temperature every single minute and could make the world's best ultradian rhythm tracker. But they're not going to share that information with anyone outside the company, and they're not going to build it into their product, or at least they are yet Garmin might be able to do it with their heart rate, they have a nice continuous heart rate trace. But I don't believe they put that on their API. And there's a lot of kind of IP related, like constraints that these companies have around wanting to share their time series data. But I think that's really the most valuable thing that they could provide, is that all day long information to people. And that's what you could really use to make like the smartest ultradian rhythm tracker ever. You can start with activity because no one cares about sharing your stuff data. And it's a pretty good reflection of your ultradian rhythms. But you know, that would be the next level.

Zack Arnold

Well, if you're looking for that next level hamster and the one because I've always wanted a way to properly track my ultradian rhythm and have a map so I can more accurately plan out my day and my week, I've been looking everywhere for it just have not found the tool that I like yet. So I'm all about it.

Dr. Azure Grant

Cool. Well, if you're up for trying out one that, you know is in beta and is being actively revised, definitely come try it. And I think the combination of you know, either that next device that allows access to 24 hour heart rate and temperature or the combination of activity and glucose for now can make it pretty good.

Zack Arnold

Awesome. Well, I'm all about it. And because we've been speaking so much about time and efficiency, I want to be very respectful of your time when we've come to the point at which we're supposed to be finished. But I want to leave with one last final quick thing, if I'm coming to as a totally burned out, sleep deprived, creative parent otherwise, and I just have no idea how to get a hold on this. What's the smallest thing that I start with?

Dr. Azure Grant

I would say it's not a small thing. But be nice to yourself first, know that you're probably doing more than most of the humans in history have had to deal with at the same time and you're trying to push yourself really hard. And then on top of that, probably have a conversation. If you live with someone else, or have a family, have a conversation with them about the issue and acknowledge that sleep is something that you want to work on. And that you feel like it needs to be a priority. Because often if we're we're so tired, we know it's a thing, but we're really trying to push it out of our minds. Telling someone else about it can be like the first step towards saying okay, you know, maybe what we're going to try to do is we're going to try to go to bed an hour earlier every night this week, even if it messes up the rest of our routine. So yeah, those are the hopefully that would would help at least somebody feel a little bit less stressed and talk to someone about it.

Zack Arnold

Well, I know that we are cut from the same cloth because somebody that spent years tracking data and wearables and everything else the one piece of advice you give to somebody is be nice to yourself. I love it absolutely love it could not say it better myself. And I can't thank you enough for being on the show with me today. You actually came through to me through recommendation kind of a sort of cold submission. And I am a ruthless when it comes to people that want to be on this podcast. A lot of people will take anybody that sends him an email. I probably get five emails a day from people that want to be in a podcast that have their pitch. Nope, nope, nope, delete, delete, delete, delete. And then yours came along. And I was like, oh, let's look into it. This seems like it could be a good fit. I can't even imagine if for some reason I had not had you on the show because dear Lord, I love this conversation. I want to stay in touch with you. I want to learn more about this stuff. And I'm very appreciative of you sharing your knowledge and your expertise here today. So thank you.

Dr. Azure Grant

Wow, thank you so much. I mean, I'm I'm really happy to be here. I'm like, quite new to doing podcasts. And I certainly I mean, I knew you were like a creative professional and I knew you helped people with with sleep and time management, but I had no idea that you had Whole ultradian rhythms connection and that you had like personally figured out so much of the background science

Zack Arnold

figuring out I haven't figured anything out yet I figured nothing out. I'm actively figuring out a lot of things.

Dr. Azure Grant

Oh, I think you have to give yourself more credit than that. You figured out a lot of things and you have plenty more to figure out like,

Zack Arnold

that's a that's a good way to put it. I like that. So if anybody wants to find you or find Crescent or anything else, that they're totally excited about all this stuff. Where's the first place I should send them?

Dr. Azure Grant

So I'd say if you want to find Crescent, they have a website crescent.co. We also have Crescent on Twitter. Me personally, my website's azuregrant.com. I have an Instagram called scoopmescience that's mostly rhythms and metabolism and hormone

Zack Arnold

really drawings by the way. So really good drawings and cartoons of which I understand you draw yourself.

Dr. Azure Grant

Ah, yeah, it's just for just for fun. I just started it, but, but you can find me there. Feel free to get in touch. I love talking about this stuff. And it makes me really happy to learn how many people like outside the general scientific community are getting really interested in actually using this information. So yeah, thank you again. It was really nice to meet you and stay in touch.

Transcribed by https://otter.ai