Meal timing can help lower resting heart rate before sleep

Transcript

Transcribed by machine (Whisper) from the episode’s audio, so a word may be off here and there.

1. 1:43:34

   Bryan, if you were to, without someone having to completely decimate their entire diet and never look at meat again. What would you say is sort of top triaged lifestyle changes most people should look at making based on what it is that you guys have looked at? Yeah, I mean, the power laws are so clear. Sleep is like by far and away the biggest power law. Then exercise, number two, diet, number three. And so it's just being consistent on those three things. And then once you get those two...

2. 1:44:00

   Those three layers, you can go down other layers. But what we've tried to do is we've tried to say anything which increases my speed of aging is a form of dye. So how do you eliminate that? And then we just started with the power laws. I start with zero all the way down and just, yep. Top three things for sleep? So the thing you want to do is you want to lower, so the key marker is lowering your resting heart rate before bed.

3. 1:44:22

   That is the number, I'd say if you could mark, if you could optimize one marker in your entire life, it's that. So before you go to bed tonight, look at a wearable. or take your pulse, it's your resting heart rate. So tonight, let's just say you're at 55. So your goal of the next week or two is to try to get down to 50. The next month, 45. And as you do that, so the way you drive it down is you have your final meal of the day at least two hours before bedtime.

4. 1:44:44

   So if you go to bed at 10, be done at eight, and then push it back an hour. You're like, hey, it's like 30 minutes each day. And as you push it back every day, your heart rate's gonna go down incrementally because your body has more time to digest. So then you also find that food you eat, Like if you eat a big pasta or pizza or something, it will jack up the heart rate. So mine right now is 44 beats per minute.

5. 1:45:05

   So if I eat late in the day, if my last meal of the day is at noon, and I did that after like a few hundred experiments of like what optimizes my resting heart rate. If I have a big meal like a five or six, I'll be up like low fifties. And that will take away about 30 to 40% of my sleep. So you go to sleep super hungry. Actually, I'm okay. Yeah, my body's really adapted. So food is really a big one.

6. 1:45:24

   And then two is wind-down routine. So you need to calm yourself down. You can't have your phone up. You need to turn it off. Give yourself like 30 to 60 minutes. Decompress in the day. Leave your kids in the house and go sleep in the garage. Yeah. No, no. One shower. That could help. And actually a book in hand has probably the best evidence. Yeah. So it's what Chris was saying, right? It's like you can't do anything.

7. 1:45:47

   So screen off, book in hand, spend even 10 minutes, and you'll be amazed at how much it'll calm you down. Yeah. There's some cool stuff around. people thought it was the blue light from screens that were impacting melatonin release and cortisol and stuff as you went to sleep. It seems like it's much more what you're interacting with on the phone, that you're so engaged, that dopamine's firing, you're probably getting riled up about you sending stuff to friends. It's triggering all of these ideas in you. As opposed to if you just sit down and read Red Rising or something by Pierce Brown and you go off to sleep dreaming about being a space man. And you can measure it by how much your heart rate goes up or down.

8. 1:46:20

   You now have a quantitative benchmark every single day if you could peg those habits. uh regularity versus duration what's more important uh consistency is so important