ep. 67 - Dr. James Maas: The Nation's Top Sleep Educator And Award-Winning Professor
Bio
Dr. James Maas is a world famous sleep educator that gives a dynamic program with incredible take-away value, which constantly receives standing ovations. The information provided with audience interaction will increase daytime alertness, psychological mood, productivity, creativity, athletic prowess, general health and longevity.
Transcript
ep. 67 - Dr. James Maas: The Nation's Top Sleep Educator And Award-Winning Professor
Gail Davis: Okay. Dr. James Maas is a leading authority and international consultant on sleep and performance. He served as presidential fellow, professor, and past chairman of psychology at Cornell University, and profession [00:01:00] at the Wild Cornell Medical College in Qatar. He holds the world's record for university teaching, having taught more than 65,000 students in his 48 years on the Cornell faculty. Dr. Maas has held a full broad senior professorship to Sweden, a visiting professorship at Stanford, and is the recipient of the American Psychological Association's distinguished teaching award for being the nation's outstanding educator. Dr. Maas [00:01:30] is one of the world's most sought after speakers for educational institutions, corporations, and athletic franchises. He has presenting highly acclaimed programs for such organizations as IBM, Apple, Google, JPMorgan Chase, National Medical Associations, the NFL, the NBA, and NHL teams. He has also served as sleep doctor for the 2014 Canadian Olympic gold medalist men's hockey team. Dr. Maas's [00:02:00] book, Power Sleep, is a New York Times best seller and published in 12 languages. Sleep for Success, is his book designed for executives and others wishing to know how to be alert and energetic all day. His latest book, Sleep to Win, shows athletes how to improve their performance overnight. Dr. Maas appears frequently on national television programs such as: The Today Show, Fox News, CNN, The View, and ABC's 20/20. Oprah devoted [00:02:30] an entire hour to Dr. Maas and his research on sleep. We're thrilled to have joining us today: Dr. Maas. Welcome. Kyle Davis: Hey, how are you? Dr. James Maas: Thank you. You know, when I hear marvelous introductions like that- of course, that was written by my mother and read beautifully by Gail. But I'm reminded of a story. I'm kind of an egomaniac, I guess, when my [inaudible 00:02:55] does well, and listening to such [00:03:00] a lovely introduction, and I'm reminded that not too long ago my then seven year old son, Dan, came to me and he said, "Daddy, why do they call you doctor? You don't give shots." So, Dan is a bright kid and I sat him down and I told him what it takes to get a PHD. You have to study five, six, seven years. You have to discover [00:03:30] something that has never been published in the scientific literature in the history of the world, yada yada yada. And I thought he had the concept down perfectly. The next morning we're having breakfast, the phone rings, Danny goes to get it, somebodies asking to speak to Dr. Maas, and without missing a beat Danny said, "Well, I'll let you talk to him, but he's not the type of doctor who could do you any good." [00:04:00] So, for the last 40 years I've been trying to do people some good by telling them to get some sleep. Gail Davis: That's awesome, there's nothing like an offspring to keep you humble, right? Dr. James Maas: Absolutely. Kyle Davis: I mean, that's our role in life. So, what took you to go into the direction of sleep and performance and ... I mean, now it's all the rage today; but how ... Decades I guess ago, [00:04:30] what led you to that study, that field? Dr. James Maas: I was teaching an introductory psychology course at Cornell and my first year, which was 1964, there were about 250 students; but I had done a lot of work at Kodak on media, and the class became very popular. Within two years we had 2000 kids in the class in the concert hall three times a week. [00:05:00] And I wanted to tell them about life and psychology and how taking the course would add value to their education. And I thought they should be sleeping a third of their life; but college kids, I soon found out, while they need nine and a quarter hours of sleep every night to be fully alert all day long, were averaging 6.1. That's more than a three hour deficit every single night. And I thought [00:05:30] maybe I better talk about sleep deprivation, the need for sleep. So I went out to Stanford to have an experience of recording Dr. William Dement, the grandfather of modern day research, capturing a dream. It was Thanksgiving night and he got a graduate student to come into the lab and hooked them up with 14 electrodes, put them to bed, and then [00:06:00] Dr. Dement and I went into the control/observation room to see if we could capture a dream. Now this was about one in the morning when we started and I was [inaudible 00:06:12] and very exhausted, and Bill had too much turkey and he was rather exhausted; but we sat in the control room watching the polygraph pens record his graduate student sleep, and it was very soporific, and both of [00:06:30] us were falling asleep. But all of the sudden, 90 minutes after sleep onset, the pens went crazy, and we went into the bedroom, me with my motion picture camera, and Bill asked his graduate student, "Steve, what was just going through your mind when we woke you up?" And Steve said, "I was having a dream." Kyle Davis: Mm-hmm (affirmative). Dr. James Maas: Bill said, "What was it about?" He said, "A baseball game." And he started to [00:07:00] talk about the baseball game. I was so fascinated by watching this one episode, that I said to myself by the time morning came, "I'm going to spend the rest of my professional life studying sleep." And that's exactly what I did. I was just trying to make a short film for my class, because sleep is a soporific topic, and I'm talking to very tired kids. So I wanted to [00:07:30] jazz it up a bit by showing a film and that one night changed my life, and I hope hundreds of thousands of other people's lives, that I've told about sleep, forever. Gail Davis: You know, I've had the pleasure of being in your audience, and one of the stories that has always stuck with me, and really resonated, is when you were asked to consult with the Olympic athlete, and your first piece of advice was that she skip the morning [00:08:00] workout. Dr. James Maas: Yeah ... Gail Davis: Talk about that. Dr. James Maas: Okay, we have a small summer home in northern Michigan, and in the summer time, now about eight or nine years ago, I was giving a lecture, and a young lady came up to me, and she was just a rising high school [00:08:30] girl, and she said, "In your lecture you talked about measuring the night's sleep, how good the quality was, and the quantity. And would you give me one of those sleep gadgets?" And I said, "Yes." And I said, "Why are you asking?" She said, "Well, you talked about a young girl who was my age that you helped, and I'm going out for track and cross country, and I wanna be just like her." [00:09:00] And so that's the story you're referring to, is when a former student of mine, who was captain of the hockey team when he was an undergraduate came to me, and said, "Professor, we have a 15 year old daughter who wants to be an Olympic figure skater, and she has the finest teacher in North America, she has the finest sports psychologist in the world, but she's not getting any better and she's frustrated [00:09:30] because it's such a time commitment. Now, we're not pushy parents; but we think she has what it takes to realize her dream of being an Olympic figure skater. Would you talk to her?" And I said, "John, I'd be glad to." And I met this charming 15 year old girl and I said, "What's your schedule like?" She said, "Well, like all competitive figure skaters, I get up at four in the morning, I'm at the rink at 4:30, we do two hours [00:10:00] of skating, and then I have some breakfast, I go to school, 4:00 in the afternoon I'm back at the rink for another two hours, then I come home, grab a bite to eat, do a little studying, and I crash." I said, "How many hours of sleep are you getting?" And she said, "I don't know." And we counted and it was barely five and a half hours. I said, "You are never going to be able to do the jumps, and the spins, and [00:10:30] turns that you want, unless you get more sleep." She says, "But I can't get more sleep and still be a candidate for the Olympic team." I said, "Look, this is what you should do: don't give up. I'd love you to read my book," at the time was called Power Sleep. "Follow all of the strategies in there. Just go to afternoon practice and believe me, you will see almost immediate improvement. [00:11:00] But what you have to do, by skipping that morning practice, is to spend the time sleeping, because you need nine and a quarter hours of sleep to do jumps, spins, and turns that you aspire to do." And she got hysterical, she broke down crying. And I looked at her dad, I said, "John, what did I say?" He said, "The first day she doesn't show up at Olympic trials, [00:11:30] she will be the laughingstock of the world, if she's just coming in the afternoon session." I said, "Look, she's gonna quit anyway, what difference does it make?" And she stopped crying and she said, "Okay, I'll try it. But why do I have to have so much sleep?" I said, "There's something that goes on in your brain, after six and a half to seven hours of sleep, that puts together all of the things that you have to think about [00:12:00] if you're going to do, for example, a triple turn, which has never been done by a woman in Olympic history, and it into automatic motor muscle memory. There's a cascade of calcium in your brain that you can't take in pill form, that does its work only after seven hours of sleep, and you're barely getting five and a half. But if you do what I'm telling you to do, you, almost over night, will [00:12:30] improve your skating, your figure skating." And she said, "Well, I'll try it." I said, "Read the book, keep a log." And she said, "Well I don't wanna read your book, but both my parents were your students at Cornell, they're gonna make me read it. So yeah, okay, I'll read it." Well, she said, "I'll try this whole thing for a month. I'll try your suggestions. I'll skip morning practice." They banished her from the practice to the dark [00:13:00] end of the skating rink when she did show up in the afternoon. They weren't interested in her at all. But she and her coach worked very hard, and they did that for one month, and then the coach called her dad and said, "I don't know what's happened to your daughter, but she's doing jumps, and spins, and turns that she could never do before. We're gonna keep this up." And they kept it up for the next four months. And then it became time [00:13:30] for the Salt Lake City Winter Olympics, and somebody got injured on the American team, and they used this young lady kind of to just fill a place on the team. She went to the Olympics and she took the gold medal. Her name is Sarah Hughes and she became world famous, because she did three triple jumps, which had never been done before in Olympic [00:14:00] history. And this little girl in Northern Michigan had heard this story in that lecture and she said, "I wanna do the same thing." Well, she went out for track and cross country her freshman year, the coach said, "You're too small. You're too young. You can go to practice, but you're not gonna be able to contribute anything for at least a year." Well, getting nine and a quarter hours of sleep, this little girl, freshman in high school, broke five all time school records [00:14:30] in cross country and track. Sophomore year she became the fastest runner in the 3200 meter race in the history of the state of Michigan. And now she's at Michigan State University and I believe it won't be long before she's on the Olympic track team. Kyle Davis: So, one that's an awesome story. Gail Davis: Very inspiring. Kyle Davis: I mean, I have like some commentary, but I mean [00:15:00] ... This is true for like a lot of college athletes. So, I played college football way back in 2006 for the other Cornell- Dr. James Maas: Oh. Kyle Davis: In Iowa. Yeah. Dr. James Maas: Yeah. Kyle Davis: So I went from having a pretty regimented, big time high school ... It was basically a college program from 9th grade to 12th grade. And then, when I went into college, the regimented schedule was still there, but it had to change [00:15:30] because we had to allow for when the dinning hall was open, we couldn't have practice then because we needed to eat. We had to be in the classroom for certain times. So then they change, instead of having an athletic period, you have to have your full day, in addition to also having football. So I remember going to being in the gym for weightlifting, Monday through Friday at 5:45 in the morning, which meant I had to wake up at 5:00 in the morning just to shake the cobwebs out, and then being able to go in [00:16:00] there. So, don't even just include the fact that I was sick for that entire first semester with tonsillitis, that I had a lot of concussions that I don't really- that scare the heck out of me now. But then I wasn't even getting enough sleep and it just ... I mean, I was still better than everybody, but- Gail Davis: Kyle. Kyle Davis: But you can feel the wear and tear, kind of on your body by just not even getting enough sleep. But then fast forward to where I ended up graduating from school, a couple years later, which was Columbia University, and ... I pulled [00:16:30] up a study. But now because they have all these wearables, like the Fitbit and Jawbone, and the Apple Watch, what they found out was that Columbia University students, aside from service academies, get the least amount of sleep, they go to bed the latest, it's at 1:30 a.m., and they only get six and a half hours of sleep. And I can't tell you how many times my mom's heard me say, "I pulled another all nighter. I stayed in the library till 3:00 in the morning and I woke up at 8:00." Which meant I had to be home and asleep by 4:00. So I only got four [00:17:00] hours of sleep. And it took me, after graduation, I would say almost a year just to equalize and get all my bearings kind of back together with all of the sleep deprivation that I had accumulated over a three year period. Dr. James Maas: Well, in every case where we've had coaches call off morning practice, swimmers have improved their times, basketball players have improved their [00:17:30] percentage of three pointers; it's just miracle according to these coaches, but to us it makes perfect sense. Kids not only won't win as much, if they don't get adequate sleep; but their academics, and we have several studies about this, go right down without adequate sleep. So, [crosstalk 00:17:54] you are not doing anybody in school any favors by doing two-a-days. [00:18:00] My favorite [inaudible 00:18:01] is I addressed all the coaches at University of Michigan a couple years ago and, the night before, the director of athletes I had dinner with said, "There's gonna be one guy who, hearing your lecture tomorrow morning, is gonna charge up to the podium and say, 'I don't believe a word of this'. And, let me tell you, he has won more NCA championship [00:18:30] swimming meets than anybody in the history of the sport, and he's not about to change. They do two-a-day's." And I said, "Okay, but I'm gonna show some ephemerized functional magnetic residence images of the brains of people on six hours of sleep where nothing is going on, and we'll see what he has to say. But thanks for the warning." I gave the speech, the first guy up at the podium, charging the podium with his assistant coach in hand, [00:19:00] is the varsity swim coach. And the director of athletics nudges me and says, "Okay, here he comes." Came up to me, he didn't look at me, he looked at his assistant, and said, "Starting tomorrow morning, the University of Michigan swim team will no longer have morning practice." Kyle Davis: Wow. Dr. James Maas: [inaudible 00:19:23] Gail Davis: You know, in these cases of college students and athletes, it's obviously, based [00:19:30] on the schedule, that they are sleep deprived. How does just your normal everyday person, how do they know if they're sleep deprived? Dr. James Maas: Well, that's a great question Gail and I've got a quiz. Let me go through it real quickly. Answer yes or no. Does a warm room, a boring meeting, a heavy meal, or a lose dose of alcohol make you drowsy? Number two, do you fall asleep within five [00:20:00] minutes of getting into bed? Number three, do you need and alarm clock to wake up? Number four, do you hit the snooze bar repeatedly? Number five, do you sleep extra hours on the weekends? Answer yes to any two or more of those questions and consider yourself pathologically sleep deprived. Rarely, when I talk to people at corporations or students, does anybody pass that test. 71% of the North American [00:20:30] population are moderately to severely sleep deprived. They're not getting the recommended seven to nine and a quarter hours of sleep that is really required to be energetic and alert all day long. It's almost everybody, it's ubiquitous, and ... So then we have to start talking about: what are you doing to yourself? They say, "Well, I'm so busy. I have a job, [00:21:00] I have family responsibilities, I'd like to play a little golf." So where do we cheat? We cheat on our sleep. But the consequences, the deleterious consequences of sleep deprivation are really very important. The number one thing is: sleep deprivation lowers your immunity. So you have a higher risk of heart attack and strokes, type two diabetes, cancer, [00:21:30] obesity, Alzheimer disease, serious depression. You name it and sleep deprivation is a primary cause. So you're drowsy during the day, you might have a microsleep behind the wheel of a car, God forbid, you lose your sense of humor, you don't like teamwork, your motor skill suffers, and you have significantly decreased cognitive performance. You have a reduced [00:22:00] ability to process information, to concentrate, to remember, to speak well, to write well, to be creative, to think critically. You make stupid decisions and you lower your life expectancy. The best predictor we have of how long you're gonna live is not nutrition, which is important, it's not exercise, which is important, but it's the quantity and quality of [00:22:30] your sleep. So you have reduced health, and reduced performance. Kyle Davis: Mm-hmm (affirmative). Gail Davis: You mentioned something that- I think I know what it is, but I'd love for you to elaborate. When you said you could have a microsleep behind the wheel of a car. Is it what I think? You literally are just exhausted and you fall asleep while driving? Dr. James Maas: Yes. You are driving down the road, you think, "Gee, I'm doing something important: I'm driving." And all of a sudden, you hear the rumble strips, and then [00:23:00] you're in a farm field. Gail Davis: Yeah. Dr. James Maas: Hopefully and not meeting and oncoming car. Kyle Davis: Yeah, for my understanding, like in Germany, that's why the Autobahn has really ... Not long straightaways, like we have on the US highway system, but instead they have these really long kind of bends, so that way you stay awake. Dr. James Maas: Hopefully. Kyle Davis: Yeah. Well, when I'm bombing down the Autobahn doing 140. You mentioned something, and I think this [00:23:30] is really really important for a lot of people to understand; but the difference between the quantity of sleep, the number of hours you get, and also the quality of your sleep. And the only reason I mention this is: one, I'm a 29 year old male who, on paper, was getting a couple ... Almost a year ago, was getting like seven, eight, nine hours of sleep some nights. But, look at my sleep study and everything else, it was really bad. Come to find out I have sleep apnea, now I'm feeling [00:24:00] a thousand times better, just because I'm getting much more qualitative sleep than I ever have before. So, I'm wondering if you could speak to both of those? Dr. James Maas: Yeah, Kyle that's an excellent point. Quality is as important as quantity. I'd rather have you get six hours of quality sleep, than eight hours of disruptive sleep. But both, both are really essential. So we have to learn, though sleep strategy, [00:24:30] how to get a high quality sleep. And, incidentally, you know we're crazy about data. You mentioned the UpBit, you mentioned the Fit, these are instruments that purport to measure quality and quantity of sleep. They're very good at measuring heart rate. They're very good at measuring running and steps during the day. They are pure junk when it comes [00:25:00] to measuring sleep. Kyle Davis: Mm-hmm (affirmative). Dr. James Maas: Because they assume that if you're moving, you're awake, and if you're not moving your arm or your hand, that you're asleep. Nothing could be further from the truth. Very often you move quite a bit in your sleep and very often you don't move at all when you're awake. So, just forget those instruments. There are some very good measures out there now and some better ones coming onto [00:25:30] the market. But you can't believe the Up and the Fitbit and anything that measures wrist movement. Kyle Davis: Yeah, I mean cause ... I mean, I like Fitbit, but like you said. But I only use it for performance tracking, like how fast I can run a mile in, or [crosstalk 00:25:47] what's my resting heart rate doing today? But when [crosstalk 00:25:50] it came to- yeah, but when it came to sleep analysis, the difference between what my Fitbit was reporting versus what a legitimate sleep study [00:26:00] reported were vastly different. I mean I was getting on- Dr. James Maas: Absolutely. Kyle Davis: Yeah and my Fitbit was telling me, "Hey, you're getting eight hours of sleep." Because maybe I have one or two movements during the night, whatever. Meanwhile, my sleep study was telling me, "Hey, your heart pretty much stops here, then it goes to 180 beats a minute, because you can't breathe, and then you're freaking out, and then [inaudible 00:26:22]" and I was only getting like and hour and a half of sleep. Like [crosstalk 00:26:26] even though my eyes were shut for eight hours. Dr. James Maas: Yeah, I think that's [00:26:30] right and as they say, there are better measures out there. One pretty good one, it's not a wearable, although it still tracks movement; but it also does respirations, snoring, heart rate, and that information is put into an algorithm that tells you the quantity and quality of your sleep, 100% would be ... [inaudible 00:26:55] asleep during your entire time in bed, we like to see at least 85%. [00:27:00] Most people average about 60 or 65% ... Is a ultra thin strip called a Beddit 3, it was developed by people in Finland, and about a month ago Apple bought the entire company, because they see just how good it is. And that will tell you, without you turning anything on or off. When you get in bed, it senses that you're in bed [00:27:30] and you sync this little thin adhesive strip up with your iPhone, and it will tell you the time it took you to fall asleep, home many times you were up during the night, whether you realize it or not, how your breathing was, the amount of dreaming, REM sleep, that you had, the time you woke up. And it's absolutely accurate. It correlates very highly [00:28:00] with the 14 electrode array that we might use if you went to a sleep clinic. One other finding I just wanna mention, when you talked about your college experience Kyle, is that very recently, about three months ago, University of Pennsylvania medical researchers found that lost sleep actually kills the neurons in your brain in the hippocampus; which is where a lot of knowledge [00:28:30] resides, short term memory, before it transfers to long term memory. And that the brain can be irreversibly injured from sleep loss. A lot of people say, "Well, I'm up late all week long, but I'll make up for it on the weekends." You can't make up for neurons that have been killed. They don't come back and so we thought that, before a couple months ago, that well, maybe some of those memories aren't permanently [00:29:00] vanished. But the truth is, they're lost. Just like the ads on TV show that, if you're on drugs, it can fry your brain. If you lose sleep, it'll fry your brain. Kyle Davis: So, my question for you then, kind of the follow up ... I mean, obviously I've paid to have the sleep- well, I didn't pay, my insurance company did. But, hey I paid to get a sleep study, I now have an amazing bed, I have my awesome CPAP machine, which is awesome for dating as a 29 year old. But could you talk about [00:29:30] what the importance of good sleep hygiene, sleep strategies, you know, just different things that people can do just to improve their overall quality and quantity of sleep that they get? Dr. James Maas: Absolutely. That- when your mom sends me out on the road to give speeches, this is where the takeaway value is, and I spend more and more time of my allotted minutes these days talking about sleep [00:30:00] tips. And we're right now writing another book, this one very very concise, as to here's your manual for getting a great night's sleep. So, number one is determine your requirement and meet that every night. Sleep requirement is not adaptable. It's something that's genetically transferred to you. If both of your parents were short sleepers, you might be one of the lucky 2 or 3% in the country [00:30:30] who can get by on six or six and a half hours of sleep. How much sleep you need it determined largely by your genetics, but also by being regular. You have to go to bed at the same time every night and wake up at the same time every morning Monday through Monday, including the weekends. You have one biological [00:31:00] clock, not one for the work week and one for the weekends. And most people don't do that. So they put themselves into a constant state of jet lag every week. How much sleep you need, how do you find out what that is? Well, you start keeping track of how you feel in the morning after X hours of sleep. And most people, as a rule of thumb, are at least one hour in deficit. [00:31:30] So, add one more hour to your sleep and see if that improves your alertness all day long without any huge midday dip. And if you're still not wide awake and energetic all day long, add another 15 minutes until the point comes when sleep is definitely something that makes you feel like a tiger. And you can tell when you've reached that point by dropping back 15 or 20 minutes and see if you feel a little bit less [00:32:00] energetic. And you want to try to get one continuous block of sleep, not a long long nap in the afternoon, not a nap in the easy chair after a heavy meal at dinner; but one solid block of sleep every night when you go to bed. And it's not unusual, in fact it's typical, that you will wake up a couple of times during the night. People think, "Gee, I'm not a good sleeper because [00:32:30] I do wake up." As long as when you wake up, you can get back to sleep within 20 minutes, that's fine. More than and we have to address the problem of insomnia, but here's some really quick tips that everybody should use. Your bedroom must be quiet, dark, and cool: about 65 to 68 degrees. You should not have any caffeine, even decaffeinated drinks, which [00:33:00] have plenty of caffeine, after two in the afternoon. No alcohol within three hours of bedtime. Get plenty of exercise, both mental and physical. Take a hot bath just before you go to sleep, or a hot shower, to raise your body temperature, so when you get in bed that temperature will plummet, putting you into deep sleep quicker. If you're a type-a personality, have a worry time before you turn off the lights. Just [00:33:30] jot down all the things that are on your mind that you're worried about, that you have to tend to tomorrow. By putting them on the nightstand, you won't wake up in the middle of the night festering about that, cause you can't do anything about it in the middle of the night anyway. If you toss and turn in bed for more than 20 minutes, get out of bed, keep the lights low, do some non-work related reading until you feel tired again, which you will feel quicker than if you had just stayed [00:34:00] in bed. Pleasurable sex before sleep can lead to a very good night's sleep, unless you're worried about performance, and then you can have a very bad night's sleep. During the day I coined the term power nap about, well, 42 years ago now. And I defined a power nap as something that doesn't last more than 15 or 20 minutes, enough to get you through that midday dip in alertness, but nothing so much as to cause [00:34:30] nocturnal insomnia or to cause grogginess when you wake up. If you nap for an hour, you're gonna wake up in the middle probably of a REM period, you'll be disoriented, you should not operate heavy machinery, or do work that is gonna change somebody's financial portfolio, or sign a contract with the wrong number of zeros. And we want you to avoid sleeping pills. There's [00:35:00] much much better ways to cope with insomnia than use sleeping pills. Every one of them on the market is dangerous. It can cause suicidal depression, it can cause cancer, it can cause heart attacks and strokes, it can cause accidents cause you're groggy throughout the day- Kyle Davis: [crosstalk 00:35:21] Sleepwalking. Dr. James Maas: Sleepwalking is something else, which usually- Kyle Davis: No I was talking about one of the pills that helps you [00:35:30] sleep, also contributes to sleepwalking. [crosstalk 00:35:33] out of their refrigerator at night. Dr. James Maas: Yeah, well there are other reasons for sleepwalking, sleeptalking, but yes, sometimes it can lead to that. There are 89 differentially diagnosable sleep disorders. Most physicians can name five. Kyle Davis: Mm-hmm (affirmative). Dr. James Maas: There are 89. You might say, "What's the 89th?" It's sleeptexting. Kyle Davis: [00:36:00] Sleeptext? Dr. James Maas: Some people overnight will send texts, which begin in plain English, but wind up, within two or three sentences, random typing. Gibberish. And yet they have complete amnesia for that during the day. Kyle Davis: So, one of the big things out in Silicon Valley is sleep hacking. You have all of these founders [00:36:30] of companies who are just trying to burn the midnight oil as much as they can, cause they feel the most productive at night. And they do this ... and I don't know what the method is called. I'm sure you kind of know, but what it is is they work for like six hours, and they do like an hour power sleep, and then that's just how they operate. It's like four hours on, one hour off. And what you mentioned earlier is you can't do that. So why do people think that's effective and [00:37:00] why is one longer chunk just so much better than these weird sleeping tricks that people try to do to themselves? Dr. James Maas: Well, you know, four on four off is what the service, mainly the Navy, used to do. They're smarter than that now. Some people are owls, some people are larks, some people are much more productive at night than in the morning, and you can change that. It's not that easy to do, but we change [00:37:30] that for people who need it changed. By using a gadget we call a Litebook, which is the size of an iPhone, which has daylight spectrum LED lamps in it, and by exposing yourself, when we tell you to, to various times during the day or the night, we can make a morning person a night person and a night person a morning person. So, if you want to change, it is possible, and it is the best [00:38:00] cure for jet lag. I can expose myself to this portable daylight spectrum light on the plane, when I'm going between New York and London, and by the time I get to London, after one or two brief exposures, I'm on London time. It usually takes one hour ... Pardon me, one day for every time zone you cross, to adjust to where you land. [00:38:30] So typically it might take you six days, if you cross six timezones, to go to Europe from the United States, to really feel good again. But, through judicious use of these Litebooks, we can get you changed as much as an 11 hour time difference; not in 11 days, but in 48 hours. And we did so with the Canadian men's hockey time in the Sochi Olympics. They had [00:39:00] only 48 hours between the time the NHL schedule broke for the Olympic recess and their first game in Russia. So, by using the Litebooks before they left on the plane and when they were in Sochi, they were able to adapt in 48 hours and they came back with 36 gold medals. Kyle Davis: [crosstalk 00:39:23] Dr. James Maas: The American team was also outfitted for these [00:39:30] Litebooks, and when they got to Sochi they felt that they were on Sochi time. So they won the first game, but then they violated our request of using this throughout the ten days in the Olympics, and they just said, "Well, we're acclimated now. We won't use it anymore." And they lost every game thereafter. And we had the Dolphins and the Jets playing each other in an exhibition game two years ago [00:40:00] in London, and the Dolphins- I'm the sleep doctor for both of those teams. And the Dolphins said, "Nah. You know, we're used to traveling. We're not gonna bother with the Litebooks." And the Jets, we outfitted every player with a Litebook, and in the first half, every time the Jets got the ball they scored. And the broadcaster said, "The Dolphins look like a bunch of junior high school kids wandering around on the field in a daze." And it's exactly what happened. Gail Davis: This [00:40:30] has been such great information, with such great takeaway. I really appreciate your time today. I remember the very first time we talked I was so excited to make the connection with you that I had been to Ithaca and that my uncle Herb Finch, had worked at Cornell. And I remembered that you knew Herb. What I may not have told you afterwards is I emailed my cousin, who also went to Cornell, Phillip Finch, and he was like, "I know Dr. Maas, that was my absolute favorite class [00:41:00] that I took at Cornell." So, your influence [crosstalk 00:41:03] and your impact has gone throughout generations and I know everyone that's listened to this today will walk away with better appreciation for sleep, and some really great techniques for improving their sleep. So I really really appreciate the time. Dr. James Maas: Well thank you for the opportunity. I really appreciate it. Kyle Davis: Well thank you and, just for those listening, if you want to book Dr. James Maas, you can do so by contacting GDA Speakers [00:41:30] at 214-420-1999 or going to GDASpeakers.com. To read the transcript, you can do so by going to GDAPodcast.com. Other than that- Gail Davis: Sleep well. Kyle Davis: Sleep well. And thank you Dr. Maas. Gail Davis: Thank you. Dr. James Maas: Sweet dreams.