SNM267 Sleep Your Way to the Top with Riley Jarvis

Jonathan Green: Sleep your way to the top with special guest Riley Jarvis on today's episode. Today's episode is brought to you by Pro Writing Aid. Every word I write needs to be perfect. 1 typo in an email, and I get dozens of replies pointing it out and saying, thought you're an author. That's why I trust ProWritingAid. I have every plugin and feature they offer to check my blog post. And when a writing offline, no other tool even comes close.

Score a lifetime license at sir of mass dot com forward slash pro writing aid. Announcer : If you want to make it online, fire your boss and start living your retirement dreams now. Then you've come to the right place. Welcome to Serve No Master podcast where you'll learn how to open new revenue streams and make money while you sleep. Presented live from a tropical island in the South Pacific by best selling author Jonathan Green. Now here's your host.

Jonathan Green: Now this is a topic near and dear to my heart because a lot of entrepreneurs think of the way to the top is to sacrifice sleep. Like, the less you sleep, the more you make. And I know when I started out, marathon sessions working long nights ,going to bed at dawn, waking up at 2PM in the afternoon, and doing it all over again. And I just couldn't do it for much longer. I just got sicker and sicker.

So I'd love to know for you, How did you start becoming passionate about sleep? Where did your journey begin? Riley Jarvis: Yeah. It's a really good question. So mine all started it's us winning warriors going through our own journey who ultimately ended up becoming health coaches sometimes. And for me, it was no different. I started out about 10 years ago working in the finance industry, working just sometimes 12 day to hour workdays. Like, it was pretty rigorous.

It was a doggy dog world, and you had to be on your a game mentally and physically. But not too long was forced to quit my job just because I couldn't keep up anymore. I went to the doctor and was diagnosed with Crohn's disease as an autoimmune condition for anyone that doesn't know. It was at that point that the side effects on the medication they were giving me, Rick, actually making me feel worse. So kinda have my back against the wall.

I had to take health into my own hands. And so I would try diet 1 month. I would try exercise 1 But when I got to that sleep month, that's when everything started to change for me, and my blood marker started to improve suddenly. I started to have more energy. The brain fog went away, and all these things started to go up and up. As well as all these other things started to happen. But, yeah, I was at that point.

It worked for me for sleep, so I started to help other people as well with their sleep. But through the lens of peak performance and other things. So 7 years later, I am where I am today, just helping more entrepreneurs and different people around the world now. Jonathan Green: Yeah. It's always been interesting to me because we don't take sleep seriously until something goes wrong. You know? And there's people that have to take sleeping pills, and there's people that have night terrors or sleepwalking.

There's so many things that can happen in your sleep that really can make a huge difference. And I know for me, right, there was certainly a point in micro where I was tired all the time, and I couldn't figure out. And sometimes, I've experienced where you sleep too much, like, often there's, like, that's associated with depression and, like, you're oversleeping. So what is the right approach? Let's start at the very beginning. What's the right approach to take when you're thinking about dealing with your sleep?

Because there are so many apps that you put on the bed to measure, like, how well you're sleeping, and it can then all you do is think about the evidence. Like, when I'm getting my blood pressure taken, if I start thinking about it, my blood pressure goes higher, I don't want a high score. Crazy high score. So you can self sabotage. Right? And how should someone start to approach sleep. And is it the same amount of time for everyone?

Because some people are like, oh, I only need far as asleep at night, and I don't know if that's true or not. Riley Jarvis: Yep. Very good question. So the best answer is to make it as easy and simple as possible. And the reason is because you're right. Like, we're just inundated at today's age with so much information, so much technology, so many things going on. That we overcomplicate and we actually fall off the bandwagon.

I mean, number 1, at the end of the day, is consistency. If we can keep it simple to the point where we can be consistent with it. That is the most important thing. If we throw in odds complexity where we just get overwhelmed and then we fall off with no duty anymore and then just go back to old habits, that's what we don't want. So make it work for you. And your the second part is for sleep. How much do we actually need?

Because Here, those people, we have a friend who only sleeps 2, 3 hours a night, and he just never gets tired, drinks coffee, gets on with it. That's only about 1 percent of the population. Some people are genetically hardwired for that. But for the majority of us, we need about 7 to 9 hours of sleep every single night. Now everybody is unique genetically, and it's not just a cookie cutter. Okay. Go to bed at this time. Wake up at this time.

There's something known as your chronotype, and it's there's also your sleep animal sign. And what that means is your genetics are more programmed for you to be a morning person or more programmed for you to be a nighttime person. And so if you can follow a schedule that's adapted to that, then you'll be in the best place. 30 percent of people are morning creek people, 70 percent are nighttime people.

And so if you can have your work schedule or or wherever that work however it goes, work with that. Instead of against that, you work with your biology and stuff against your biology. It'll reward you in ways you can't imagine. Jonathan Green: That's really interesting to me. Now can you change over time? Because I was, like, a massive night owl in my twenties. Like, partying all the time, staying up late all the time, working at nights.

And now, which I never thought it would be, I get up at 6 in the morning, work out, and do a lot during the day. So I wonder, is it possible to change, or is it that I was always wrong about my sleep type? It's a really good question. So with your genetics, you are genetically hardwired.

Riley Jarvis: What your genetics are, you know, from the if you did a genetic test when you're 2 months old or when you're 9 years old, you would still get get those same results. But there's a part of your genetics called epigenetics, and it's how your genes express themselves. And it's you can think of epi, I think, in Greek or it was Latin for on top of. So you can change it based on what your environment is. And so I think there's 2 parts to it.

There is a part where you are genetically hardwired to be a certain type, but your environment can change things, but only so much. And so what I like to do with clients sometimes sometimes, to run a genetic test on them when we see, are they a nighttime person, or are they a morning person? And it's amazing. Like, I'll see you in real time.

They always swear they're a nighttime person, and they've been following that they go to bed late, but their genetic test shows their morning lark. And as a result of that, what happens is we change their schedule just shipped it back just a couple hours. And now all of a sudden, we see that their schedule their productivity just shoots to the roof. Their performance shoots to the roof, like, 50 percent sometimes over a couple weeks. Because we have that match now.

And sometimes we will swear by it just because they've been doing it for so long. But sometimes you don't know what you don't know just because you've been following the same habits for long period of time. But at the end of the day, it's all self experimentation. Jonathan Green: Yeah. That's very interesting because 1 of my favorite things about my life now is that I very rarely have to set an alarm clock. Like, I can choose when I wake up.

I can choose when I go to bed. I choose I have total control to start my day as well as when you're a kid, have to get up whenever school says. Right? If you change schools, you have to get up at a different time. And you go to bed when your parents say you do. And there is this rigidity. Right? Same thing if you're working for someone else is that, well, you go to work when they say you have to go to work.

And I used to do shift work. Right? So sometimes you're working 7 to 5PM, and then they shift you to another team, and now you're working from 2PM to 11PM. And it's such a jarring change that it takes a while for your body to get used to it. So you can do a blood test or a DNA test that tells you a genetic test.

What else does that tell you, the test when you do the that part of it that's like, oh, I can tell just for look at your genes what time you should go to bed. That's I didn't know that was a thing. That's branching. What else can you find out when do that testing. What else does it tell you? Riley Jarvis: Yeah. It's very interesting. So the genetics will kind of yeah.

It could take this so many ways, but genetics just gives you a window into what your biology actually But then you have also different forms of testing that tell you, like, currently, what is your body state right now that it currently needs? Like, where are the potential deficiencies? So other tests I like to run, for example, are, like, a hormone test. Hormones are extremely important for our sleep. It could be we we don't sleep because we have elevated cortisol levels while we sleep.

Or before we go to sleep, we're having blood sugar spikes happening where blood sugar will go up, insulin comes in to bring it back down. But when it goes too low, horizontal adrenaline will come in to bring it back up. And as a result, it wakes us up in the middle of the night.

You could have other things, for example, like your gut that you have gotten these different hidden stressors inside of your body that are causing your body to be just overall inflamed, and so sleep is never fully restoring your body. It's just going from a debt state at the end of the night just back to 0. You're never going into a surplus each and every day.

And if you can think of your sleep like that, These lab tests will really show you where your body currently stands, where the hidden stresses are inside of your body, and then what you can actually do about it, and then you can take a snapper like approach where you can give what your biology actually needs instead of just taking a cookie cutter approach and throwing everything against the lawn, hoping someone sticks. How does someone know something's wrong.

Like, what are the signs like, because it seems like a lot of times for we wait until it's really bad. Right? Like, we say, oh, I'm only when I'm, like, really, really compressed or only when My wife's just packing her clothes. Do I go time for a marriage therapist? So how does someone know, like, what are some early warning signs? Like, how long should it take someone to fall asleep when they get into bed? Yeah. All really good things.

And so there's 2 different ways you can look at it. So 1 is what you just said is where it's too late or maybe not too late, and you reach a disease state. So whether diabetes. You have a heart related issue. And that could be somebody who's not sleeping properly for a period of time. Like, quick example, Margaret Thatcher used to brag about back in the day that she only need a 3 or 4 hours of sleep. She eventually developed Alzheimer's.

That's because during REM sleep, we have these garbage truck cleaners that come through and clean up all the plaques. Inside of our brand. If we don't have that, these plaques can eventually contribute to some of those Alzheimer's. So, you know, it's a chicken or an egg thing first, but so that's more of a disease state. But like the kinds of testing I like to run is more functional based testing.

This is where it's a lot more sensitive, sort of private health care, and we can see where there is just dysfunction in the systems inside of your body on a subtle level that could be causing brain fog, that could be causing you to wake up in the middle of the night and some of those things. If you don't have those lab tests in place, you can just go by, like, getting to sleep.

If you can fall asleep within 5 to 15 minutes, that's a pretty good sign. You usually don't wanna wake up in the middle of the night or at least, like, once it's sometimes okay, but if it's more than that, then there's probably something going on under the hood of your biology. And, obviously, you wanna talk your doctor. But the model that they operate from is you take a pill to cover the symptoms, which have their own side effects. Like, where's the endgame with that?

I just want I wanna ask that question without being biased. And then so then that point, you you wanna get to the root cause because then it's a lot more sustainable. So what's keeping somebody up at night? Is it their cortisol is off? Is it their bedroom environment's off where all this light's coming in? While they're sleeping at nighttime. What did they do throughout the daytime? How resilient is your body? So there's a couple different ways to look at that that are leading indicators.

But you can even just journal and each healthy new habit you try in your life. Just see how you feel, and then you can tie those together. Journaling, it's 1 thing that I never really wanted to do, but It's just amazing that meta level awareness that you can have and change your own circumstances once you see in people like, wow. I had no idea that exists We don't even know we have a breakfast 3 days ago. Right?

And so anything else beyond that can be difficult to keep track of if we don't write down. Jonathan Green: And I think that there's so many things that we don't realize can affect our sleep, whether it's noise or light. Every single thing I own has, like, a light, like, even like, the charger for my wall that I plug out the things into has a light on. Like, I don't need a light on this all the time.

I often 1 of the things I do, missed a good idea. Maybe you tell me several days. I put a little piece of black tape over all those alert lights in my room because it just it's like every piece of it. And for some reason, where I live, air conditioners always want you to know what temperature they're set to, so there's a bright neon glowing light. I'm always like, how do I turn that up? They don't I mean, like because the room will tell me.

And we don't realize there's all these little lights in the room. And then we especially now, people get on the phone. They're playing around on TikTok and watching videos and I've heard, and this is where maybe a little knowledge is a dangerous thing, that there is an effect from that. Right? Like, from having light like, your badge Like, the only thing you should do in bed is sleep. You shouldn't be in bed playing video games or it's all things I'm guilty of. I'm totally confessing here.

Playing video games on the Nintendo Switch or having your laptop on or watching videos, for me, 1 of the big moments in my career was when I could move my office out of the bedroom, right, for a while. And when you start, you have your computer and your bedroom. That's where it starts, and that can be it's create so, like, there's it's like work and sleep are too close together.

Like, you can just roll out of bed and start grinding, and that can just wake in the middle of night to go to the bathroom. Oh, I don't just do a few minutes of work. So what about that stuff? What are some of the dumb things that people do that could really be damaging their sleep without even realizing some bad habits. Riley Jarvis: For sure. Absolutely.

So 1 of the 1 of the easiest ones, and it's picking up more mainstream, is blue light before we go to sleep. And that could be our eye That could even just be, like, coming inside of our window. Like, if we live downtown, the street lights could be coming through.

So, ideally, you wanna make it like, an ideal environment would be a nighttime before you go sleep, you put your hand in front of you, and you won't be able to see your hand because it would be that pitch black. So you wanna think to yourself, how can I get as close to that as possible? So does that mean getting blackout curtains, does that mean covering up any neon lights like you were talking about?

Is that minimizing money usually 1 1 to 2 hours before bedtime, we wanna really reduce that blue light. So whether that's we wear blue light blocking glasses, whether that is we reduce we don't see electron. See electronics. We have a blue light filter on those. A really good strategy, actually, is just an hour before bedtime.

Pop in, like, an audio book or, like, some kind of video that you can listen to with all the lights off, and you can put it on a timer too and just kind of let your mind drift away. And I've noticed by doing that and working with clients doing that, their sleep score improves, and they just feel so much better during the daytime. But it's tough. Right?

Because for us to some of us can't just fall asleep when it's very quiet, and we just listen to our thoughts. We like to fall asleep with a TV on or something. But just know that the blue light will directly suppress your melatonin, which will directly suppress your REM sleep, which we need to feel fully restored the next day with our mind. And if we don't, what are we gonna go towards more coffee? More coffee is stimulate. It stresses our body out more.

So it's deeper and deeper down that rabbit hole. And then but we don't have energy, so then we go to the doctor. And then we eat poor foods because we didn't sleep well, and we have more So it's just this ongoing cycle that affects the sleep, and the sleep affects all these other things. Jonathan Green: We've touched on a few things that are very important to me. I'm huge end of blue light. So, like, all my monitors have at least 2 layers of blue light blocking.

So they have they're always low blue light monitors. I they're always in low blue light mode, and have an additional software filter. And same thing for my phones. My main phone is actually e ink phone for that reason. So that's normally the thing that you dial into some stuff that really matter because I've had a lot of vision problems. Add dramatic vision, Rob. So I know there's some people that say that blue light's not a real thing, but, like, I was going blind.

And I I've had, like, incidents of blindness when you go blind for 6 hours. Like, you start stuff real serious. And that's why I got really deep, and I noticed that, like especially now, there's some really good ink monitors. I can't get them here. I'm trying so hard, but they're really hard to import to some countries. And it's like, You can switch to having an entirely black and white monitor with no blue light in it and all. Like, that gets me very exciting.

And there's RLCD monitors now, which have no light in. They're CDs with no lights, you have to use only sunlight. So I have a little 1 I use outside, and it's very interesting that these if we don't know because it there is such an effect from this from blue light that in other parts of your life too. It's very interesting. I'm wondering, like, oh, you know, when I switched to all that stuff, my sleep did get better.

So that's why I'm like, oh, that's very interesting to me because yeah, we if we don't realize it, you have your phone in your room, and there's this thing we do where we think everything is important. So we leave our phone. Like, every time I used to have every single work email account give me alerts at to the point this 10 years ago where I would start to have phantom buzzes you pull out your phone, you think there's a 1, there's not.

I leave my phones on full silent all the time because there's never that there's never actually that level of emergency. I'm not a doctor. Right? Like, there's never an emergency so important that I need I probably, in the last my entire career, my business 12 years, probably had 2 emergencies worth me getting up in the middle of the night fixing them. But we think every text from someone and so I think that's the work personal balance is so important. Like, I have 2 phones.

1 has my work email. 1 has my personal email for that reason to kind of separate them and have a separate phone for when I'm shooting videos for TikTok and stuff because that's work. But we have a tendency to mix, work, and play more and more.

Like, a lot of people that they work from their laptop and has their games on and things like that, and that I worry about that too that as we start to mingle work and not work, as we start to do more and more things, we're just blasting more lights into our eyes that all of this just starts to have a cumulative effect. But you also mentioned that, like, it can really affect your health and these other things can happen. What are some health signs?

Because you did mention getting up in the middle of the night. I wake once I hit 40, I started getting up the middle night to go to the bathroom. So that like, that's a change that happened. It's like, oh, have when I'm a little kid and then when I'm over 40, that's, like, a new thing. But what are the signs like or that someone should look for, like, in the rest of the day. Like, you talk about brain fog, but can you define that?

Like, what does it mean, or how would someone know they have a brain fog? Riley Jarvis: Yeah. That's definitely a good 1. It's a bit of a loaded term, Mike. It's just like, well, what is brain fog and what does not having brain fog feel like? And some people have been walking through days and they don't even know it. So brain fog is it's different for everybody, but it's like the inability to focus. It could be like a thing of focus. It could be concentration.

It could be memory related. Like, if you just feel yourself like, just think when you when you drink alcohol and the next day you feel hungover and you your brain just doesn't feel as fast as fast as as it did before. Let's say you're used to drinking coffee in the morning, but you don't drink coffee, and your brain just isn't firing as fast. But just think of it in that point of view. Of your brain is just not as clear as it could be.

I just speak general there just because it could be taken so many different ways. But why people cannot brain fog, it just be blood sugar related issues. It could be their brain is, like, actually inflamed from the foods that they're eating, like, high fructose corn syrup, sugar, and all these different things that are that are causing or, like, if you eat a very heavy meal, you know how you feel tired afterwards and you just can't think properly and you just wanna go to sleep?

Think of that as, like, a subtle form of brain fog, and that's just a change. But it's all relevant. Right? It's just what was somebody's baseline and what was their new thing of dealing with that? But When you do get better sleep and when you don't get sleep, you probably noticed this shift in your mind as well. You maybe have better emotional control. You can think more clearly. You have those soft skills.

So for some entrepreneurs, when they're on a sales call, they can increase their sales calls ratio when their sleep score gets higher because they have those soft skills. It's not what you say it's the intoinality. It's everything between it, but your ability to focus for long hours. Like, some people, instead of doing the 8 hour a day, they can finish that. Imagine finishing your day by noon because your focus is just so on point.

You have that deep work and that flow that you're in, and you're not just checking your phone every 2 seconds. Because your brain now has that ability to just focus cleanly on the thing that you're focusing on the thing at hand and at task. So presence is another 1 too, I would say. But everything else excuse me, you touched on, a couple different apps people can use to start reducing some of this brain fog is getting your sleep down point.

So an application I love on the computer screen, it's amazing you about those monitors, is an application software called iris it's called iris tech dot co, and it's a really good 1 that can use to not only minimize the blue light, but also reduce the screen flicker rate and all these different things. I think it's only a couple bucks a month. There's 1 called efflux, which is good, but this 1 takes a step further. And blue light fucking glasses. My favorite brand is called Twilight.

I think they're these ones are called the Twilight classics. Let's see if I could got them here, actually. They could look like this. It makes you look like X Men a little bit. They're probably about a hundred bucks for glasses, but they got peripheral vision, everything like that. But it really can help you with sleep, and what you'll find when you wear them is a couple hours prior to when you would normally go to bed.

So let's say you typically fall asleep at 10PM, If you pop these on at 8PM, you'll find, like, 08:39 o'clock, you're ready to fall asleep. And what that is is your body's natural inclination to fall asleep It's just because we're exposed to that blue light that we have the second wind effect, and it makes us stay awake longer than we actually should. So everything you said about blue light, yeah, like, it can lead to serious things.

Like, they've shown, like, it can increase your cancer risk over time and just specific disease risk and everything else that goes along with it. Jonathan Green: Yeah. It's very interesting how technology can be so far ahead of our bodies because it's so long takes so long to figure it out. Like, we were going to bed to candlelight a hundred and 50 years ago. Right? It's so fast technology is changing.

My kids don't even know what a pager is, and I was excited to have 1 in high school. Because all these technologies are jumping, and now my kids know how to use a cell phone. They can't believe some of the screens in our house aren't touch screens. I was trying to touch my computer. I'm like, no. These aren't not everything's in touch screen. And it happens very quickly, and I do worry about those things.

Like, I know that some technology just makes your attention span shorter and shorter and that we don't have we don't have enough time to even know what like, the old tie like, CRT computer monitors were doing 4 window flat screens, and now we're in a new technology in that it does Like, you do have to be very proactive. And only when I became serious about what was happening, because I will really make a difference. Like, I haven't had a blindness since in a few years.

Whereas before, it's having 1 a week or 1 a month for a long time before I got just really got really crazy about every piece of technology and always limiting eyes and always trying to be near outside so I can look outside a lot. And there you have to be really proactive because, yeah, you can wait too long. I do wonder as well. I know so many people that, like, they can't start their day unless they have a coffee.

And I was thinking you brought that up, Jay, because that's other members of my family. I've never been a coffee person. Always makes me sick to my stomach. So it's what about those people that are drinking and sometimes it's so many. Like, oh, I drink 6 cups of coffee in here, 8 cups of coffee. Are they turn the machine on multiple times. I have limited you can tell I don't really drink coffee because I don't know how to describe it very well.

Like, I have limited knowledge, but I you know, are they going to Starbucks several times a day? I wonder about that. Can you tell me how that affects you? Should we need should you need coffee to start your day? Like, I've always thought there's something wrong with that. Like, you should be able to wake and not be tired. Riley Jarvis: Yeah. Absolutely. So what you just said is bang on. And it's 1 thing I think of just, like, the recent hustle culture too.

You know, we're trying to get more done, sleep less, sleep is seen as this liability in order to get ahead. And coffee is something that we can use to help us achieve that goal of success or whatever that looks like. And so what I say is if whatever we're using, whether it's coffee or anything else, if it's used as a crutch of a deeper problem going on, then that's a net loss for us at the end of the day.

So if if our bodies are completely taxed, we're not sleeping well. Like, if we were to zoom in and imagine our body was, like, all these little workers that were trying to make our body run, if they were really, like, screaming and overdrive that like, we need a break right now. But instead, we just keep adding fuel to the fire. More coffee. More coffee. Then it's not gonna be good for us.

And then as a result, we'll feel more tired because we're more stable at nighttime from all the caffeine we had the day prior. And now it's just that same thing happening again and again. And a big reason for why that can happen for people, not everybody, but that I especially see in the lab testing is their hormones, especially cortisol. Your adrenal glands produce cortisol. Cortisol is good. We want cortisol highs in the morning and lows before we go to sleep.

But when we've been pushing go for too long and pushing on the gas for too long. It's almost like it's a bad analogy, but, like, whipping a tired horse, you can think of the whip as the coffee and think of the horse as your body running, you can only do it so much before you have to increase the dose, increase the dose, increase the dose.

Now your body just with that same amount of caffeine, it builds adaptation to it, and then it just can't go anymore to the point where, like, even having 4 cups of coffee, 5 cups of coffee, doesn't have that same effect as it did maybe 6 months ago, 1 year ago, and then you just keep doing that.

And that's the point where people go from coffee to maybe, like, more high higher advance forms of stimulants, you know, medication and things like that down the road versus if you could kick to the root cause of what is causing your hormones like this in the first place, cut coffee out or at least minimize it as much as you can, give your body a break to build up those systems, now you can reach a point where you don't need coffee. You have more energy.

You're not running on a dirty not a dirty high, but, like, a dirty fourth source and form of energy. You have it that just lasts all day long. You don't have a sudden energy spike and then a crash shortly after. It's just this clean source that's sustainable all day long where your body's buzzing. And it's entirely possible to achieve if you give your body the right inputs, it will give you the right outputs to allow you to do that.

Jonathan Green: What's the amount that's assigned something's wrong. Is 1 cop of copy a day okay? Is 2 okay? Is 3 too many? Is there a sign when someone trying to self assess? They go, oh, maybe I have a problem because I need this many. Or is it overall how they respond to the coffee. Right? If they see like, I think if someone says, I can't start my day without coffee or don't talk me till had my coffee, like, to have those cute mugs. Yeah.

To me, that's such a red flag. Like, I've always been worried about chemical dependent ability to work. Like, I have these friends in college who would have to take Adderall or something. They couldn't study or they couldn't study for a test, and so they're unless they take it. And that always made me very nervous anytime your ability to do critical stuff replies on relies on something external. That's always made me nervous. But is there a sign before then?

Like, an earlier thing, someone go, oh, maybe I do have a problem. Like, even in the gray face where they should at least be thinking about it, what are what's that amount of coffee? Riley Jarvis: Yeah. It's a really good question. And the answer is it's all relative and it's all case by case. And the reason is this is because, genetically, some of us are a fast metabolizer coffee. Some of us are slow metabolizer of coffee.

So what that means is some of us who drink coffee, it'll pass through a system fast. People can drink coffee at 7PM and go to sleep fine at 10PM, and that doesn't affect them. But other people can drink coffee at 10AM, and they're still wired at 10PM because it's slower for that to pass through their system. Calvin has a half life of 7 hours.

And so the just as a side point, if you were to drink coffee, let's say, 3 or 4PM, and you were gonna go to sleep at 10PM, you would still have, let's say, about quarter of that coffee going through your veins before you go to sleep. And that would be equivalent. Just put that in perspective. You go at 09:30PM, you go to Starbucks, your quarter shot of espresso, chug it back, go right to bed and hope to fall asleep. It would be that same equivalent.

So That's why it's very difficult for some people, and that's why it's case by case. But what are the warning sides? Like, how much should you have? Ideally, having 1 cup of coffee like, coffee does have many benefits or there's antioxidant benefits, and there's a lot of these things. And so at that point, you have to weigh the pros and the cons. Right? And usually, I would say typically 1 cup of coffee before 2PM daytime is good for most people.

But, again, if you don't know what your genetics are, try and sense. Like, where do you fall in that line? Like, Me, for example, I just need 1 cup of coffee, and I don't do it all the time, but maybe I'll have 1 or 2 cups of coffee a week. I'll have it in the morning and can help me get my day started. And that could be a day that fasting because that can help subside hunger. So it just really depends.

Or if I'm, like, working out, that could be very good as a stimulant for that as well. But if that's better I don't rely on it. I like teeth of coffee. I like the smell of it in the morning, but I don't rely on it. It's not a crutch. And so if you rely on something as a crutch, you have to ask yourself, where is that exactly coming from?

Because if everything was working fine in your biology as it should, then you wouldn't necessarily manifest on these symptoms of fatigue and tiredness you're experiencing, maybe your body needs like a, you know, like a full recap weekend reset to really just go back to to become centered again, to become grounded again. And then at that point, you can reintroduce coffee back in. But, obviously, there's caffeine withdrawal as well. So there's things you can do to mitigate that. But that's another conversation.

Jonathan Green: I'm trying to think if I even know anyone who only drinks 1 cup of coffee a day. Like, I feel every single person I know, it's more than 1. Right? It's more it's always at least 2 or 3. And so that's interesting. How do you feel about Neutropic? So it's like this whole industry around focus now. And There's a wide spectrum of things that obviously don't do anything to things that do a lot. Right? Everyone saw that movie Limitless and is chasing that pill.

Like, oh, the -- Yeah. Yeah. The NCT. And I understand that desire. Right? And I know I have a lot of people that I talk to that are all on the spectrum at different places. And focus has just become a huge industry now, kind of like organization has. Right? Like, everyone wants to do getting things done, have to be more efficient, so much content and so many programs to help you be more efficient and more focused. And it feels like it's the new thing.

Like, before, it was multitasking before they found out multitasking is terrible. Like, every test showed it so bad. Right? It just get bad at everything. But what about this chasing of focus? Is it focusing, is it like looking at the symptom rather than disease? Riley Jarvis: Good question. Focus is a very interesting 1. I like to see focus through the lens of better optimization. And if we don't have folks, it doesn't mean we're necessarily in the disease state. I like to look at first principles, though.

Where does that focus come from? For our body and our for our brain to focus, we need dopamine. The precursors to dopamine are there's l dopa, and you have tyrosine, And when you break it down, these all come from foods that we eat that purse provide that breakdown.

But once our body takes in those foods, it has to simulate those nutrients for our brain so if our dust is not working properly for that simulation to happen for a brain to use, then that's where we're not getting as much focus as we could. And so that's why just thinking about it as just a brain problem isn't necessarily the best way to do it. And it doesn't mean your brain isn't a disease state or anything.

It just means It could be whether it's neurotransmitters, whether it's blood sugar, whether it's inflammation. These could all be things that are contributing to your body not being able to focus as it should be. But neutropos are very interesting. Because it can be used 2 different ways. Whether you are somebody who's a bio hacker who focuses on health, who already falls a healthy diet, who falls good sleep, and all these different things.

Maybe you're already adenate and you're looking to use new tropics to really just get those last 05/10/1520 percent or you somebody who's not doing any of these things much like coffee, and are you just using that as a band aid and a crush in order to in in in order to get there? And so I would say, like, taking nootropics to subsidize the supplement at poor lifestyle, poor diet, poor the things, it might work temporarily.

But compared to if you were to improve your diet, exercise, and do all these other things, and then you add the Neutropics, you will just see, like, an 100 x in results of all those things put together, and it will just work tenfold. But you're right. Like, nootropics, it's a very interesting industry, and it's very exciting.

And they you know, like Adderall and Vyvanse and what people talk about, you know, like, NuVidil and some of these other ones, Paracetam and Aracetam, and all these ones have become very popular these days. And I think those are good to take. I mean, everyone is case by case, but just from what I have seen, they don't seem to have any side effects, and I've experimented with some of them. And I had great results, but I wasn't using it every single day.

It again, it was just kind of used intermittently. And just keep in mind, how should I say this, trying it once, trying it twice, and giving your body a break to come back to baseline is I think it's just general good philosophy and a good approach to take. Don't try and take it every day. Give your body a break to go to baseline with every with with whatever new thing you try. And that's a good way to experiment with some of these things.

Not try everything it wants. Be a scientist. Try this. Write down. How did you feel? Okay. Now try the next thing. Write down. How did you feel? If you throw in everything at once, you won't be able to isolate those variables. Jonathan Green: Yeah. Because there's in our industry, everyone's there's so much of that because there's some things that my friends take, and I try it. I have no effect. And there's other things. I'll try it.

Like, 1, and I'm like, this has arrived, like, 8 hours. I'm like, this -- Yeah. -- really. And it's And it that's the thing is, like, it's the dosage is so important. I usually am like, I gotta do start off at a quarter or half when anyone else is taking of even, like, any of those, like, focus drugs, I try I'll try to drop again. Like, I can't do a full 1 because I've I don't wanna be focused for 8 hours. Totally. Yeah.

I also wonder about our generation. I'm at the exact age of when I'm 1 year over where they started diagnosing everyone with ADD. And then now that seems to not exist anymore. Now they've switched in everyone as ADHD. And I just wonder because almost I think they've diagnosed almost half a boys with it. And I just feel like, is that really what's happening? Because I went to my doctor when I was 30, and I was like, do I have ADD?

And he's like, well, what are your ideas about? And I told him a bunch of me goes, well, aren't all the don't all those help your and they aren't all parts of my business. Like, I have lots of nonlinear thoughts about growing my business in projects. Most of my ideas work out. He's like, yeah. If you have ADD, you have the good kind. I was like, oh, okay. I had a cool doctor, but it's also I wonder, right, if I've been 1 year younger, Right?

I would have been 1 of those kids because a lot of my friends or who were young and they got all diagnosed with stuff, and they answered everything was a pill. I just wonder, maybe that's where on the exact age, though, where, like, you started getting a television in your bedroom. You started getting and that's a game changer. Right?

As soon once you get to television in your bedroom, then it can be on all the time as a kid, and it can just no sound, so you're just getting light, and your parents don't know. I wonder if as you're thinking about they're talking about this. It makes me start thinking maybe there's some changes that happened in our culture that maybe not everyone has, right, this disease because it's so it seems far too prevalent. Right?

And to be like, oh, the answer is, like, to make you calm down. But there's other things going on that we kind of again, we always seem to go after the symptom, not the disease. Right? It's like -- Exactly. -- I I know for me, if I don't exercise for 3 days in a row, I start to get oppressed. And so I don't have a choice. Right? I'd like, oh, I don't wanna be depressed.

So there's things I have to do as someone who, like when I was younger, the answer to depression was pills. Right? Pill pill pill. And lots of therapy sessions, and it's like, well, no. There's it is other parts of your body are interrelated, but we have started to just disconnect every Right? We just look at what's the shortest solution, and the solution everything does seem to be prescription.

And once you're on, when it's so hard to get off, So for people out there, not a lot of people can afford to start doing genetic testing and they're, like, in an early phase. Like, I don't even know if I have a problem. What's, like, the first thing you tell people to do? Right? You you mentioned journaling.

Is there, like and I know there's this thing, like, you can have an Apple watch or any of those technology watches on your wrist that tracks your sleep, but, also, then you're trying to sleep with a watch on. You know? I'm like like, it's so because I've tried it a few times, and I've tried those things where you put your phone on the bed and it measures your rustling. But does it work if you're married? Because if my wife moves, now it says Right?

It's measuring the wrong wrestling. Do you rate any of those things like those technology solutions that are watching you, or is that the wrong place to start? Riley Jarvis: Really good question. And it's just, again, it's just inundated. People were just inundated with all this information. Same thing with the laptops. It's like, well, do start this first or I try these other things of, like, what do I do? I don't have the money to start these, and it just goes on and on sometimes.

So what I would typically say is this, Do the lowest hanging fruit things first that are easiest to implement, that are inside your control, and that you can start doing today and better also inexpensive. First on the trackers, though. So I'm wearing 1 right now called an aura ring, and I'll show you in the camera what it looks like. But it has technology inside of it that will track your sleep. They're specific to sleep. And of all the sleep trackers, it is my favorite.

And it doesn't have a screen on it. So I find it's the most accurate yada yada yada. The other ones are really good too, and I think having a tracker or post to non having a tracker is probably better. Because if you combine that with the journaling and you can see the objective data, you think, oh, that wasn't my hat. I actually did have a bad sleep. Oh, it looks like my REM sleep was kinda low tonight.

Oh, it looks like my heart rate variability was lower than it should be. So I probably don't wanna push it too hard in the gym today because my body needs more time to recover. The more tools we have for this, the better that we can better that we can be. So that's, like, monitoring to see how our body is actually feeling. Part 2 of that would be, like, implementing the actual habits in order to sleep better, that is very easy for us.

So the easiest things would just be like our bedroom environment, like lowering the temperature, making it very dark, trying to relax, like, 30 minutes before bedtime. Like, can we think of it like active recovery or passive recovery. Are we just passively watching Netflix drinking a beer hoping to wind down because we're stressed out from work? Or Are we doing meditation? Are we doing, like, hot cold shower? Are we doing absol bath, like, a float tank? Do we do, like, a yoga session?

Do we take a walk outside. In terms of, like, minutes, we were able to downshift from fifth gear down to first gear, ready for bedtime, much faster with that active recovery. And those are just, like, so easy to do. And other things, for example, are just, like like, you can supplement certain things. Like, magnesium is good. You know, like, eftoncell fazer forming magnesium, so that is very good as well.

And, like, not eating very heavy meals before bedtime, that can be 1, not like, exercising too rigorous rigorously before bedtime, that is 1 thing we can try. There's tools to help with this. Like, if we want a cool bed, we can have a chili pad that blasts pulled air into our sheets, or there's just these different things that we can try.

But we always wanna do the basics first, and we wanna implement 1 variable at a time and see why do we make a mental note or we actually journal it? Take note of how does it actually make us feel. And I guess what the word is here is just better internal awareness. And with that awareness, we can start making more implementations on the fly, and as a result, just start to feel better.

Other ones from our for our bed, I won't go into why, but we can elevate where our bed is. On about 3 inches. So our bed is actually on an incline. What this will actually help do is our lymphatic system with the drainage while we sleep. That'll help create that positioning for the drainage and give our body a bit of a break. So that's just been shown to have 1, you know, to help us sleep.

Sometimes wearing socks before we go to sleep, but we wanna focus more principles here instead of just 1 off things to do. We can always do these tips, but then at the end of the day, it's not using a crush in order to subsidize this. It's actually getting to the root cause of what's going on. So I like to go simple and think of it as a pyramid.

And as we start to go down, we start to optimize, then eventually you can do some test and go deeper with some of the stuff. And then that point, it's not just sleep. Like, it's energy. It's focus. It's all these other things. But you can't be hard on yourself. You are where you are. And you'll get there when you'll get there as long as you keep following the journey. Jonathan Green: And I think that's really good for me.

I mean, even though I'm not perfect to sleep, it's always a journey for everything is that definitely -- decreasing light in the bedroom made such a difference, especially because some of the lights are blinking, which is the absolute worst thing you can have. Yeah. And covering, like, putting a little piece of tape over all the because you don't need to know. Like, now your toaster wants you to know if it's on. It's, like, insane.

I don't need all these, like, lights to everything, like, all of that stuff. I get it why they exist. It's like a cheap solution to saying if it's working or not. But, yeah, I recommend that's the first thing I would say is really look at how much in your room. The blackout curtain's such a good idea. I remember what a friend told me about that. He's like, yeah. I sleep in pitch black.

That got me very interested in that because, also, like, we have the Wi Fi router in your room is, like, a huge mistake because that's the light blinks on that intermittently or things that make a noise. So we have like, I have a water machine. You know, the thing you put 5 gallon water on top because you can't drink tap water here. You'll die. But that thing makes a noise. Because it's got a refrigerator part.

Intermittently, it may that's why because otherwise, I'd have 1 in the office. Like, I don't want it to go off right now while we're recording. Sometimes you're tempted to put that in the bedroom so you have water right near the bed, but then that So some of these things we don't realize that are making noises in the night. So I think what you're saying is really good. There are some simple things we ignore, like, how loud everything is.

Like, cities are so loud and we just get used to hearing car noises or motorcycle noises outside that actually, like, you can make your room quieter. You can make your room darker, and that's, like, I like things that you do once and has a long term effect. I really love that. Right? I think you totally change the room once, you make things better, and then it's very true.

I'm probably gonna talk to my wife about raising 1 end of the bed tonight, just where it shall fall out of it. Like, roll right out of this. This has been really interesting to me, so really, really useful. Where can people continue the conversation with you, find out more about what you do, kind of do some sleep self assessments, and figure out where they are in the spectrum. And if they need help or how much help they need or if they're in dramatic situation.

Where can they find you? Yeah. Definitely. Riley Jarvis: They can just go to my website. It is VTHE sleep consultant dot com. Side of that, there's a lot of resources. They can join the weekly email lists. There's a bunch of free there's my ebook on there. They can even schedule a 10 minute free 1 on 1 directly with me. I can create them just a custom tailored plan for them to help sleep better as well. So everything's really on there.

And if they want to get in touch with me directly, It is riley, RILEY, at the sleep consultant dot com. And I heard you're working on a new program, the sleep solution. Wanna hear about that a little bit. Yeah. So the sleep solution system is 1 that I reach it's a program that I beat I recently finished. It's truly revolutionary. It's about but 20 hours long, the thing is a beast, but bringing you basically to a state that I call sleep Nirvana.

And what that is the ability to get to sleep within 15 minutes stay asleep uninterrupted. You know, we're not waking up at all for 7 to 9 hours, and then waking up with a with an abundance of energy that lasts all day long without the need to take any stimulants at all. And so that's the end goal.

So inside of the program, it's all the exact step by step things that you have to do in a very easy way that fits your life in order to achieve that goal. And it's all we're looking at every single part of your biology in a systematic way to get you there as fast as possible. So, again, it is sustainable. You go through the program for 8 weeks. You go through just this acute phase. You give your body the resources to finally build back up again.

And after that, yeah, you're really cruising for many, many years to come. It sounds great. Thank you so much for spending time with us today, Riley. I really appreciate it. I know I learned a lot. So much, Jonathan. It was an honor being on today. Jonathan Green: Thank you for listening to today's episode. Starting your blog is an amazing step. Now it's time to get your first 100 raving fan as quickly as possible.

Let me show you the shortcut to this milestone with my free guide at sir investor dot com forward slash 100. That's forward slash 100. Announcer: Thank you for listening to this week's episode of the serve no master podcast. Make sure you subscribe so you never miss another episode. We'll be back next week with more tips and tactics on how to escape the rat race. Please take a moment to leave a review at serve no master dot com forward slash itunes.

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