245. Go From Dragging Your Butt to Kicking Butt – Interview with Dr. Michael J. Breus

Dr. Michael Breus 00:00
So eight hours is a myth. Let me be very clear about this. Very few people actually need eight hours of sleep. And there's a reason why. So many people actually get more sleep than they need. Wait, what did you say, Dr. Bruce, more sleep? What are you talking about here, right?

Susan Sly 00:17
So, what's up everyone? I hope you're having an amazing day. And I have a question for you. How's your sleep? Like, let's get raw and real. That's why we call it Raw and Real Entrepreneurship. How is your sleep? So, are you one of these people like I used to be like, I'll sleep when I'm dead, or are you one of these people who is like, Oh, I sleep 12 hours a day? Or are you one of these people who can't sleep through the night? Well, my guest today is in my opinion, for what it's worth, the global expert on sleep. But I promise you we're not going to put you to sleep. So check this out. He has been interviewed on CNN, Oprah, The View, Anderson Cooper, Rachel Ray, Fox & Friends, The Doctors, Joy Behar, the CBS Early Show, The Today's Show, Kelly and Michael. And he has been interviewed in the Wall Street Journal, New York Times, Washington Post. And on top of it, he is on the clinical advisory board of the Dr. Oz Show. He is a best selling author. And we're going to be talking about his new book, which I feel, and we've had many New York Times bestselling authors on here, I feel this book title is probably the best in history. Energize!: Go From Dragging Your Ass To Kicking Ass In 30 Days. So Dr. Michael Bruce, welcome to Raw and Real Entrepreneurship. I'm so excited to see you.

Dr. Michael Breus 01:47
I'm so excited to see you too. Susan, thank you for having me on here. And of course, I love you, love your audience. Love what you are doing. So thank you. Thank you. Thank you for helping me get the word out about Energize.

Susan Sly 02:01
Well, everyone's gonna order Energize. I mean, it's just a given. And so that's the bottom line. But I, Okay, so we haven't caught up in a while. And before we went into recording, you had a heart event like, from the last time you were on the show, like what the heck happened?

Dr. Michael Breus 02:19
So yeah, so the impetus for this book was, so I have a co author, her name is Stacey Griffith. And she's one of the founding trainers of SoulCycle, you know, the bicycle, indoor bicycle class. And she had a broken heart. And I had a cardiac event. And both of which kind of woke us up to what was going on in our lives. And so I wasn't doing the things that I needed to do. You know, it was doctor heal thyself type of moment. So I was running 3, 5Ks a week. So I did the opposite of what a lot of people do, instead of not taking care of themselves, I overdid it. Oh, surprise, surprise, right. So I was running 3, 5K's a week, I was doing intermittent fasting where my feeding window was for only five hours. I was, the good news is I was always sleeping well. I mean, I kind of have to, right? It would be really bad if the sleep doctor didn't get his rest, right? So one of the points of the story is you can't do it with sleep alone. Right? Like, it's important to realize that you can't just fix your sleep. And just to be clear, I'm happy to help people fix their sleep, and I want people to fix their sleep. But sleep appears to be only one piece of the puzzle of being able to be motivated, have energy, be successful, have happiness, all the things that we're kind of gunning for. But I learned that lesson in kind of a harsh way. I ended up having a cardiac event in the middle of a restaurant one night. Wasn't fun.

Susan Sly 03:42
No. And Michael, let's talk about that. So the pre COVID stats, and for the audience who's, if you're a new listener, welcome. We're so excited you're here. And for the audience that doesn't know, so Michael and I met through our mutual friend, Harvey Mackay and one of the ways we bonded is I was a health practitioner. And so when this, pre COVID stat for American women is that American women have more heart disease, die from heart disease more than the top five cancers combined. This is a pre COVID statistic, but heart disease doesn't just show up. There are some warning signs. So what was happening for you, Michael before the restaurant event, because I'm sure your body was giving you some signals.

Dr. Michael Breus 04:28
It was, it was, you know it, what was happening was it was lots of stress, hard to calm down, hard to relax. I learned unfortunately that if I ran a 5k, and just to be clear, it wasn't like I was leisurely jogging along, you know what I'm saying? Like I was doing 26 minute, you know 28 minute 5K's which is not like it's anything super fantastic. But for me that was definitely pushing my limits and I just kept wanting to see you know, Can I do a faster mile, could I do a faster this, could, and challenging myself helped lower my stress. But unfortunately, my body didn't catch up to it all. And I really started to feel like if I wasn't running, then I couldn't relax. And that's, that was kind of a weird cycle for me to get into. The other thing that was happening was, I felt like my intermittent fasting was working so well. I was leaning down, I was trimming down, I was feeling really good because my body was lighter, I could actually run faster. And, and I kind of liked that. And I was like, Well, if it worked at six hours, does it really matter if I only eat for five? Does it really matter if I only eat for four? There are people who do three day fasts out there, right? And so I really started to not look at the science as closely as I should have for me, and just started saying, like, Hey, I'm a doctor, I'm sure I won't hurt myself type of thing. And lo and behold, I hurt myself. And so at the end of the whole thing, it really made me take a quick look at my responsibilities to my family, my responsibilities to my wife, and like, what was that? Like why was I pushing so, so, so hard over there, and not getting the results over here? And so I really had to understand more about balance. And that's really what the book is about. And so it's a feeding, eating, I'm sorry, feeding movement and sleeping program that I have personally adopted, that I use myself, that we've actually tested, and it works really, really well for people. And it's actually easy to do. And you only have to know two pieces of information to completely personalize all three areas.

Susan Sly 06:32
Michael, I'm so excited to get into the program. And I want to have an interfriendtion with our entire audience because they, you know, like myself, like I started several years ago, well, I've been intermittent fasting for almost 20 years. And then I started doing, feeding windows a few years ago, and I went like full on keto. I started losing weight. And then this, starting last January, you and I were talking offline, I went through a very stressful event. And suddenly, I gained a bunch of weight plus, it's Raw and Real Entrepreneurship, I don't care. We'll say it. It accelerated me into perimenopause. So I'm getting the night sweats. I'm grinding my teeth. I'm not sleeping, the intermittent fasting stopped working, the Keto stopped working. And that's what I want to ask you. Why does that happen?

Dr. Michael Breus 07:26
So at some point, your body kind of kicks into survival mode. And it's like, Uh-Ah, you're doing too much, you're losing weight too fast, your metabolism starts to slow down, because it's trying to survive, right. And what you're doing is when you're fasting too much, you're forcing the metabolism to go in and use that autophagy to burn that fat as opposed to any carbohydrates left, and then you start to run out of fat, right. And so then what happens is your muscles start to break down, because your body wants to maintain a certain amount of fat on you. But if you're intermittent fasting, hard and long enough, your muscles start to break down. And I think, and that's partially what was going on with me as well. We were starting to see some of that. So you really have to be careful about fasting. And you have to also listen to your body, not necessarily your head, because that's what I was listening to. But listen to your body, because my body was I mean, I had injuries from running so much, you know, I had weakness from not just fatigue, from not having enough, you know, fuel, basically, I mean, there were days I'd go out for a run, and it was good. I was only running 26 minutes, because I don't think I could run 30 you know, like, I just didn't have it in me. So I think that a lot of people have a tendency to ignore some of those things and say, hey, I'll be okay. I'll be okay. When the fact of matter is, is there's a lot going on.

Susan Sly 08:42
And thank you so much for that, Michael, because entrepreneurs tend to push. And I find there are two schools of entrepreneurs, there are the entrepreneurs who don't take care of themselves. And they're just, I know a lot of people like this. They're mostly men, but business and they're like, you know, between the three or four bourbons at dinner on a Monday night for business, they're living on airplanes, they are, you know, gaining the weight around the midsection. Then there's the other category of entrepreneur, the other extreme, that's kind of where I am. It's like, we're gonna do fasted cardio every day. We're gonna exercise seven days a week. And we're so regimented, that, you know, that's the way we live our lives. But interestingly enough, what I've observed in from research, that those two groups can ultimately have the same outcomes. Yes. Have a heart attack, have, you know, get cancer and, and stress obviously, and we. that's why we need the balance of it all. So Michael, I want for listeners who didn't hear my first interview with you, I just want to go back in time a little bit and then we're going to talk about the new program and I'm so excited to have that conversation because I think I've been living it before the book came out. So you are an expert in sleep. And there are some myths out there around sleep. So I think for fun, let's imagine we're playing a game of football and I'm going to pass you the ball. And I'm going to say a statement about sleep and you say true or false and why? Sure, no problem. Okay, let's have fun. We're friends. So like, okay. So we all need the same amount of sleep every single night, The answer is, it's eight hours. True or false?

Dr. Michael Breus 10:26
False. So eight hours is a myth. Let me be very clear about this. Very few people actually need eight hours of sleep. And there's a reason why. So many people actually get more sleep than they need. Like, what did you say Dr. Bruce? What are you talking about here, right. So we have these things called Chronotypes. And if you know what your Chronotype is, and you sleep within your Chrono typical sleep window, you actually get higher quality sleep and need less of it. Yes, entrepreneurs, there is a way to get eight in six, if you know what your chronotype is. So in my third book, The Power of When, which we talked about quite a bit last time I was on your show, and thank you again for all that help. I'm there for different Chronotypes. Now, people might be saying, Hold on a second, Dr. Bruce, what the heck is a chronotype, Right? Now you've actually known of the concept, you just might not have heard of the term before. If you've ever been called an early bird, or a night owl, those are Chrono types. So back in the 70s, these guys came up with this questionnaire called a morningness-eveningness questionnaire and we could put people into three categories, early bird, night owl, and then people in the middle, we call them hummingbirds, okay? So just didn't have, didn't have a proclivity one way or another. Right? That kind of moved along for quite a while. And then I started to think about that idea. I had a patient who came to me and she said, you know, we tried everything. I mean, she had terrible insomnia, she couldn't go to bed before like, 2am, every single night. And we worked and worked and worked. And honestly, I failed. I could not help her. I tried everything I could think of. Brought her back in, started talking to her again. And I said, you know, help me understand it. She said, Dr. Bruce, if I could just work in a different time zone, my life would be great. And I was like, explain that to me. She was like, if I, because I was, at the time I was in practice in, on the East Coast in Atlanta. She said, If I could just show up for work on California time, it'd be perfect, right? Because it was a three hour spread. And she felt like she was off time zones. So I said, I'm gonna, I'm gonna think about that and look at that a little bit more. And I started to realize she was an extreme version of a night owl. And I was trying insomnia techniques on her, which would never work on an extreme version of a night owl. So then I started to say, I wonder if there's an insomniac chronotype. Turns out prototypes are genetic. Believe it or not, I can look at your 23andme data or your ancestry.com data, I can show you where on your genome, the exact spot that does this, is called the PER3 gene. To be clear, there's about eight or nine places that you could really look at, but this is one of the biggies. And if there's a flip right there, what we see is if you flip one way, you're an early bird, if you flip another way, you're a night owl. But there's, some times where the building blocks of our DNA get a little squirrely, and that's what I discovered was, there was an insomnia chronotype. Genetically determined things like that. And so I said, Holy cow, I wonder how many patients I've had, that have had this problem. It turned out that this is all based on your melatonin production. So let me tell you this, if you're an early bird, you wake up in the morning, your melatonin stops at, let's say, 6am. But if you're a night owl like me, you don't want to wake up at 6am. Let's say you wake up at eight, your melatonin stops at eight. So there's a two hour time lag. But here's what's interesting. When you wake up, most people go through a very similar hormonal progression throughout the 24 hour cycle. But for us night owls, by the way, I'm a night owl. We're two hours behind. So let's say Susan, that you and I were going to go have a meeting and you wanted to discuss something creative and entrepreneurial and decision making and things like that. You said, Michael, I'm gonna, I'm an early bird. I've been up since 5:30. Let's have a meeting at eight o'clock. I'd be like, Oh, that's gonna be terrible, right? Like, there's nothing creative about me at eight o'clock. Like four o'clock in the afternoon, I'm your guy, right? But eight o'clock in the morning? I'm a night owl. This is going to be terrible. And we started to learn that it wasn't just things like sleep, or creativity. We started learning things like intimacy, we started to learn it was things like decision making, we started to learn it was things like email, like there's actually a perfect time of day to read an email. There's actually a perfect time and day to send an email. There's a perfect time of day to work out. There's a perfect time of day to drink coffee, eat a cheeseburger, have sex, ask your boss for a raise. Literally, we found data on all of these things. And that's where the Chronotypes come from. So I created the fourth Chronotype and I named them all animals. So an early bird gets replaced by a lion. Now you'll appreciate this. When I was marketing this book when we were in the, in the meeting with the marketing department, we had these four avatars but we didn't have names for them yet. So I decided I wanted to do animals. Nobody really wants to be a platypus. Nobody really wants to be a porcupine, you know what I'm saying? You had to find cool animals that people would want to aspire to be. But my requirement was they had to have the chrono typical schedule in their natural habitat. So early birds become lions. Lions have their first kill before dawn, they really do wake up superduper early in the morning. We know a lot about these people. They've, not only do they wake up early, they have a tendency to be the COOs of the company. They make a list every day and they go from step one to step two to step, sounding familiar to you. 100% me. Yeah. Right. And they're very staunch in their thinking. And a lot of people say, Oh, I wish I was a lion. And I'm gonna be honest with you, there's pros and cons to being a lion. It's not the best to be a lion when you want dinner and a movie. Lions have been up since 4:30 in the morning. They're like, forget it, dude. I'm not going out till midnight. Are you kidding me?

Susan Sly 16:00
Oh, Michael, I just have to jump in. This is so funny you say thid. Because on the day, we are doing the show. Yeah. So our friend Harvey Mackay gave me two tickets to the Phoenix Suns tonight. And the game starts at eight. My first thought was, oh, Dear Jesus, I just like, you know, I even said to Emery, my 12 year old who I'm taking the game, I'm like, Emy, we might not, I don't care how good the game is. We're, we're not seeing the whole game. We'll finish the rest of it. You know, we'll find out the score or whatever. Because that's so me. Like 4:30 in the morning, let's go. Yeah.

Dr. Michael Breus 16:37
Absolutely. Right. So you're my lion, you're my, you're my, definitely my king Lion, or queen Lion as the case may be. The next are bears. Bears are the folks in the middle. And they are kind, they make up 55% of the population by the way. And to be clear, being a bear is the best. Honestly, I wish I was a bear. Because society works on a bear schedule, like a nine to five schedule is perfect for a bear. They get up at 7:30, they go to bed around 10:30. It actually works out very, very well for them. Bears have a tendency to be a little bit on the extroverted side. They're the folks that kind of get the work done. They're very fun people, they'll invite you to their home for dinner or they'll buy a drink at the bar, that kind of person that's out there. The night owls we call them wolves. Make up about 15% of the population. As many people probably know, wolves are nocturnal creatures. They hunt in packs at night. I am a wolf. Sometimes I feel like the lone wolf, because there's not a lot of wolves out there, only 15% of us, but I never go to bed before midnight. So like never. It just, isn't in me, right. I know, you're looking at me like I'm like-- that sounds exhausting. Right, you're like, I'm never hanging out with Michael again. He's gonna be up too late. But what's interesting is these are my creatives. So these are my actors, my musicians, my authors. Those of, you know that creative mind, like, I don't know if you know any creatives, but try talking to them at eight o'clock in the morning.

Susan Sly 18:01
Oh, no, all of our engineers at Radius, they're all wolves. They're like, Oh, yeah, okay, we'll do a meeting at midnight or I'm not coding like at two in the morning and, but if you ask them for an 8am meeting, they're like, oh, it's not pretty.

Dr. Michael Breus 18:17
They can't even speak at that period of time. It's terrible. It's terrible. So So we had that lions, we got the bears and we got the wolves. It coincides with the early birds, the hummingbirds and the night owls. My contribution to the literature was I added a fourth category, what I call dolphins, which represents my insomniacs, the woman that I learned so much from before. Now some people say well, why did you choose dolphins? Many people don't know this but dolphin sleep unihemisphericly. So half of the brain is asleep while the other half is awake and looking for predators. Right? I know, isn't that interesting? And I thought to myself, that kind of sounds like an insomniac because never quiet asleep type of thing. So you have one of these four characteristics. Now, to be fair, as we discussed at the beginning of the show, I didn't do so well. I stressed myself out, I really burnt myself out. I mean, if you want to talk about burnout, you know, having a heart attack in the middle of a restaurant, that's about as close to burnout as you can get. Yeah. Right. And so when we talk about burnout, it's one of those things that a lot of entrepreneurs don't talk about. You say to yourself, I'm an entrepreneur, I got to do everything, I got to get my business going, nobody's gonna care about it like me, who cares if I only sleep four hours a night? We care if you sleep only four hours a night. You're gonna hurt yourself. Unfortunately, I learned the hard way. And one of the things I learned is that it's all about balance. And the other area that is important about balance is movement. And then the third area is your fuel or food, right? And so when you talk about sleep, and you talk about movement, and you talk about fuel, all three of those have got to be in balance. And one of the things that we've learned is that when we've got people who've got balanced in all three of those areas, they're hyper successful. I mean, it's not like they're kind of successful. They've got everything running exactly the way they wanted and it just seems to move well for them. So I partnered up with my partner, her name is Stacey Griffith. She is the founding trainer of SoulCycle. That's the indoor spin thing. And what was so great about her as we were talking, she was helping me with my fitness, cuz I didn't want to overdo it. And I was helping her with her sleep. And we both said something at the same time. We're both like, why are our patients so freaking exhausted all the time, right? Because I got patients who sleep the right amount of time, and they tell me they're exhausted all day. Why? Because they're not moving. And because they're eating poorly at the wrong times. She says to me, I got patients who will do two spin classes, and tell me that they're unbelievably exhausted, they can't do anything. Well, number one, you shouldn't do two spin classes in a day. But number two, understanding what the right exercise for you and when to do it makes exercise from a draining activity to a gaining activity. And so we started to think about it. And so I said, Well, how do you know who's good in your spin class and who's not? And she said, You know, I look at their bodies aand I try to see what they're, what they would be able to do. And I said, You ever heard of body types? She was like, You mean back in high school like, the endomorph, mesomorph, ectomorph? And I'm like, exactly. I was like, What do you have, like for your long and lean people, How did they do? And she's like, they're awesome. They're cardio junkies, they can get on a bike and spin for hours, and they love every minute of it. Okay, well, what about the mesomorphs, kind of the more V shaped people, a little more muscle and she's like, they do okay, but they're not my gunners in my class. They can keep pace, and they do well. And they seem to be alright. I said, Well, what about the endomorph? Got a little bit more weight on them, maybe in the hips, or in the belly area. She's like, they hate cardio. They hate it with a passion. And it's hard to motivate somebody who hates doing an exercise that you're asking them to do. So I said, So then do you choose different types of exercises for different body types? And she's like, actually, now that you mentioned it, I kind of do. And I was like, I have an idea. Let's mix the four Chronotypes with the three body types. And let's see what happens. Now the good news is, I've got, over a million people have taken the quiz. So if people want to know what your chronotype is, if you go to Chronoquiz.com, we'll have that also in the show notes for you. You can learn what your chronotype is immediately. But we took about 5000 of those people and we asked them to complete body type quizzes. And all of a sudden, even more information opened up. So we learned that if you're an early person, a lion, and you have a long and lean body type, which means you have a fast metabolism, running and cardio is 100% the thing for you to do. And we also learned that if you're a long and lean person, you don't need to intermittent fast, you don't need to have a feeding window of only eight hours, you can have a feeding window of 12 hours. Right? So you start to think about it. Then we say, right, and then we say, because of your chronotype being earlier in the morning, we want you to feed in the morning, and then fast in the afternoons. Whereas me as a wolf, I fast in the mornings, and then I don't eat anything until one o'clock in the afternoon usually, because I'm a wolf. And my feeding window is again based on my body type, which is a mesomorph. So I, my feeding window is 10 hours, right. And I do it starting at one o'clock till about 11 o'clock. So, oh no, until I'm sorry, till 11, 10, nine o'clock, 10 hours. So it's, it actually works out really well. So what you end up only needing is if you understand your chronotype and you understand your body type, I can tell you the length of your fast and where to fast, I can tell you which exercises are going to be motivating for you. And I can tell you a time to go to bed.

Susan Sly 23:37
Michael, I love it. And I love the science behind this. Because where my mind goes as a former nutritionist, trainer, so people would always say to me, Susan, can I change my body type? So I'm an endomorph and I want to be an ectomorph and I, here's my answer to this. You can quote me, you can only shift one. That's right. So an endomorph cannot become an ectomorph, but you can become mesomorph, Yes. That's right. And depending on how you exercise, and you might have to exercise in, I would break it down into percentages. So that person who's the endomorph, who's maybe curvier, who wants to be the mesomorph then they're gonna have to do initially 80% cardio, 20% resistance. And if the person is an ectomorph, and they want to be a mesomorph it's 80% resistance, 20% cardio, and you know, you begin to get the idea. You just helped me with something so much. So going, going back to me, darling.

Dr. Michael Breus 24:37
It's my favorite topic besides me.

Susan Sly 24:39
So as a mesomorph, who is a lion, so what I have been doing is fasting until one o'clock and being exhausted, like just so tired. And I am a cardio junkie. I love cardio, doing weights and like, you might as well tell me I'm gonna do a meeting at 11 o'clock at night because doing weights, I'll do it but it's not my favorite, you know. I'm like two workouts a day, I'll do spinning in the morning, hot yoga in the afternoon. And I'm a happy girl, right? So that, what I'm hearing from you is someone like me, that I'm probably eating way too late.

Dr. Michael Breus 25:19
Well, what I would say is you're eating way too late, and your fasting window may be too small. Right? So thinking through that idea, and again, getting comfortable with it. And what I like to do is give people these parameters and say, try it out and see how it works for you. Remember, there are still individual differences within Chronotypes. There's still individual differences within body types. So you're what I would consider to be a meso lion. Right? So you're a mesomorph body with a lion Chronotype. And so what we know about meso lions is exactly what you said. They could, they're not as, believe it or not, well, yeah, cuz you're a lion. They're cardio freakin junkies, which is what you are, yeah. And we actually have to push them to get them to actually not do as much cardio, because a lot of times they get hurt, or they overdo it, right? Or they're like, Yeah, I can do a spin class. Oh, it's gonna, there's another one with a new instructor? I'll do that one too, you know, type of thing, right? I know you, Right? Like, that's how it works. So you're the perfect example of how using this book can provide balance. So the book's called Energize and the reason it's called Energize is because we want people to think about their energy levels, right. So first of all, what does energy mean? There's so many different definitions of energy. And so what I like to, I like to bring it down to one aspect. Energy means change, Okay? From going from rest into motion, you are changing, right? Energy is something that changes you fundamentally. Now, let's be honest, there's a lot of kinds of energy. There's emotional energy, there's physical energy, there's food or fuel energy, right? There's spiritual energy, there's all kinds of energy that's out there. And so what I tell people all the time is we have such a big toolbox to work from. So once you know where your energy lows are, you can insert an energy gain and bring your energy level up and keep consistent energy. The point of the book is we don't want to have energy that goes up and down like this, right? We want to have smooth, consistent energy because as an entrepreneur, you want to be able to make decisions. You don't want to be stressed out, but you also want to have work out you know, like, you want to have all those things kind of humming and drumming, so that way you can move through your day and be able to accomplish it.

Susan Sly 27:30
So-- I'm so excited about the book, Michael because, well, 50 million reasons. But one of the things I want to say to everyone listening is that the, the thing that Michael and Stacey have done with the book is there's a lot of misinformation out there when it comes to health and a lot of it is well intended. My daughter came to me, my 24 year old she's like, Oh Mama, I, there was this person on TikTok who said you need to take like X amount of vitamin C or whatever. I'm like, Oh, good. TikTok expert is, you know, not a health practitioner, yay! So what Michael and Stacey have done, I want everyone to imagine is they're taking the guesswork out. And here's why. It's very clear what your body type is. If you're, if you're confused about your body type, it's so easy to know. You are the, the ectomorph who, you essentially, you know, this my daughter, Avery eats whatever you want, and you're like a size two, that's her. You're, you're a mesomorph like me, your shoulder-hip ratio is very proportional, you can put on muscle very easily. And the endomorph has a tougher time. They're curvier. And there's a, we, Michael and I could do a whole show. And maybe that's a book down the road. But around epigenetics and how a lot of environmental toxicity have actually shifted our genetics. That's a whole other story. But it's very easy to know your body type. It's very easy to know when you're energized and when you're not. And that's why I'm so excited about this book. So at Radius, I host something called Wellness Wednesdays with our staff, right. So we have engineers, data scientists like, and they, they're you know, they, they are ask, they're asking questions, and I'm so excited to get the book for all of them because then the next Wellness Wednesday is like, here you go people, we actually have like, because they love science. And that's, I love science, too. So I want to ask you, because this is a burning question for me going back to like, you know, something you spoke about about the Chronotypes. What percentage of people are dolphins and what percentage are lions because I'm only at 70% with bears and wolves?

Dr. Michael Breus 29:39
Yeah, 15 and 15. So we see about a 15% spread for lions and about a 15% for dolphins. So it kind of makes it, and to be fair, the numbers aren't perfect, right? Because people, and by the way, you can change chronotypes over time. So as you notice, maybe when you see grandma and grandpa and they're saying, I want to have dinner at 4:30, 5 o'clock. That's because their Chronotypes started to shift earlier and earlier. It's what happens, welcome to getting older. It has to do with your melatonin curve moving backwards a little bit. But yeah, it's, it's fascinating because it's just this key that opens up all kinds of things. It turned out to be more of a communication tool than I ever would have imagined. Let me give you an example. My daughter, Carson is a wolf. I mean, most teenagers are right, most teenagers like to stay up late and sleep late. So I was the person who was responsible for waking her up in the mornings when she lived here at the house. And I would walk in, I'd say, Carson, good morning, what have you got on the plate today? And she'd look at me and she'd like, leave me alone. Like that was the most I could get out of her, right. But if I walked into her room at four o'clock in the afternoon, and said, Hey, Carson, what did you have on the plate today? I'm in there for 90 minutes and having a wonderful discussion with my daughter, which I can't think of anything more important than that. So it becomes a way to understand other people in your universe, knowing where they are and what they're doing. And it becomes so critically, critically important. Because when you want to have an important discussion with somebody, you want them to pay attention, right? You want them to be on point. And there are, there are very predictable times during the day when you can do that. Now, I will tell you that sometimes even, even with this predictability, people aren't moving, especially since COVID. I gotta tell you something. More people stopped moving since that shelter in place and all the craziness that went on there. And, and all the sudden, people's sleeps started getting messed up. They wouldn't follow their sleep schedules any longer, right, because all you got to do is throw on a ball cap to get on a zoom, you don't have to drive to work anymore, right. And so people's sleep schedules are off. We've also seen an increase in both caffeine and alcohol consumption during COVID. A 14% increase in, I think it was caffeine and 27% increase in alcohol. 27% increase, right? So and look, it's not like I don't like scotch, okay, it's not like I don't have a bourbon every once in a while, or, or have a cup of coffee or enjoy something like that. But understanding where it fits into the balance of it all is important. And so I didn't know a lot about movement. And that's where Stacey came into play. And we came up with this idea, we asked people to track their energy five times a day. So you set an alarm on your phone, and we have a scale of one to 10 scale. Now, this isn't just my scale, this is the scale that's called the RPE scale, the ratings of perceived exertion, which I know you're familiar with it, got our board created it. And it's great for exercise to know how hard it exercises. So we're using that to teach people about their energy. You do that for about four or five days, morning, mid morning, afternoon, early evening, and nighttime. And then what we do is we pull a little trick on people that now that they've been monitoring their energy those times, we say, now take those exact same times, and you're gonna move. So we give you a movement schedule. Five minutes, five times a day. You're not breaking a sweat, this isn't, this is, just to be clear, this isn't going to keep you in shape, this is going to keep you energized, right. So the first set of movement is what we call stretch, right? Makes sense. You get out of bed, you kind of need a little stretch here, you know, kind of give it one of these, we got a couple of those going on. Then the mid morning, we have next a shake. Do you ever seen an animal when they get up? What do they do? Right. They do that hold shake thing, right. And it's actually kind of energetic like you see, and then they're kind of waking up. Like if you try it, you'd be surprised at how energy producing it is. The third one is a bounce. So jumping up and down, jumping jacks, skipping, things like that. Now to be clear, I look ridiculous skipping down my driveway. But I do it and I have so much fun. My wife is laughing at me when I'm at, but I come back and I'm like, let's go, I'm ready to, I've got my enerygy.

Susan Sly 33:47
Next time I'm in LA, you all have a promise, I'm gonna sync up with Michael and we're gonna make a video of him skipping down the driveway, it's happening.

Susan Sly 33:55
Absolutely, you will see it, I can assure you that. And then the fourth one is build. So that's where you actually involve a major muscle group, chest, legs, but what have you again, just to keep the energy flowing and keep yourself moving. And then the final one is balance. And so we have people standing doing a tree pose, you know, before bed and the beautiful part is you can't think of anything else but trying to stay balanced. And it helps clear your mind and allow you to fall asleep. So it's really, it's really fun. It's interesting, you know, and honestly in 30 days, you feel like a million bucks. You know, it's really a lot of cool stuff.

Susan Sly 34:33
Well in the chrono like the, the lion type personality or the cortisol cardio junkies. Yes. What they are going to find and I will you know, my 20 plus years, maybe 30 years in health, you're going to lose weight, because I'm going to lecture people Michael just for fun. So. Go for it. Some of you, your cortisol is so high. You're doing way too much cardio, you're waking up between, you know, two and four in the morning, your adrenals are firing, right? Yeah, lose weight, your body's inflamed. And you're like, if I just fast more, I'm going to lose weight. No, you'll probably have a heart attack. So what you'll find is like, Michael, what you'll find is, as you begin to dial it back a bit and be unbalanced, the body naturally is going to release the weight. And I'll tell a story to validate this. So I, recently, Michael you know, with COVID, we weren't having road races, right. And so you know, I was, many people know I was a former professional Ironman triathlete, and so on. Anyway, so I entered a 10k. And so this is the fun thing. So after going through a super stressful q1 and q2, I told you I lost my teeth from grinding my teeth and all these things that happen. I was like Susan, you know better. You know, I was a holistic nutritionist. I told people this stuff. So I said, Screw it. I'm going to, if I don't feel like running, guess what I'm going to walk and when I go on the peloton, if I don't want to do a tough Cody Rigsby class or something, I'm going to do a scenic ride. And as I started to just say, whatever you want body for movement, that's what I'm going to do. So I actually ran less, and here's the fun thing. You ready for this? My first 10k ever, I was 20 years old, because I was a high school track athlete, but there was no reason I would run 10K. So at 49 years old, I ran a 10k only a minute and a half slower than I did when I was 20. Wow, that's impressive. I'm running less. And so my message to everyone is this book, in my opinion, and you guys know, you know, I have a lot of my friends on, Mark Victor Hansen, Mark-- Oh, I love him. Mark Divine, who has five New York Times bestsellers, if you haven't heard Mark's show, you know, Mark is a dear friend of mine. I only, if my friends write a book, they're the only people that get to come on and really promote their book because they're my friends. And that's, you know, part of the Friend Code. Right. But I believe Michael, this book that you and Stacey have created is not just about helping people have energy. I'll be bold enough and say it's gonna save some people's lives because I'm not, I'm more concerned about the high achieving CEOs, you know, driving, you know, that they're the ones who get cancer and heart attacks. I've lost many friends like that to cancer already. You give yourself cancer, you give yourself a heart attack, right. And so I want to thank you for creating this book with Stacey. I'm so excited to order a bunch of them. Oh my gosh. And so let's talk about what you know, people go on Amazon, they, like--

Dr. Michael Breus 37:51
We have, we have a website called Energize Myself that you can go to and you can order the, preorder the book there. Or you can just go straight up to Amazon and just type in energize and it will pop right up. And it's really a lot of fun. If people want to learn more about it, you can actually look at me on social. I, my handle is the sleep doctor, on Facebook, on Twitter, on LinkedIn on I mean, every one of those things. I don't know them all, to be honest with you, but I think I'm on all of them. And oh, believe it or not, you were mentioning TikTok. I have a TikTok video that's had 1.5 million views. It's fascinating. Because we give sleep tips. It's amazing how many people who are watching TikTok need sleep tips. Now. My curiosity is-- I'm not surprised --what time in the morning are they watching these sleep tips? Like it would be, it would be great if I could get a timestamp of everybody who watches them. Because then I could send them back a message to be like, go to bed.

Susan Sly 38:49
If you're watching this, you need to go to bed right? Yeah, exactly. Unless you're a dolphin.

Dr. Michael Breus 38:54
Yeah, it doesn't. Exactly It doesn't matter, Dolphin. So you know, it's it's interesting to sort of see we've had several people do the program ahead of the book. And it really does change people's lives. It really does put you into a place of more calm, more gratitude, more energy, and to be honest with you, more purpose. You know, I know you've got a lot of people out there who, they're purpose driven entrepreneurs, they, they've got something that they want to share with the world that either saved them or a family member or they've discovered something or they know a way to help people. And they're purpose driven entrepreneurs. When you have energy, you have motivation. And when you have motivation, you get success. That's just how it works. Right. And so I want my commitment to everybody out there is try it, give it a shot. I can almost assure you that it will it will work for you. But give me feedback. Let me know if there's something about it you want to add. We've got all kinds of interesting aspects to this book and energy. One of my favorites is what I call energy vampires. So I'm sure you have these people in your life, right? There's somebody in your life that every time you go near them, it sucks the life out of you, right? Now sometimes you don't have a choice, right? You have to be with this person on a fairly regular basis. So knowing and understanding how to maintain your energy without somebody pulling it out of you turns out to be a massive skill set.

Susan Sly 40:19
Well, Michael, I cannot thank you enough for being here. I'm so excited. Everyone needs to get the book. Energized!: Go From Dragging Your Ass To Kicking Ass In 30 Days, because I want you to kick ass and so does Michael. And Michael and I would love a five star review. If you're listening on iTunes, Spotify, Amazon, wherever you're listening, give us a five star review. Tag us on social, @thesleepdoctor, @SusanSly. And if you happen to be popping by the YouTube channel, you can see what Michael looks like, you can see him do the shake. And also I am the one who responds to all your comments. So drop a comment on YouTube. We would love that. So with that, God bless, go rock your day. And thanks again Michael for being here. This has been another episode of Raw and Real Entrepreneurship.