107: Mickey Beyer-Clausen & Dr. Steven Lockley, Timeshifter App : Shiftworker? Jetlag? There’s An App For That!

Welcome to the Sleep is a Skill podcast. My name is Mollie McGlocklin, and I own a company that optimizes sleep through technology, accountability, and behavioral change. Each week I'll be interviewing world class experts ranging from doctors, innovators, and thought leaders to give actionable tips and strategies that you can implement to become a more skillful sleeper.

Let's jump into your dose of practical sleep training.

Welcome to the Sleep is a Skill podcast. This is a. Special episode because years ago I brought the creators of Time Shifter, one of my favorite apps that you must must download if you have any sort of long haul travel in your future, where you are gonna be jumping around in different time zones. First of all, you just must get this app.

I have no affiliation with this app, um, but I really, really urge you to have this in your toolkit to help support. Minimizing jet lag, mitigating the effects of jet lag to improve your sleep. Have this in your kind of back pocket because it can make such a difference. Now for today's episode, we of course touch on the power of time shifter and we discuss something really exciting that the creators are coming out with, which is this access to, uh, a component of the app, which will now support shift workers.

This is a big deal. I work with a lot of poker players in particular, but also other people that are dealing with variable schedules, and with that, that can bring a lot of disruption to sleep. As you've likely determined or discovered, sleep loves consistency, and we'll talk about this on today's episode, but when your schedule with your work, your livelihood is one that will have that level of variability.

This is an app that could support you, strengthen your circadian rhythm as much as possible, and being in. Formed on what steps you can take and at what times you can take them, such that you can minimize some of the deleterious effects of shift work. So I think you're gonna really enjoy today's episode.

Now. Previously we had Mickey Bayer Clausen on the podcast, and he's an entrepreneur with the track record of building venture backed category defining companies. In the nineties, Mickey was one of the first to launch internet businesses, and since 2008, he has pioneered the use of cutting edge science and technology to improve people's lives.

Currently, he's the co-founder and c e O of Time Shifter, the world's most advanced circadian technology platform. Now recently Time Shifter launched a new app to help shift workers optimize their sleep, alertness, health, and quality of life. Before Time shifter, he co-founded several other businesses including Truck Archive.

He's also the founder and chairman of the Happiness Foundation. Now joining us today as well as Dr. Steven Lockley, which is really exciting cuz he is truly a pioneer in his field. And he is a neuroscientist at Brigham and Women's Hospital, an associate professor of medicine in the Division of Sleep Medicine at Harvard Medical School, and time shifters.

Co-founder and chief scientist, Dr. Lockley is also an adjunct professor in VC Fellow at the Surrey Sleep Research Center, university of Surrey in the uk. With nearly 30 years of research experience, he's considered an international authority on circadian rhythms. Sleep in humans. In addition to his research, Dr.

Lockley works with clients such as NASA astronauts and mission controllers and Formula One elites on the managing of jet lag shift work and peak performance. Now, truly, this was an honor to speak with these individuals who are making such a difference in this area of circadian health and management on a practical level.

So I think you're gonna absolutely be fascinated with this conversation. And as always, if you have any questions about some of the places that we went in this episode or topics that we got into that were unclear, do not hesitate to go to sleep as a skill.com. In the lower right hand corner, we have a little sleep bot that you can ask questions.

You can also sign up for our weekly newsletter, sleep Obsessions. We've been sending those for over four years, every Monday. We've never missed a Monday. So please join that community and ask any questions that might come to mind throughout this podcast. So I get a lot of questions around sleep supplements, and I'm very hesitant to just throw out a whole laundry list of possibilities.

One, I don't think it's the most responsible thing to do. I really do believe in testing to see what types of supplements make sense for you. And two, because I really truly believe that most of the things that you can do to improve your sleep are behavioral, psychological, environmental in nature, and often don't cost a dime.

However, there is one supplement that I personally take every day and that I do feel quite comfortable with suggesting for most individuals to experiment with because of couple of reasons. It's high safety profile and high rates of deficiencies in our modern society. Some put the numbers as somewhere around 80% of the population being deficient in this one area, and that is magnesium.

So magnesium has been called the calming mineral, and some report that magnesium can increase gaba, which encourages relaxation on a cellular level, which is critical for sleep. Magnesium also plays a key role in regulating our body's stress response system. Those with magnesium deficiency usually have higher anxiety and stress levels, which negatively impacts sleep As.

Now before you go out and buy a magnesium supplement, it's important to understand that most magnesium products out there are either synthetic or they only have one to two forms of magnesium. When in reality, your body needs all seven forms of this essential sleep mineral. So that's why I recommend a product for my friends over at Bio Optimizers, they have created something called the Magnesium Breakthrough, and taking this magnesium before bed helps you relax and wake up, refresh and energize.

And while we don't recommend that you go two nuts on looking at all the sleep stage classifications on all your wearables, I will share anecdotally that many clients have reported improvements in their deep sleep trend numbers. Again, I don't want you going nuts on the sleep stage classification numbers on your wearables, but I do wanna let you know about that because I know that many of you do reach out on questions of how to improve your deep sleep.

So I also love that bio optimizers offers free shipping on select orders, and they offer a 365 day money back guarantee on all their products. Plus they have a customer satisfaction rating of 99.3%. Very impressive. And you can get 10% off magnesium breakthrough. Again, this is the same magnesium that I use every single night.

And finally, you can get 10% off magnesium breakthrough. Again, that's the magnesium supplement that I use every single night by going to www dot mag m a g. So mag breakthrough.com/sleep as a skill and be sure to use the code sleep as a skill for 10% off. And welcome to the Sleep is a Skill podcast. I am really, really excited to introduce to you two real pioneers in the area of sleep and circadian health, and really providing us on this podcast with some clear pathways for action in various areas that can impact the results with your sleep and many other areas of life by virtue of that.

So thank you both for being here, Steven and Mickey. Thank you. It really means the world. Thank you for having us, Mollie. Hello. Yay. So great. And now this is actually the second time that we've spoken to some of the things that you've both have been a part of creating over at Time Shifter and now some of the new things that are coming out around shift work.

So we had you on way back at the beginning of the podcast, so we had you way, way, way back. Uh, so really excited to dive back in with more. And in this one, I think we're gonna go even more deeply in rooted into the science of circadian health and how to be navigating this and why it matters. Why do we care about this as it relates to improving our sleep?

Okay. I'm gonna stop talking and let you all, you know, kind of share what's happening over there. With this Time Shifter app, the Shift Work app, how did this all come to be and why is this so important from under the umbrella of circadian rhythms and circadian health? Well, I think to give you a quick answer to that, many people know time shifter for our Jet lag app that we launched back in 2018 and, uh, probably think the time shifter is just a jet lag app, which is not completely true.

We are a technology company and jet lag is only one of many things that we want to address. So since we spoke the first time, we have, uh, moved a little bit further ahead with, uh, uh, some other areas where the first, that is in beta now is the shift four gap that is, is intended to help shift workers manage their changing schedules.

You're seeing, just like with jet lag, you're seeing some misalignment in their circadian rhythms because of the changing schedule. So that's the second area that we're gonna focus on and help people with. And I'm really happy you bring us on, Mollie, because now your podcast is about sleep. And of course, I bet many of your listeners are wondering, circadian, what's the connection between Steve and Circadian?

And so I'm excited that you invited us to come in. We, we'd like to highlight and talk about that for a little bit. And with Dr. Steven Lpi on, on the podcast, he's one of the leading scientists in that area. So maybe he can enlighten us all. Yes, would love that. Well, thank you Mickey. Uh, and thanks Paul again for inviting us today.

Circadian rhythms are, are really central to health and, and we underestimate their impact. And I think over the past few years people have started to understand the importance of sleep, but circadian, I think encompasses sleep and many other aspects of our health. The timing of our biology is really important to how healthy we are.

And sleep is of course, important in terms of its timing. We need to sleep at the right time in order to get good quality sleep, long duration sleep, particular sleep stages. Um, but it isn't just about sleep. The circadian clock controls the timing of sleep, but also the timing of many other aspects of our biology.

So your alertness patterns, your performance, your. Your immune function, your metabolism, your reproductive hormones. Really any of our body systems has a circadian or a 24 hour element. And so people often think about sleep as being the most important aspect in terms of health, but we need to make sure that the timing of sleep and then the timing of many other aspects is also optimized.

And so we often, I think, don't think enough about the circadian aspects, the timing aspects, and that's what we're trying to do to make sure that we don't just do the right things, but we do the right things at the right time. And that's gonna be necessary for good health. Absolutely. And we do have a, one of the things we've discovered so far anyway about who's listening is we've have kind of a, a breadth of people listening in and one of them, or one group seems to be quite savvy, kind of, or views themselves as more savvy as it relates to getting really connected to their sleep.

They might be tracking their sleep in some regard. They might be looking at really aiming to optimize their sleep and are loosely familiar with and maybe more familiar than the average person on circadian rhythm and how that impacts. Their sleep. And yet this is an opportunity to go much, much more deep on that conversation and, and I appreciate your distinction of we might think and collapse inappropriately circadian rhythms and sleep and forget this whole other world that's at play and how that can massively impact our, our health and wellbeing.

So you get all of these other benefits by in training this area. So I wonder if we can even share too, with the kind of practical application here of what you all have created these two pathways for action by which people can help support their circadian health by virtue of guidance of these particular algorithms that certainly out of your, on your website, speaking to using a similar algorithm that they use at NASA as our understanding and then applying this to everyday individuals.

So I'm wondering if you can help us understand what would that look like? How would that kind of pan out? So before we get to some of the applications that we've developed, maybe it's good just to review how sleep and circadian rhythms can, can interact and how your listeners can use them. So the, our circadian clock, we have a, a main clock in the brain, uh, in the super charismatic nucleus is the fancy word for it in, in the brain.

And that, uh, is considered, if you like, central clock, the clock that controls many things like sleep, many hormones and alertness and so on. Uh, we also know that there are clocks all over the body as well. Our organs and tissues also have clocks, so we can come back that, uh, to that a little bit later. But what the circadian system craves is stability.

We evolved in a very stable light dark cycle. We evolved in the natural light dark cycle where the day-to-day pattern of light doesn't change by more than a few minutes. And so our clock synchronizes to that light dark cycle in fact. Light is the major and really only major environmental time queue that our circadian system can synchronize to.

And so we detect through special photoreceptors in the eye. When the light comes up, when the light goes down and those special cells send information to the brain. To reset our clock each and every day. Now, uh, for a lot of my career, I've studied the impact of blindness on circadian rhythms and sleep.

Hmm. And if you are unfortunate enough not to have eyes or not to have, uh, any light perception, you can't synchronize that clock to the 24 hour day, to the 24 hour light dock exposure. And in those patients, they develop something called non 24 hour sleep weight disorder, which is a long way of saying that their, their rhythms on a non four hour day.

But on average, they shift a little bit later every day, about half an hour later, every day in blind patients. So their clock wants to make them go to sleep at midnight tonight, midnight 30, tomorrow, 1:00 AM, 1:32 AM and go all the way around the clock. And so that might seem okay for a few. But after 24 days, your brain is trying to make you go to sleep at 12 noon and then 1230.

Yeah. And then 1:00 PM so on. So we underestimate what the light dock cycle does to our clock and, and therefore does to sleep because when we lose that ability, our clocks can't synchronize and everything. The clock controls, including sleep, is unable to remain synchronized. And so light dark cycles are really important to our biology and keeping everything at the right time and sleep is a way that gates light to the brain.

So when we close our eyes, we of course reduce the amount of light hitting the retina and then get into to the clock in the brain. When we open our eyes, we see light and that information gets to the brain. So the sleep wake cycle is actually the way through which the brain gets its light and dark cycles.

And so if you want to have a stable, light, dark cycle to stabilize your central clock, You need a stable sleep wake cycle so that the brain is receiving the same light, dark information every day. And so even if you didn't sleep but stayed in the dark, that would still be important for the biological clock and all the things, the clock controls.

But of course, if we sleep at the right time, we see dark at the right time, we synchronize our rhythms to the right time and everything that lines up. And so for good sleep and good circadian entrainment, keeping a very stable, light dark cycle, doing as closely as possible, the same thing every day is important.

Now, the other part of that is that we've introduced electric light into our modern lives. And so we now have an ability to extend the day beyond dusk. And that light also has a major impact on our biology. And so we don't want to be seen bright lights in the evening. We don't want to see bright lights up until bedtime because that tells the brain it's still day.

Shifts our clock later and essentially induces a daytime physiology, which, which is not what we want when we're trying to go to sleep. So again, if we're thinking about light and circadian rhythms and sleep, we want to minimize light exposure after dusk. And that means bringing down the intensity of the light as much as possible, and also bringing down the blue content of the light.

So having warmer looking lights, firelight, candlelight type lighting, uh, in the evening for as long as possible before sleep. And I'm talking about two to three hours before sleep. Mm, will help your brain calm down and also help synchronize your circadian clock, which has all those other benefits. In addition to sleep.

It's so important. I love what you said too, cuz I think that this can be really helpful for those that get concerned if they are having difficulty sleeping or they anticipate that they might not sleep so well, whether it's travel related, just day-to-day life. If they, and because I love that in your, in the time shifter app, that there's that kind of call out.

It was worded some version of, you know, even if you don't, if you're not fully asleep, just the mimicking. Right. I loved that. It was so well put. Even if you're just putting yourself in a dark environment to mimic what would be happening during that darkness time that we're trying to create can have these benefits and I think that such an important call out that you're making for our day-to-day life, that there's something that we're helping to support ourselves on.

Even if we didn't get perfect sleep that night, even if we had some wake-ups or whatever. That I think is really important for people to understand that Then still maintaining that. Consistency, that stability that you're speaking to is just game changing. So important. It's really very important to, to try and maintain that light doc cycle, even if you're not getting enough sleep.

Now, of course, if you move away from a little bit, you can bring it back. It's not that, you know, you have to do everything on the minute every day, but the closer you can get to a, a more regular schedule, the better. And that has those knock-on benefits to those other systems as well. Now, of course, that isn't gonna help overnight if, if you just do one or two nights of, of sleep stability, just like any behavioral change, yeah, that's not gonna have a, a miraculous effect in a day or two.

But if you do that over weeks and months, your body clock will actually reset itself to that new light dark cycle you've imposed and everything will align with that. And so people could feel improvements in their alertness, in their mood, and and so on and so forth. So stability is key. Light. Dark cycles are key.

And so in any circadian intervention, whether that's just your day-to-day health or dealing with something like jet lag or shift work, you have to really concentrate on the light, dark exposure. And often that means also focusing on when you are sleeping. Mm. So good. And actually, since we are going a little bit deeper into the topic of light dark, I'm curious, we get so many questions from people that say, all right, fine, but I wake up so early.

I have hours before the sun rises. What do I do with things like that? Or, I have a particular schedule. Do you have any suggestions on how people can manage that? Do we always wanna aim to just as much as possible align with the actual rhythms of nature? Uh, or do we wanna utilize faux lighting in those situations?

What do you see? So, so often if people wake up early in the morning and they don't have a clinical disorder, and of course it's important to differentiate normal, uh, waking from someone with a clinical problem, uh, we can come back to that. I found that blocking out the light with an eye mask, for example, in the morning, is often a good idea, especially if you've woken up close to dawn or or after dawn.

That light is an alerting signal. It's telling your brain to wake up. And so having an eye mask next to the bed, pop an eye mask on, try and go back to sleep, uh, can often help in the morning, but also thinking about how you time your sleep. And so of course people understand the, the idea of chronotype, whether you're a morning person or an evening person.

Those measures are, if you like, proxy measures of of your own internal body clock time. Someone who has a very quick, uh, body clock time tends to be morning type and they feel better earlier in the day and, and feel sleepy earlier in the evening. Whereas evening types have a slower body clock and they.

Tend to feel better later in the day and go to sleep later. If you can time your sleep with what you know about yourself in terms of your chronotype, then it'll be easier to sleep for longer and get better quality sleep. Of course, many people can't do that because of school or work or or other schedules, and so then it's important to stick to their schedule as much as possible because you will adapt to it and jet lags a good example of that.

If I fight to Japan, I will eventually synchronize the Japanese time. If you decide to to shift to a particular work schedule and sleep pattern, you will adapt to that over a long enough time, but you have to stick to it. The problem comes when we change at weekends because we decide to stay up late for social activities.

Or if you've got a rotating shift schedule where your work schedule is changing very rapidly, then it is harder to stick to that stable plan. But if you're someone who has a a regular time job that doesn't require. Uh, shift work. Then try and find a time that works for you with your social life and, uh, and, and your work life.

But then stick to that including at weekends if you can, because when you change at weekends, you go back to square one on a Monday morning and you're struggling again for the rest of that week. Sure. Real quick question. When you think of uh, night types and early types, do you have a particular, and maybe this is uh, out of the scope of the conversation, maybe this is too out there, but do you have a range by which you think about for that?

The reason I like the range of time, so I asked this because I have a lot of people that will say, oh, I'm an extreme night owl. I do my best work late at night, and they're pushing it till three, four or five in the morning. When you say night type, do you mean just drifting a bit later than you might traditionally see outside of Sunset happens and we got a few hours later.

Does that feel right that people would actually go that late or does that feel like it's a misalignment With lighting, that feels a little bit late and it does, right. Eventually it does. It, it does. And eventually that does spill over into a clinical disorder called delayed sleep Wake phase disorder.

Which is a formal clinical disorder, which, um, is very common in teenagers whose clocks are naturally, uh, shifted later. Uh, it's not because they're staying and playing video games. Yeah. Their clocks really are later, and that doesn't start to change until our early twenties. But the definition of whether it's a disorder is whether it really interferes with your life.

Yeah. If you work a job where you can go to sleep at four in the morning and wake up at noon, that's fine. Right? That's okay for you to do. But if you have to be at work at 7:00 AM and can't get to sleep until 4:00 AM then of course that's a problem that then constitutes a disorder problem. So if you can live completely, naturally to your own time, then great, you should do that.

And, and that would be a healthy thing to do. But when it starts to interfere with your work life, social life, family life, then it starts to become a problem. And so someone who is going to sleep at 3, 4, 5 in the morning, who has a, you know, a typical type work schedule that is too late, we think of even in types who are not.

Approaching that clinical. So there's people who may be going to sleep after midnight, something like that, and and morning types who feel tired and go to bed at sort of nine or 10. That's a sort of normal range. Yeah. But of course there are people at either end of that. So if you do find you can't sleep when you want, that may mean you are approaching a clinical disorder.

And then we have to think about, well, why is that happening? Are you seeing too much light late into the evening, which is causing you to shift later than you want? Are you doing all those good sleep hygiene things at the right time Because the timing matters. And so you should then evaluate, well, how can I prioritize sleep and get the right time for sleep and then fit everything else around that?

Whereas we often think about sleep last and do everything else before we decide when to sleep. So being proactive, like any behavioral change, you have to work at it to, to get it right. Oh, absolutely. I mean, we work with people and they're all wearing aura rings, so we look at hundreds of aura rings data every day, and we'll see the difference when people just start to shift exactly what you're saying, bringing in the evening, red light, candlelight fire, you know, just the really dramatic difference to their environment, and then a high amplitude of bright light exposure by day.

They're like, oh, I don't, I don't know what happened. I'm getting tired so much earlier. And just over time, it's just remarkable. And so the things that you're speaking to, I just, ugh, it's so, so important. So we're all very appreciative of the incredible work that you all are doing to really help educate the masses on the massive importance of some of these topics and then helping to really make it applicable in people's day-to-day life.

So from that place, what are some of these things that you've be, I feel like we're only on the beginning of what you all are kind of creating, but what can we start to learn about what you are creating and how could people envision that in their day-to-day life? Well, I mean, I think that, again, the first thing that we did is create the, the jet lag app with the intent to help travelers deal with that disruption of their steep weight cycle in the light dark cycle.

Now we're talking about light. That, that is the key. And um, as you know, like on a rule of thumb, we say it takes about a time zone or day per time zone to get over jet lag. By applying science in terms of timing, light and dark, you can get that, uh, reduced three to four times in terms of how quickly you can get over jet lag.

So it's me. It's really materially different than, uh, trying to do it on your own. And I think the thing that got me excited about circadian science and what Dr. Lock is for has worked with for so many years is that it's just not intuitive. I mean, some of these things are very, very complex and they are not only about circadian science, there is a component of sleep science, there's a component of caffeine science.

There is, we know the homo melatonin and the supplement version of melatonin that also can play a role. And so how do you. Figure out the best timing for doing things in order to achieve your goal. Whether it's to adapt a new time zone or, or change the new work schedule is really, really complex and just not something you can do on your own.

Yeah. And then on top of it, not just if you, if you knew how to do that freight, but then your modern life gets in the way, right? Because then there might be some issues. You can't sleep when you arrive to a destination because you're in the airport. You need to get to the hotel before you can check in and, and ultimately go to bed.

So there are all these different practical things that are getting in our way from really doing what is best for us. And so you need to work around those constraints as well in order for us to really figure out. How to time things and that's what the time shifter, jet lag app is doing and I think is doing an, an incredible job.

We have, at this point, we have almost a hundred thousand post travel surveys back. Wow. The users that have used it, you know, we always ask people if they are willing to give us that information. We ask them from a scale from one to five, how much did you follow our advice From a scale from one to five, how much jet like did you experience?

And now based on, on those, uh, questions we are getting back at 96.4% of people don't struggle with very severe or severe jet lag. When they follow the advice 80% or more, that's just one extent, but then you have a six time increase in very severe and severe jet lag if you don't follow it, uh, to that extent.

Oh, we have a 16 time increase if you, with very severe jet lag if you don't follow it. So the numbers are pretty impressive, you know, and that's clearly because the science is working, uh, the way we, we expect it to. So it's very exciting to really for the first time have the circadian knowledge of Dr.

Lockley and other colleagues of Dr. Lockley. Now come into play in a solution where we are translating that science, but not only, you know, one science, it's multiple sciences and they're not trying to apply what we refer to as a practicality filter in order to give people advice that are realistic to follow.

Yes. Because if you are told to follow some advice and it's just unrealistic Yeah. For you to follow it, the first thing you're gonna do is abandon the solution or delete the app in this case and, and move on and try to go back to your old routines that we know don't work very well. So jet lag is, is we are really excited about.

It's been a great validation. You know, in the real world, uh, for the science, the science, we knew it, what the science said and what, how it works in the lab, but really translate that to, to the benefit of all the, the travelers has been a really, really exciting journey for us. And finally, we're seeing all these big brands embrace circadian science.

More and more of them. We have, uh, this partnership with United Airlines that's been incredible. They say that, uh, when they're offering time shifter to all their premium one  members at no cost and are offering their other mileage plus members a great deal where they get 500 miles back when they buy time shifter.

And then, uh, working with, uh, chase Bank recently a partnership with launched here in general to put a spotlight on circadian science and how to deal with jet lag. So more and more brands, six sensors. We're working with six sensors, Orva, working with different brands out there in the travel industry. And of course, more and more travel brands are now understanding the importance of applying circadian science because now that it becomes more known that circadian science is the solution to jet lag, we're gonna start seeing a more and more embrace it and offer it to their guests, their members, their their passengers.

Now then the second thing that we are very excited about, the second solution that we built is for shift workers. Yes. And of course this is, uh, something that is incredibly exciting for multiple reasons. Number one is, There are a lot of shift workers out there worldwide. We're talking about 20% of the workforce.

It's a lot of people. It's almost 700 million people worldwide. So it's, it's not a small group. It's, it's a very large group. And increasingly so during Covid we saw, you know, all these operations trying to am but production and work around the clock. We all are becoming shift workers in some way because we are now doing Zoom calls at, you know, one, 2:00 AM Yep.

Or doing other things. At times we normally wouldn't do them. And, and again, the work schedule changes. That's one thing. The other reason why I'm excited about it, and I know Dr. Lochte is, is very excited about is because. It's a daily problem for them. This is not a trip they go on, you know, every month or every quarter or every year.

It's people that are living with these negative consequences of changing work schedules every single day and struggling with social relationships with their family. Clearly there are safety issues there. Um, yeah, increased accidents. Their immune function isn't functioning optimally when they work, when they're awake because it does not really understand what the misalignment that's going on.

So being able to help shift workers really deal with, with these consequences and negative consequences is a great milestone for us and something we're very excited. Amazing. And I'm wondering too, if we can real quick paint the picture of, so when we speak about time shifting on our first podcast that we did together, we talked about kind of being like this verb where you're in the act of time shifting both before your trip, during your trip and after your trip.

And is someone that was a digital nomad for three years. I can tell you that be time shifter has just become a night and day, no pun intended, on the difference that it's made for long haul travel, just game changing over the years. And it almost could be like sketched out as very clear avatar of the difference when you're kind of in night mode and day mode.

And I'm wondering if you can kind of help guide us on what that person might look like, because people are like, well, what would I be doing any different? I mean, besides changing my clock to the destination time, you know, people say these things. What might we see when we are in that process that can really make a measurable difference?

You know, Mickey spoke earlier about circadian solutions not being intuitive, and I think, you know, jet Lags a, a great example of that. Yeah. You know, the travel magazines or, or generic advice will say things like, you know, get on the new time zone as quickly as you can when you land in Paris in the morning, have breakfast like a Parisian, uh, go for a run, get onto local time as quickly as possible, and that's only true half of the time, and in fact, half of the time will make your jet lag worse and send your body clock back to California if you've flown from the east coast of the us.

And so you can't really tackle these circadian issues with intuition or you know, what you think is happening. It really has to be based in the science and in the science of when to see light, but also when to avoid light. The only thing that resets our clock substantially in the natural world is the light dark cycle.

So light has to be central to any circadian solution. Often people talk about, well, exercise or food or acupuncture, or, All, all these other ideas, none of them work if they don't address the light dark cycle, which. The whole point of, or the most important point for cian rhythms, melatonin can reset your clock, but you have to take it again at the right time.

It may shift in in the wrong direction. And also, Steven, if I can interrupt, because now we're talking about melatonin supplement and also if you're taking melatonin, but you are doing the wrong thing with light, you are eliminating the benefits of melatonin supplements. So, but before I knew about science many years ago, I used melatonin at times when I traveled because I thought that would help.

And, and maybe it did make me a little drowsy and, and help that way, but you could really use melatonin in a much more clever way where it's really pushing you even faster towards your new time zone, as long as you are also timing light correctly. So the combination of the two is powerful, but if you don't, if you ignore the light, the timing of light, you are really not getting the help that you could, uh, the benefits of, of melatonin.

That's an example of where sleep and circadian becomes separated. A lot of people for jet, like for example, Think that if they tackle the sleep, they're tackling the jet lag, right? And that's not true because if you only tackle the sleep, you are not addressing the underlying cause, which is a circadian disruption.

And so if you knock yourself out with a sleeping pill on a flight, you may sleep, but you are not doing anything to help jet lag because your clock isn't resetting to the new times zone. And in fact, it could make it worse because if you knock yourself out with a sleeping pill and see dark at the wrong time, you may shift your body clock in the wrong direction.

And so it really has to be an integrated program of how to shift the clock. And then on top of that, we can use other things to help with sleep or help with alertness. And that's okay. Once you've got the circadian component right, then you can look at some of those other direct benefits. And certainly we, we advise people how to use caffeine not only to help with their alert.

But also to help them stay awake and see light at the right time. Yes, uh, as well, which again isn't obvious if, if you're using the app but is in included in the science. And so circadian shifting has to be central addressing sleep doesn't necessarily address that. And I think that's the sort of mindset change that needs to happen when we're talking about circadian applications.

Sleep is not the clock, but the clock certainly affects sleep. And, um, as people get more educated about circadian rhythms, and as Mickey said, we're going to see more and more companies and more and more solutions in the circadian area, people will learn this difference. Then it opens up a whole new set of, of solutions for people that are not focused just on sleep.

Absolutely. And I think people are often surprised when they really see that they can, even though it might be challenging at different points when say on, in the case of travel, when you're in a cabin with all kinds of light and you wanna be shifting dark, but you can do certain things and you can have the eye mask and you can do the hats and you know, you can have the physicality.

And then when it's time to be mimicking daylight, then suddenly you are the person that is maybe annoying people, but whatever, uh, you got the lights on, you got the screens on full blast or whatever you need to do to mimic that excitatory response to mimic daylight as much as we possibly can. And you know, so you, I think what's so great, what I love about what you're creating, Is the clarity by which we have this schedule to follow.

And it tells us when we're all groggy and out of it, and you know, half the time we're messed up when we're jet lagged and trying to function and the ugh, the flight was delayed and whatever happened. But then when we have this clarity that, okay, I know I'm supposed to be mimicking darkness here and to have that guidance, so, so important.

And then as we start to step into that very same concern with shift work. And my understanding is you also speak to rotating shifts too. Is that right? Which is just so challenging. I mean so, so, so challenging. So to have that level of clarity when people are shifting to a whole set of, uh, schedule one week and then entirely different thing the next week, to have this, I think can make such a difference.

So thank you for. So shift work is, is a slightly different problem to jet lag. And in that it's a often, for many people, a continuous, uh, process, a continuous series of, of shift work schedules. Yes. And you can never really fully adapt to shift work. So people often say, well, I, I work the night shifts, I've adapted nights.

But in reality, most people are not because you have days off and you go back onto your normal schedule during days or you are rotating, so you, you're not able to stick to a stable schedule. And so management of shift work is, is not quite the same as gel. Like it has some of the same underlying principles in terms of, of trying to, to reset the clock, but it is about managing the sleep and managing the wake directly as well as the circadian component because often people can't change their shift.

So, yeah. Um, I've done a lot of work understanding, uh, how different shift schedules can be changed to alter, uh, safety. So for example, I've published some work where we look to medical residents work hours. And we changed their work hours to a more sleep and circadian friendly, uh, schedule. And in a study in the US we reduced serious medical errors by more than a third and a study in the UK by 30% just by changing the schedule so that it was more sympathetic to sleep and circadian adaptation.

And so if you can change shift schedules, you can often make them much safer, but many workers don't have that opportunity. They're given their schedules and, and have no, uh, way to change them. And so what we're, we're trying to do is help people manage the shifts they're given as well as they can. But we know if, if we get it wrong, which we, you know, really have got it wrong over the past, uh, century or so, there are big consequences.

Shift work is, if you like, the most extreme example of circadian misalignments. Yeah. What happens when your clock and behavior are completely out of sync? So you are sleeping at the wrong time, eating at the wrong time, being awake and performing at the wrong time. And we know that shift workers have much higher rates of, of all chronic diseases, more heart disease, more cancer, more diabetes, more depression, because it's unnatural for us to be awake at night and asleep in the day.

We've not evolved to do that, and so we know it. Shift work is very damaging to health. And so what we need to try and do is reduce, first of all, how much society uses shift work? Do we really need 24 7 restaurants and 24 7 libraries? Do we need to have all those shops open around the clock? Society should, you know, should judge whether we really need as much shift work, first of all.

But then if you're given a shift pattern, how can you best manage it? But it's not really about adapting fully to that. It's really about adapting how you, uh, best you can, but then also managing some of those other aspects, light the sleep and. And Mollie, I was thinking before, uh, Lochte responded to, uh, to that question.

I, I really liked how you talked about mimicking, you know, the, what you need to do and what you need to follow. Because what I think is very exciting and encouraging about, uh, Tian science and, and applying it in real life to deal with these types of problems like jet lag and shift work, uh, disorder, is the fact that it's relatively simple to follow and comply with the type of advice that we're providing.

For example, in the Time Shifter app for jet lag or shift work. You know, when we say prioritize bright light, it doesn't mean you need to be out in sunlight, right? You can, you can just increase the brightness of the artificial light you have in your, in your room, or if you're in a plane, you mention that in a dark plane, you turn on the lights above you, you increase the brightness of the screen when you're watching a movie or your computer, when, if you're doing some work, you just increase the brightness fully.

You do everything you can to just get some bright light and, uh, the fish light is su. The same applies to darkness. You need to be avoiding light for a period of time. And that might, you know, happen to be in the morning for a few hours before you're returning back home on a trip or something. And it, it's like, but if you want to go outside and have breakfast or if you are meeting people, what can you do?

Doesn't mean you have to have a seat mask on or stay in a completely dark room. Of course that would be the best, but in reality, we can't follow that type of, of advice all the time. So putting on your dark sunglasses when you're outside in the sun or, or trying to, you know, even inside where there might be a bright light will help you.

And so I just feel like when it comes down to it, we should all understand that in order to comply with circadian science, to improve our lives, reduce jet like, Deal with the negative consequence of shift work, managing our day-to-day to optimize our sleep and our alertness. It really comes down to just look at light and and dark.

And if you can't do what's best, you have some tools for the second best. You can use dark sunglasses, you can use artificial light to get you there. So that's what I see as very encouraging. This is not, um, it's certainly not a silver bullet, it's not a pill you can take, but it's very, very powerful. And we talked about the benefits before, so, uh, I think that's what's exciting.

Here's a science that when translated correctly, can have massive. Massive benefits to you and that's exciting. It's rather you find that it's not just a matter of feeling just a little bit better, but here you have not a little bit better. You have a 400%, you know, faster adaptation to a new time zone that's not a little bit better.

That's maturely better. It's in it. In fact, when I go from New York where I live now, back to my home country, to Europe, which is a six time zones difference and east, which is bad for me and my prototype. When I arrive, I already don't feel jet lacked because I did my two days of pre adaptation and I did the right thing on the plane.

So even though there is a little bit of jet lag left, it's unnoticeable and that just is fantastic. Being able to wake up in the morning and on your own and not find an alarm clock that's trying to drag you out of bed because it's in the middle of the night in your biological clock, and being able to speak through the night every night when when you get there is just amazing.

So I hope that when people are listening to this podcast that they take this, these incredible tools and also the science and, and, and investigate more. What circadian rhythms are, how many of our systems are affected by it? When you travel, why are you getting more sick? When you're at shift worker, why do you get more sick more often?

It's because your immune function isn't strong at the time. It needs to be strong. There are 300% increasing car crash in car accidents, in shift workers, not shift workers. When they drive home in the morning, they're fatigued, they're tired. The immune function example actually was to start in 2020 in a, in a hospital around covid infections.

Night shift workers had a 300% increase in covid infections. Yes, and it just shows you how many systems this affect if you eat a steak when it's 2:00 AM in your biology, even though it might be in the middle of the day at your destination time zone. Or it might be when you are off from work as a shift worker.

Certainly it's not good for your metabolism. Certainly it's not something that's great for your, for your health. You know, we can see, um, Steve, maybe you can refer to the glucose level study when it comes to, uh, at the wrong time and you can just see free diabetes and diabetes levels, you know, very quickly.

Well, you know, that's one of the other consequences that that often shift workers experience are the, the metabolic consequences of eating at the wrong circadian time. We've known since the 1990s that if if you eat the same meal in the night compared to the day at night, you have high glucose, higher insulin, higher fat levels to the same meal.

Because we've not evolved to eat at night. We should be asleep at night. And in the study Mickey is referring to by a colleague, Frank Skier, he essentially inverted the sleep wake cycle in the laboratory study. And young, healthy people, quite a high percentage of them looked diabetic just, just in a few days.

Because they're eating at the wrong time. Now, they went back to normal when the study finished, but it shows that, uh, even in a short time, you can cause these, these health problems of eating at the wrong time. And imagine doing that over a lifetime. O over years and decades as a shift worker. That's what causes these, these, uh, health issues.

But if shift work is, is the most extreme example, if you like, of circadian misalignment. All of us have circadian misalignment day to day. Yeah. And so if you stay up late by two hours, that's like traveling two time zones west. If you go to bed early, that's like traveling east. You don't have to travel to feel the problems associated with circadian misalignment.

And so that brings us right back to, to the stability discussion. Yep. The circadian system wants stability. So even if you are not a shift worker, if you're not having jet lag, keeping that stable day-to-day pattern is good for health because then you're eating at the same circadian time, sleeping, active, working, and so on.

And that's what we've evolved to do. And, and so even in your day-to-day lives, thinking about how you time things is gonna be good for health and wellbeing. Huge. Well, one of the things we discovered since the start of this podcast is that people will say, wow, okay, these people, these guests know so much about sleep or things related to sleep.

So they wanna say, or they say, well, we wanna know what they're doing. So we do ask four questions to every guest. It started with three, but then we added in morning routine with the argument that that would impact your sleep results at night. So now we have four questions, and the first one that we do ask everyone that comes on, I'm gonna be curious to get the answer here, is, what does your nightly sleep routine look like?

And I think we've had some clues based on these conversations, but curious what that would look like. I'm, I'm happy to start. I have, uh, I have a family with two kids now, 11 and 13. And so since I became aware and I met Dr. Lockley now seven, seven years ago, I think. Mm-hmm. I have had, uh, biological lighting in my house.

So I have essentially different light bulbs for daytime and different light bulbs for the evening where the light bulbs in the evening, they don't have the very blue, and you know, this, the entire spectrum is somewhat optimized for circadian to ensure that the brain is not told it's daytime. So by having that in the entire house, our melatonin production is able to go on, which is important for us as we, uh, ease into or get closer to bedtime.

And the results have been incredible. My kids from a early age that didn't used to. You know, necessarily, and when they were very young. I know it's, there are different issues as well. It's not just about their food and other things that, that's part of it, but it's been very easy for us to put our kids to bed and, uh, for them to fall asleep relatively quickly after they go to bed.

We don't allow them computers or iPads in bed or anytime near bedtime, you know, after six o'clock. I know that's a little early for many, but they're not doing iPads after dinner. We don't want that type of bright light in our house when it's late. So that's the biggest gift I think, to our family. Just in addition to all the other things that we are doing to ease into the evening and, and the routines we have, I think the, just controlling light in our entire house has been incredible.

No iPads in bed. If anything, we have a TV far away on the wall, far away. So if we watch TV at night in bed, which is rare, It'll be far away on the wall. It'll be dimmed down and with a timer on it. So sometimes we do enjoy that, but certainly very cautious about the light effects. Sure. Ugh, awesome. And helping the whole family.

Yes. It's amazing. Steven, what about you? Very similar. I also have light bulbs. I, I don't have a fancy tunable system, but I do have a different light bulb in the ceiling in versus my table lamps and bedside lamps. So I have sleep promoting low blue lights for the evening, just one lamp. And so it's about being aware I, I think of your lighting environment.

So yes, the right light bulb is, is good. They're not expensive. It's the same price as normal light bulbs. But then do I need three table lamps? No, I just need one. That's absolutely fine. And so lighting is absolutely key. Dark blackout curtains as well are important. I certainly have those to block any outside lights.

I use an eye mask. If I need to, certainly when traveling, but also at home if, if I wake up early, as I mentioned, and stopping caffeine early in the day. So that's not an evening routine, but of course Sure. Caffeine affects the evening. Yeah. Even caffeine. You drink at 10:00 AM affection, nighttime sleep, and, and those people say, caffeine doesn't do anything to me.

They're wrong. Yeah. Uh, we would measure them, we would definitely see a difference. There are individual differences, but everyone is affected, uh, to some extent. I was one of those people years ago that had a, a cappuccino bef, you know, within, or sometimes, or, yeah, I was still able to fall asleep. So I, I didn't believe that it, it impacted me in any negative way until I started measuring my sleep, my rem, my deep sleep.

And of course you could see during the evening or during the night that the quality of sleep wasn't very good. It was. And I think, Mollie, you were saying a lot of listeners, you know, have, have sleep trackers. Our measuring own sleep. I think that's great. In the way that Mickey just described, if they try a new thing yeah, but give it some weeks.

Um, they can see the difference themselves, whether that's reducing alcohol, reducing caffeine, changing the lights, stabilizing their sleep pattern, getting more light in the daytime, they can see for themselves the improvement. And I think that's a lot of the power of, of wearables. You can see for yourself the benefits.

It's not always easy to tell if you're sleeping. You know, without that, and if I can just make a plug, uh, Mollie, you, you might have done that on my behalf or our behalf anyway, but it is one of the reasons why both of our apps, the Time Shifter, jet Lag app and the Time Shifter Shift Work app comes with free trial.

So when you travel for the first time with the Jet Lag app is completely free. No matter how complicated your itinerary is, you know, no credit card needed, just try it out and you'll see the results. The same with the Shift Work app, you get a couple of weeks where you can try it for free. Right now the beta testers are not paying anything.

We're just inviting them in so that they can, uh, try the experience and so we can make absolutely sure that before we release the final version, which is, is pretty much there that we are not missing out on very. Cases because of course it it, every shift worker has a different type of schedule. Some are working two jobs, it can get complicated.

So we just wanna make sure before we release something that it works well. Ah, amazing. So awesome. And what might we see on your morning sleep routine, which might sound counterintuitive, but your morning routine and how that might affect, I'm enjoying all of these quick, snappy questions, which we're giving you very quick, snappy answers to.

We're not good at that, as you can tell. No, you're doing great. I know. I should preface with the knowledge or for the listener that it's clear we are only scratching like the tiniest of surface on what's there. Yeah. Morning routines are involve light. Of course. We want that, that light signal. So that means opening the curtains, that means turning the, the indoor lights on, uh, getting that light pulse.

There's a bit of a misunderstanding that morning light is, is more important than light. At other times of the day, that's not really true. We want bright days all day. Yes. Dim firelight evenings and then sleep in darkness. And, and the circadian system wants that contrast. You were talking earlier about, uh, well if I can't get sunlight, I can turn on the indoor lights and, and that works because the circadian system is looking at, at changes in light.

It's not measuring absolute light levels. So that's why the sunglasses work in the example Mickey talked about. So yeah, that morning light, but all day light is important. Get as much as you can today. That's super important. And we, cuz we've heard many people speak to this concept of sunlight anchoring and how you, if you're choosing where to get your sun anchor it on the first half, that's not telling the whole.

Not really. So I, I, I know that's based in, it's based in the, the theory that when you measure people's internal clocks Yeah. About three quarters of people have a clock longer than 24 hours. Sure. And they need to be advanced earlier every day to and train to 24 hours. If you're normally synchronized morning light shifts you earlier, evening light shifts you later.

So for three quarters of people that morning light might be shifting them earlier, but for the quarter of people who are more morning type, sure they need to shift later and, and need evening light. And there's no need to even, you know, divide it that way. Just get all light all day. Yeah. Keep it simple.

It doesn't have to be bright light all day. Can be indoor light, it can be outdoor light, it can be intermittent light. We've done many studies for nighttime exposures showing that if you can even get 15 minutes of bright light an hour, you'll do nearly as well as getting continuous bright light. Mm. Uh, for that night shift, for example.

So all light all day, you don't have to get it into the morning, but if that works for you to go and do a morning walk, And you get a light pulse, then that's great If you just put normal indoor lights on in the morning, but then do a walk outside at lunchtime, that's also great. So good. But bright days, dark nights is, is the key.

Love that. Amazing. Yeah, that was the big mantra I was at, uh, sleep 2022 and would hear that kind of bright days, dark nights on repeat. So important, so. Okay. Any call outs for you, Mickey, of any differences in your morning routine? Or is that the No, I mean, obviously light is also a key part of mind. I mean, I, I have the unfortunate situation that my kids go to school at a, at a, a very bad circadian time at seven 20 in the morning, which I'm very unhappy about.

I am a night owl on top of it, so it's a, it's, it's very difficult for me to get up at that time and, and drop them off at school. But I clearly also use bright light in the morning. I get a big jug of, of water when I wake up and then, uh, only when I get to work, I take a cup of coffee. So I allow my body to sort of get replenished with hi with water before I use a.

Caffeine to dehydrate me again. Yeah. Oh man. The struggle. So good. And then the third question would be, what might we see on your nightstand or if you are traveling or in a different location, maybe the proverbial nightstands kind of apps, gadgets, ambience, any call-outs that we missed or should know about in your environment If you like to read at night to avoid that bright light from iPads and and TVs, I recommend, uh, you can get them on Amazon, like a little L B d reading light that can be able to be reduced in the brightness and also change it to that more yellowish, take some of the blue light out.

I think that's a great thing to have. And again, we'll help you with melatonin production and forest wisely. Yeah. Yeah. I don't do much that's very detailed. I have an I mask that I mentioned. Uh, sometimes air plugs if needed. More often than not, I'm unplugging things in hotel rooms. Unplugging, uh, you know, the bedside, uh, the alarm clock, that's usually too bright and blue.

So I'm either unplugging that or turning it around or covering it up and looking at the lighting in, in the space. And so trying to avoid bright lights at the wrong time, uh, which many hotel rooms often have. So it's really just about, again, thinking about light, but then also prioritizing sleep. I know that's not a bedside thing, but when you travel in, when you work, in thinking about how I can make sure I get enough sleep within the schedule, and that might include not allowing early morning meetings, not allowing late night meetings when you're traveling or even at home, thinking about prioritizing that time for sleep and saying no to, to some of the, the crazy schedules that people ask us to.

So important, and I know, Mickey, you have to run this. Clearly we need some sort of part two, three, whatever part we're on. Uh, you guys bring so much knowledge and I'm so grateful. Thank you so much, Mickey, and we'll take it home with Steven, but appreciate wonderful time. Awesome. Thank you for having us on the show, Mollie.

Thank you so much. Thank you. All right, Steven, again, so appreciative of your time. So, uh, it's perfect to kind of round things out, uh, with you on the last question that we ask everyone, which is out of your whole management of your sleep, the entire time that you've been looking at your sleep and really thinking critically about it, what would you say up to now has made the biggest difference in managing your sleep or maybe even the biggest aha moment you've had when looking at managing your sleep?

I sort of say this as a joke, but I, but I don't think it is. It really is about managing time and I try not to have any meetings before 10 o'clock. So good. I'm, uh, sort of a, a moderate evening type. I'm not as, uh, as extreme evening as I used to be, but I don't wanna get up and do things at seven in the morning.

That's not a good time for me. And so working in the division of sleep and circadian disorders, I can never be late for work. Yeah. Because, uh, no one can tell me off, uh, for sleeping in. But I do try and do that. And so it, as I mentioned, we always about prioritizing time, so try not to have meetings before 10:00 AM which gives me the time to go to bed a bit later as I like to sleep in, get a bit more sleep than, than maybe I would and avoid that bad part of the day when, when you're slow to get ready.

And so I think being confident in setting your schedules to your sleep if you can, I think is, is important. And that goes back to prioritizing sleep and not burning the candle at both. Giving yourself, your brain, your body, that time. I think that probably is something that I've, I've found most helpful.

And then all the other things like the light come into play, but even things like driving, I try not to make sure I don't drive soon after waking. I don't drive late into the evening because we know those are dangerous times. I try and avoid flights that are the first flight of the day because we know that there's a higher risk of sleep related accidents in pilots in the first flight of the day.

So it's just being aware of, of some of these consequences and we can't get rid of all risk in the modern world, but where we can, uh, let's change that and change that for yourself. So prioritize your sleep, set your nine hours in bed, work everything else around that. And I think people then will feel better.

I love that you say that cuz uh, one of the things that we've found just from the behavioral piece of having people actually have this be a lifestyle is how much it really becomes a time management thing once they discover some of these principles that you're speaking to and, okay, well how will I end my meal, my meals at this particular time?

How will I line my lighting and get that light exposure? How will I have my movement timing at a particular time? All of these things. And certainly what we spoke to on the light dark piece and the behavioral changes that need to, um, kind of play in the mix with that in so much of that is, uh, an element of our calendar.

And then sticking with that and that stability that you spoke to and trusting that we'll do that every single day largely. So really, really important point. And I think a calendar's a good tool if, if you starting a new behavioral change, put your sleep time in, put it in your diary, put it in your calendar.

And then two hours before that, give yourself a reminder to dim the lights. Why not put it in the diary first and then let everything else fit around that. I think that's a, a good strategy for people to use. And, and you just hit upon another circadian element, which we maybe can talk to another time, but the increased interest in focus on time restricted eating in, in pushing your eating time more into the daytime.

Yeah, that's a circadian intervention. It's not called that, but that's exactly what it is. It's, it's eating at the right circadian time, which is when it's light as opposed to the wrong circadian time, uh, when it's dark. And so we do some circadian things already without quite knowing about it. But I think giving people the tools to help them predict what they're going to do and make it easier to comply is, is part of that circadian health.

And so our tools try and do that, but you don't need a tool. Just put your sleep in in the diary. And then don't touch it. Yeah, absolutely. Well, I so, so appreciate the work that you're doing. It makes all the difference for all of us, and the more that we can get this information out and have people in this conversation, it becomes less and less of an outside the bell curve way of behaving.

Because often if we, there can be social kind of, uh, things in the mix that might throw us off of that calendar, and the more people that are in this conversation, hopefully we can, as a poll, start to shift things to be more circadian aligned where possible and we're not possible then make it work for us mindfully.

So really, really appreciate your time today. And so for anyone listening, I'm sure they're gonna wanna know how can they follow more of the work that you're doing, the apps that we spoke about, what are the best ways to do that? So for the apps, time shifter.com is the website where we, uh, have that information.

For general information about sleep. Um, I wrote a book, uh, about 10 years ago with Russell Foster, who's a prestigious researcher in the uk Oh, fantastic. Uh, called Sleep, a very short introduction. It's inexpensive. And, and you can, you can buy that online. And then Harvard has a website, uh, called Understanding sleep.org.

All one word, understanding sleep dot. And that's a free public website with a lot of of high quality information around, uh, healthy sleep, and then a range of different sleep disorders. And then there's lots of resources there that people can, can follow up on. Ah, amazing. So good. I'm actually reading Russell Foster's book Lifetime at the moment.

The recent one, uh, incredible that you have done such. You've had such a long line of time that you've put into this work and just made such a phenomenal difference. So really, really appreciative and, uh, hope to have you back for another part, 2, 3, 4. Who the heck knows, but it's really, really important.

Did we leave out anything? Did we miss anything or do you feel like we we touched on as much as we could in this time? I think we've covered a lot, probably too much, but yes, we can certainly come back and talk more about, I mean, many of the topics, the work in the blind, obviously people found very interested and we could get into that in a lot of detail.

It'd be amazing. And then we've done a lot of, um, work around sleep disorder screening and occupational settings. Uh, shift work schedules that I mentioned briefly. So, and recently studies on light and falls in care homes and patients with brain injury and, and sleep. So there's a lot more that we can get into in some, uh, of the science, but it's been great.

Thanks for having us. And, um, hope the, uh, the listeners enjoy the hour. Oh, absolutely. Well, thank you so much. Really appreciate it. You've been listening to The Sleep As A Skill Podcast, the number one podcast for people who wanna take their sleep skills to the next level. Every Monday I send out something that I call Mollie Monday Obsessions containing everything that I'm obsessing over in the world of sleep.

Head on over to sleep as a skill.com to sign up.

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