147: Bill Tancer, co-founder of Signos: Understand How Your Blood Sugar May Be Impacting Your Sleep Quality & Wakeups!

Welcome to the sleep as a skill podcast. My name is Mollie Eastman. I am the founder of sleep as a skill, a company that optimizes sleep through technology, accountability, and behavioral change. As an ex sleep sufferer turned sleep course creator, I am on a mission to transform the way the world thinks about.

sleep. Each week, I'll be interviewing world class experts ranging from researchers, doctors, innovators, and thought leaders to give actionable tips and strategies that you can implement to become a more skillful sleeper. Ultimately, I believe that living a circadian aligned lifestyle is going to be one of the biggest trends in wellness, and I'm committed to keep being you up to date on all the things that you can do today to transform your circadian health and by extension, allowing you to sleep and live better than ever before.

Welcome to the sleep is a skill podcast. Today we're going to be talking about blood sugar and sleep. Could some of those middle of the night awakenings that you've been having be related? to your blood sugar. We'll get into all that and more. Now we've had a number of podcasts where we've looked at examining this from different lenses through different experts.

We've had nutricents on the podcast levels vary. And today we are diving into the world of Signos. It's a CGM company that actually uses a bit of real time inspiration. So say you're spiking after a big bowl of pasta, right? Your CGM is spiking. Well, this product will actually alert you and prompt you to take some actions that it will offer you.

So for instance, you're spiking and it will suggest for you to do some squats or for you to in one way, shape, or form. to help bring down that spike and to mitigate some of that crash that we might have experienced without that intervention and so much more. So you can also kind of get into the weeds on how your friends might be doing with their glucose.

So there can be some of that transparency you can learn within the app, ways  to bring more balance and stability to your blood sugar, not just. Because, but because you'll feel in a whole different way and you will sleep differently if you get that really handled. So a little bit about our guests, Bill Tancer co founded Signos to apply data analysis to help solve the obesity epidemic and fulfill his personal passion to be healthier.

Bill is an expert in consumer behavior. He is a New York times bestselling author and former columnist for time magazine. Bill most recently served as GM and SVP for data and research at Experian. Bill has appeared as a featured guest on ABC's 2020 and Good Morning America, as well as CNBC, CNN, Fox, Business News, Bloomberg, et cetera.

And he frequently comments on the application of big data to understand consumer trends and so much more. I think you're going to really enjoy our conversation and we'll jump right into it. But first, a few words from our sponsors.  Here at the Sleep is a Skill podcast, we're all about enhancing your sleep and a cornerstone of that journey often revolves around stabilizing your blood sugar levels.

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This special offer is only available at  magbreakthrough. com forward slash sleep is a skill. I will also include this in the show notes as well.  And welcome to the sleep is a skill podcast.  All right. I am very excited for this episode and my challenge is going to be to reign it in. I know we're going to have lots of things to discuss, but Bill, thank you so much for taking the time to be here.

Molly, I am so excited to be here because I got to tell you, I'm a huge fan of the Sleep as a Skill podcast. So it is an honor to be on your show. Oh, you are such just a, a gem of a human. I love our conversations. I had the honor of being on your podcast recently and every time I connect with you, I want to connect more.

You know, my challenge is going to be, I'm going to want to ask you questions. So if I start being the host, you just tell me to stop. I mean, it can be a ping pong, you know, back and forth. Okay. But yes, I am so excited to deliver your knowledge to the listener today because one of the things that we find makes such a difference for people in the management of their sleep is for many people surprising how much of a difference Glucose regulation, the management of what can be a roller coaster for many people if they are to wear continuous glucose monitors and they see these numbers, when they start realizing the impact that that can make on the quality of their sleep, the frequency of wake ups.

And that bi directional relationship that can be at play between then the poor sleep that they might get and what that does to glucose. I mean, this is a huge topic. So I'm really, really grateful for you to help us guide us in navigating this and then having tools in place that are really late breaking outside of the mold that can really make a difference in transforming this.

So thank you so much for your time. And how did you find yourself in this role of really pioneering? Uh, glucose management. How did this even happen? You know, it's kind of a funny story. It's a circuitous story But I am a data scientist. I used to work with a massive data set. So I used to analyze um internet behavior and I Was uh in charge of this data set of what 25 million people were doing worldwide on the internet And it was a data set that updated every single day and some things updated every five minutes  So, in my previous life, I really didn't get much sleep because I was analyzing so much data.

Yes. Understandable. So, so I'm a data geek. I think your audience needs to know that first. And I'm going to try and rein it in so I don't get too data geekish on this particular show. Yeah. Um, but from there, I advised a company. That was also using big data and the founder of that company then went on to start signals and right as the company was starting.

We had a dinner together in San Francisco. I was visiting from L. A. And ironically, it was a very carby meal late at night. It didn't include a few glasses of wine.  All the things I've learned not to do. Yeah. But over this carb meal, he said, you know, I have this idea of using these continuous glucose monitors to help people with weight loss and to help them get metabolically healthy.

And I wonder if you'd be interested in advising. And I said, absolutely. On the side, I was actually researching. This idea about using CGMs for weight loss because I'd just been to the doctor. And, um, so a little bit more about my story. I'd moved from San Francisco to LA and I just got married. I married a vegan, which to paraphrase Samuel Jackson, uh, kind of made me a vegan at that point.

And, uh, I thought, you know, I'm, I'm going to get a great physical. And the doctor came back with my lab results. He said, you're pre diabetic. If your glucose is high, you've got hypertension. You, um,  you've, you've, you're pretty much stacking up all of the factors of medi metabolic disease and metabolic syndrome.

So you really need to get the stuff under control. So I said, what do I do? He said, lose weight.  Okay, how do you do that? He's like, you know, just go to the bookstore, get a book, lose weight, lose weight.  So I was like trying to figure out how I was going to get my blood sugar under control and lose the weight.

I went to my doctor and he said, you don't need a CGM. So I went back, you know, as I asked for CGM, he's like, you don't need a CGM. That's for diabetics. Uh, just lose weight. Right. So that then that dinner happened with Sharon with the pizza reason why I'm probably overweight  and I've got bad glucose. It's like, he's like, he's the bread guy.

He's he actually baked sourdough bread. So we've got bread. We've got pizza. We got the wine going dessert  and he's we're talking about this idea of using cgms to help people lose weight and get their, um You Their metabolism under control and get healthier, optimize their, their, um, their metabolic condition.

And I thought I would love to advise. I put on a CGM that that was like, maybe a day or 2 after that.  And I ate the same bowl of oatmeal that I always eat. I've eaten for like two years. I'd researched this. This is the healthiest thing to do to get my cholesterol under control.  And my glucose went from like 99, which was my resting or fasting glucose at the time up to like 140, 150.

Oh my God,  I'm trying to lose weight. And here I am, like spiking my glucose.  I called him up. I said, okay, scratch the, uh, the advisor thing. I'm joining the company. You have to hire me. And so, that's how I started at Signos. Wow! Okay, so this is part of a personal transformation. How long ago was all that?

That was 2020,  just as the, uh, the pandemic was starting. So, it was like, in February, March. Wow. I think, yeah. Okay, and you don't appear to be overweight for when I can see what I know of you, at least of like the chest up. Yeah, I lost weight pretty quickly once I started, um, really paying attention to my glucose.

And the thing is, is that in prior attempts to lose weight, I, like many others, just did diets. I tried keto, I tried paleo, I tried the whole 360. And they were For a while, but they were all unsustainable. And what I found was so interesting about using the CGM is you could make small changes to your diet.

You can make changes to your exercise. You can make changes to managing stress. And what I found was really important sleep all of these things together, making little small changes. You could drastically improve. Um. Your weight and and your your metabolic health. So, uh, yeah, I'm just so excited about this technology and the data that we're getting  that it's just so exciting.

So, yeah,  I could talk, uh, on and on about my own. My own metabolic health, but, uh,  100%. No,  it's so true because it is very exciting from a perspective of actually, we have a mutual friend, Nick, who is wearing your product and continuously is not to use the word continuously repeatedly, but To who keeps commenting on this is of all the things he's doing.

This has made the most profound difference in his health because it's just such that real time feedback that just has us be clear on the thing that we just did this, the one action that we just took to see how is this impacting our health and wellbeing and all the subsequent, you know, spillover effects that can result from that.

So maybe even that could be interesting to parse out. Why don't we want to have the spike in a crash? What are some of the kind of deleterious effects of that and how do they relate to sleep? Yeah, so there's a number of reasons why we don't want the spikes and the crashes. The first one just being the insulin that's released as a result of spiking that over time you can become insulin resistant and then you've got higher resting glucose and and also higher circulating insulin which can lead to a lot of inflammation.

Uh, there's  a whole A bunch of studies around high glucose and sleep. And like you said, it's bidirectional. It's a two way street. So if you are, um, going into sleep with, um, with hyperglycemia, high blood sugar, or if it's erratic, it's going up and down. It's crashing. It's going high. It's going low. That's going to be disruptive to your sleep.

Interestingly, if you have bad sleep, that affects your glucose the next day and you have glucose dysregulation along with a couple of other things that happen from bad sleep, like the suppression of leptin, which is your satiety hormone and the increase of ghrelin, which is your hunger hormone, which causes you to eat Thank you.

More because you've had poor sleep. It's actually the body's way of trying to fuel you up since you didn't get enough rest from the night before. But if you are like me and you're trying to lose weight, trying to get healthy, it's not the, uh, not the thing you want. You don't want that suppression of leptin and the increase in ghrelin.

There's so much interesting. Uh, there's so much interesting data. One of the things that I do at Cygnus is I also for our staff, I run our experiments channel.  Mmm. And I kind of fell into this and oatmeal and sleep are one of the ways I fell into, um, to this particular experiment role. and my, my listeners on my own podcast joke about every single episode, all episode.

I, I've, I've done, I, I've mentioned oatmeal at least once, , and here I seem to be talking about it. It's a mandate exclusively. Yeah. . Yeah. So I'm gonna make sure my, my listeners jump over, but they're probably gonna come back to me and say, okay, it was all about a oatmeal. We've heard these stories  , so I dialed in that oatmeal so I wouldn't spike.

And I did it by adding all sorts of things. So adding some protein and adding some fat, putting some almond butter in there and some chia seeds and some, um. And parts and  doing all sorts of little micro changes to the oatmeal to the point where I wasn't spiking at all. And then 1 day, I had a poor night's sleep,  had that bowl of oatmeal and I spiked again  and I thought, well, something's wrong.

Maybe I've got a bad sensor. Something's not right. So the next time it happened, I had poor night's sleep. Maybe a week later, same thing. Big spike.  So then I start researching and I find all the research on at the, at this point, I'm very new at Cigna. So I'm just now ingesting all of this research and wasn't aware of the connection between bad night's sleep and glucose dysregulation the next day.

So I launched an experiment for the whole staff. So everybody try and regulate, um, to, uh, the same breakfast every day. And then if you've got a bad night's sleep report back on this channel and Slack and tell me about it. And people were like, Oh my God, yes, that happens to me.  We found it happens actually in two really interesting scenarios.

One is when you're really stressed and the other is when you've had a bad night's sleep. So, um, one of my co founders is an E. R. Physician at Stanford. And he's like, when I'm in the trauma Bay.  And I've got a patient come in and it's like a really bad case. I go into this, you know, fight or flight mode and I'm, it's, it's stressful.

And he said, without eating anything, I can go from a normal glucose to like 160  completely normal reaction. What's happening is the liver is dumping glycogen gluconeogenesis. dumping that glycogen into the bloodstream to fuel the body to handle whatever the stressful situation is. So we started noticing these things and that gave rise to this idea of, okay, let's really, um, let's, let's bring some life to these studies that we're reading about and doing these experiments.

And, and it's, um, You know, the other thing I'll mention about using cgm for for weight loss and to help with sleep and to help with stress is that there's a fun element to it. Okay, yes, I'm a, I'm a data geek, but the idea that I could do these experiments and actually see for myself, like you mentioned, it's that continuous feedback loop.

But when you start playing with it and making these small changes and seeing the improvements suddenly. Weight loss goes from this chore or this thing that sounds like it's going to be so hard to do to something that is actually fun. Yes. Oh my gosh. Okay. So much to say about what you just said there.

So on zooming out, that's completely how I've related to sleep from the technology piece is and one of the things I hope to instill for many people is that it can we can actually gamify and hopefully have fun in the process of yeah. learning, iterating, getting curious on some of the things that make a difference for sleep.

Now there's been the spillover effect because now almost becomes, and I've even toyed with the possibility of pretty much mandating that people have continuous glucose monitors in alignment with their mandated sleep wearables in our programs. So stay tuned because that might happen because it's just so important.

And to your point, It really does become fun. And that's one of the things I think really stands out about your company is that the interface on the Cygnos app, one of the things that I was struck by is it has some real time actions that can be taken that I think many people might miss, especially if they're just using plain continuous glucose monitor or, you know, they're Not and can become disempowered when they see the spike, they see the crash, but then it's like, okay, what do I do about this?

Now your app does a great job in helping to show one, what can you do in the moment when this is happening, which is really cool to how can you kind of join forces with friends, which is really interesting and providing that kind of gamification and, you know, kind of group dynamics at play. And then three, the education piece.

So I'm wondering if we can break down some of those unique offerings that are on your  Yeah, you know, I think one of the things that really differentiates us is that we built this, we, we've got some amazing engineers on our team and they have built these predictive algorithms using machine learning and, uh, an artificial intelligence to ingest all of the food logs that you put in and what your responses to those foods are to then build this predictive engine that can, you can enter in any food and we'll make a prediction of what that's going to do to your glucose.

So if you are having a meal and maybe it's dinner and you don't want to spike knowing that you're going to go to sleep in a couple of hours hour to you can put in those food items and we'll make a prediction  in terms of what that meal is going to do to your glucose. That's the first thing. The second thing that we do is movement.

We found is very important in terms of moderating your glucose.  So You put in what you're going to eat, you then start to eat it. If the system senses a spike, we make predictions in terms of what type of movement will help you mitigate that, that spike. So for a lot of us, it's simple as just getting up and going for a walk after meals.

Uh, for me though, sometimes if I, um, walk by the kitchen and there's chocolate chip cookies on the counter and I eat one, maybe it's like a zone three workout on the treadmill and I'm like running as fast as I can for 20 minutes. But normally all it takes is like a simple walk after a meal to help mitigate that response.

But the. The algorithm and the interface is, um, it's, it's just so fascinating to see those suggestions real time because little notification pops up and it says, Hey, do this, just get your heart rate up to this amount, which, you know, equates to a walk or to a jog on the treadmill or to just climbing some stairs.

Uh, so that's the predictive piece.  Then on top of that, what we realized very early on was that we really needed to help our members. With a curriculum, so one's just educating on the basics of glucose, but then it's about talking about how it's not just your nutrition, but we do go into that because that's a huge part of it.

It's also the movement, the exercise piece, and it's also stress and sleep. So here are the things that you can try.  To, um, to help moderate your glucose throughout the day to get more energy, uh, to get healthier and hopefully to lose weight. If that's the mission of a particular member.  Absolutely. I mean, one of the things that we're often speaking to is how behavioral change.

Is one of the biggest needle movers in transforming your sleep and I feel like you are really making this fun. This process of bringing these behavioral change elements and testing navigating. getting curious on this area that is just so transformative. And it's so transformative and so beautifully connects with sleep because many people come our way because they are tired and they are crashing throughout the course of the day.

And just it's an arduous task to get from the morning to the night. And one of the things that we see is when people do start managing their glucose and their metabolic health over time. Oh my gosh, I'm not. crashing after lunch anymore. I'm not just completely dragging and zombie like or anxious or getting headaches or all of those symptoms that can come about.

And so I really think it's so important some of the things that you're doing to make this fun and to get involved in it with the team, with your own team. And then sharing the findings like you do a great job with your emails and sharing what, you know, so it doesn't just stay insular in your team. It comes out to the masses so that we can all kind of follow along in your findings is what I've seen.

Yeah, absolutely. And I just mentioned one other thing is that we really encourage our members to do the same thing that we discovered on our staff that makes things so much fun, which is experiment, experiment, experiment. Yes. A lot of our system is built. On the idea that was behind the study that was published in Cell in 2015 by the Weitzman Institute about personalized nutrition and glycemic response.

And this particular study, they had, I think, it was 800 participants. They put CGMs on and they measured the response to about 46,  000 meals. 46, 000 meals.  And what they found was everyone responded to these foods differently. So our approach is we're not sure how you're going to respond to these different foods.

So experiment, try different foods, see how your body responds to those foods. And it, it goes beyond just the foods. Yeah. It's interesting. Real story. I'm on my rower because Cygnus told me I needed to work off totally and I've been there. Uh huh. Yeah,  and I'm listening to another very popular podcast.

Yeah. In this particular host, you probably know who it is, says,  I eat this big carby meal at the end of my night. Oh, I think I know who it is. You know who it is. I almost fell off the rower. I'm like,  that's the exact opposite advice we give everybody. Yes. Then I had, I thought, actually did some reading and I found that there are actually some different chronotypes.

And while it's relatively rare that I would ever give someone that advice,  there are some people who don't spike from carbs later in the day.  And it has to do with our chronotype. It has a lot to do with circadian rhythms, specifically in the microbiome that some people just have different circadian rhythms.

And so one thing I encouraged everyone to do is take that Carby breakfast item that you have maybe once a while or like me every single day and have it in the morning and then the next day have it at like five, six, seven o'clock at night and then see the difference.  Almost everybody sees a dramatic spike.

I had a difference of like 50 milligrams per deciliter difference between the morning and the night. It's a huge difference. Yes,  100%. But to all my experiments, it's really interesting. I have people Almost every time we do an experiment that respond in a complete opposite way that I expect  to this particular podcast host  credit.

If he's listening to your podcast. Yes, he actually that might work for him. He might have a different chronotype that. Allows him to do that, but you'll never know that unless you do the experiments and test the foods and test how exercise changes things and how mindfulness or meditation might change your response to foods, which for me is a huge one, by the way, I time things in the morning where I do my meditation right before breakfast.

And this actually another one of our head of product was telling me that she has her breakfast and it's always, um, she's she's managed it. Like I have managed mine to not spike. But 1 day she was getting her kid ready for school at the same time. And then there was something stressful in her email from work and she had this completely different response to that same meal  and she attributed to stress.

Anecdotal one data point, she wondered, so of course we launch an experiment and we ask people when you have a stressful morning, just record your glycemic response. And let us know what you see  and in this staff experiment. Yeah, a lot of us noticed that same thing. So I modified my morning ritual to have meditation before I ate to make sure that was nice and calm and stress free before I started breakfast.

And  did it work? Yeah, I haven't had a spike since, um. Again, this is just anecdotal, but it's it's it's what's also interesting about experiments is that it's behavior change. That is, um, it's fun and it's empowering to because  it's it's actually causing me to engage in these these positive behaviors,  um, just to improve my life and it's all kind of goes back to that continuous feedback loop where I can look, see, does this work?

Does this not work? Oh, so beautiful. I mean, I love what you're pointing to there in the experimentations on that call out. Do many of us are impacted by what we discovered glucose to have this kind of circadian component to it that we might not have realized in years past and now we're learning more and more that that same type of food you eat in the morning might respond really differently just given the time of day and how time affects our biology and then yet.

To your point, bio individuality, how we can't just blanket say, because people want to know, Oh, well, will this thing spike me or will it not? It's that's the reason that's the beauty of getting our own continuous glucose monitor, because I'll see people spike on coffee and the next person, not at all.

I'll see people spike on, you know, the certain type of wrap that they have and next person, not at all. It's just fascinating. So you really want to get in the game yourself to make that difference. And so I think what might be valuable, because I love. And one of the things that I get from you is just this excitement in even discovering through your own life, the profound difference that this has made and navigating sounds like continuing to navigate, which is certainly my mission in life is to, you know, never be done.

And we want to keep going, keep looking. So I think that this might be particularly interesting. These, the set of questions that we always ask everyone to really delve into what's going on for you now that you have this information. So we do ask everyone for questions and The first one is what is your nightly sleep routine?

So I'm curious now given what you've heard certain podcast hosts say and you know, all of this and all the data, how are you managing your nights and particularly the glucose piece, but then other components of your sleep? So Based on some things I actually heard on your podcast, my, my most recent modification is I'm going completely dim light when I'm getting ready to go to sleep.

So I have a wind down period. That's like an hour long. So TV is off. I'm trying to, um, to just do things that aren't activating, but all the lights in the house are either dimmed or off.  And then, um, right before I go to bed, I do, um, 20 minute meditation. I'm now into non dual meditation, which is  really cool.

Yes. It's a, there's a couple of great apps out there. So I use my, my apps to do meditation and then go to sleep.  So just to find that non dual for anyone listening that is new to that. Absolutely. So, uh, I started with just the, um, the basic mindfulness meditation. And I, I did that for several years and got a lot out of that, but then I wanted to take the next step.

And so in non dual meditation, there's a couple of different schools of it. And, and, uh, Buddhist thought Dzogchen is the one that Kind of the focus of what I do my meditation on is it's trying to deconstruct the self. So in our minds and our consciousness, we've constructed like almost like a little person in our head.

Yes.  And when you deconstruct that little person, some really interesting things happen. A lot of stress goes away. A lot of things that you take personally, like things that happened during the day, how in the world could he have said that to me? Or she said that to me when yourself isn't there. It's like, okay, these things happen, but it wasn't really about me.

This is just something that this person was saying, and I shouldn't take it personally. And I found that that type of meditation just really takes all the stress away. And.  I was a really bad, bad sleeper and one of the things if I ever had sleep onset problems, it was because I would be replaying something that happened  during work in my mind over and over again and writing stories about it and that really.

That would just get me worked up and I'm getting activated. I'm getting more and more awake as I'm trying to go to sleep by doing this, um, this meditation. There's a saying no self, no problem. So take the self away and then the stress just kind of naturally dissolves. Amazing. I love that. And I love that you're adding in the dim lighting in the evening.

That's fantastic. Are you noticing a difference with that? Yes. In fact, now I want to try. Were you the one that told me about the experiment where they did just candlelight? Oh, yes. So, this is, uh, yeah.  So, the NASA. That's the next step. Uh huh. Yeah. Okay. My wife's like totally into it. She's like, yes, we're going to do the candles.

That sounds awesome. Yes! Oh, my God. Your wife rocks. Okay. Fantastic. Yeah, because I owe it to her because one of the experiments we did, uh, on sleep was with bright lights, like 100 lumen versus 3 lumen. She's like, so mad at me. So I'm like, okay, we're going to do candlelight now. This is on the flip side.

Yes. The flip side.  Actually, I did want to hit on that because I don't think we discussed that yet. I was wondering if you can share a little bit about that because it's been a more recent finding and just, you know, the kind of the impacts of sleeping even with a little bit of light. Yeah, so classic example of what happens within the, uh, the team at CYGNOS is we're at an offsite and someone brings up a study that just came out from Northwestern and in the study, it was a really small study.

I think there was only an end of 20. So 20 participants, they took 10. They let them sleep in a dark environment. Then the other 10 and there's less than 3 lumens. The other 10 had to sleep in 100 lumens, and then they gave both oral glucose tolerance test the next morning to measure their, their glucose dysregulation or regulation.

And of course, the group that, um  That had the bright lights when they tried to sleep had a much worse response to that  than the control group that were sleeping in lumens. Less than three.  Interesting. It's you could argue that. Well, disruptive sleep is going to cause that same dysregulation.  I would have loved to see the study where they tried to disrupt the sleep some other way, but I still personally can tell you that it's hard to sleep  when you've got those bright lights on.

And they use polysomnography  to, to measure the different sleep stages. They also found that the people that were in the group that had the hundred lumens, they were getting hardly any REM or deep sleep. It was almost completely late sleep or into sleep. So, um, yeah, it was an interesting finding. We replicated that the few of my team members willing or had spouses willing to let them put a hundred lumen light, um, in their bedroom and try and sleep.

Uh, tried to replicate that. I'm also, I'm an amateur photographer. So I've got the light meter. I'm doing 100 lumens. I'm adjusting thing. Like, yeah, exactly. Like, like the hundredth of a lumen. Um, yeah, it's a, it's interesting, but I, that kind of made me realize that I needed to  blackout, you know, blackout shades, um, mask if I needed it at a hotel when I didn't, um, Didn't have the ability to black out all the light really makes a huge difference.

Huge. Absolutely. Yeah. 100%. That output of light can be so impactful on the quality of our sleep. And then that subsequent impact on our glucose is just fascinating. And I think just something that people do not. necessarily connect. It's just one of those actionable things right away that we can do to make a difference with how we're feeling the subsequent day and the quality of our sleep.

So it's kind of twofold. Amazing. So with that, then our second question is, does your morning sleep routine look like, and we say that meaning that with the argument that how you set up your days can impact your sleep results. So curious what we might see there. So kind of a mirror of what I do at night, so wake up and right off the bat before I do anything else back to meditation.

So another 20 minute meditation. Yeah. Like I mentioned before, that helps me meditate before I have a meal. I'm not sure which book or podcast I got this tip from, but a big tip. Big life changing, uh, change that I made that's really helped is I now will not check my email until after breakfast. Yes. So forcing that in the beginning.

It was very uncomfortable for me. It's like, I got to check the email. Got to check the email. Got to check the email. And when I like.  Stopped doing that and put off that until after breakfast, it allowed me to relax a little bit more in the morning and not kind of like be half sleeping, wanting to go check the email as soon as I woke up.

The 2nd, I woke up. Um, it just it really did help me. Um, in that last part of my sleep. Uh, you know, I, I wake up usually at 5  36.  So, um, that part of my sleep from like four to six is now a lot more restful now that I'm not anticipating what's in my email inbox. Ah, so important. Yeah, that sleep inertia that we're working through when we first wake up.

I think we might underestimate just and underappreciate how much of a transition it is from the brain to go from a totally sleep state to now being awake and kind of coming online. Um, and then. We might want to throw at ourselves tasks and things that we really want to be cognitively alert for or that could have that clear stress response when we're still sort of in this weird stupor.

And I think it's so important that you're putting in those boundaries and it's sometimes easier said than done. So the fact that you're able to like notice that and make that difference is really, really important. Have there certain structures that you put in place to make that happen or more than just a choice.

Maybe just, yeah, it's low power. It was, yeah, it was, yeah, exactly that. Okay. It's willpower. Yeah. Uh, I did this by accident, but the fact that my meditation is the next thing that I do before I, um, go on with my day also, I think was key because part of, uh, my meditation practice is, is making sure I've dropped everything, anything that's bothering me before I go into a meditation session.

So.  I now have this goal of not really letting anything bother me in the morning. So my meditation is okay, which then helps my sleep as well. Yes, so smart. Yeah, I think there's something powerful about kind of like the bookends to our how we start our day and how we end our day. And I love that you're sounds like being mindful on both sides of your day.

Super important. And then the third question would be what might we visually see on your nightstand or if you're traveling or out and about proverbial nightstand sort of apps, ambiance, gadgets, what have you. Yes. So right now, a couple books on my nightstand lamp and I hate to admit this. There's a cell phone charger for a reason, for a reason.

No. Yeah, I know. I'm on a sleep podcast. I'm going to, I'm going to make a confession here. Okay. Yes. But there's a reason to my confession because I'm, I'm always trying to improve things and improve things with data. So I found an app that can help with my snoring. So the only way I, I was for a long time putting my phone all the way in the bathroom, so it was out of reach so that I wouldn't wake up in the middle of the night and go and check something.

I mean,  it's amazing, like 2 in the morning, what goes through my head is like, Oh, what was the score in the game? I'm going to check.  Then leads to something. Oh, I saw just a notification pop. Oh, there's a message. Well, let me check my inbox. So I was putting the phone far away from the bed. Yeah. But now to measure my snoring, I've got it there.

And I'm just again, practicing willpower to not check the phone at all. Sure. And  it's been a huge help because I'm trying all sorts of different things like mouth taping. Yeah, like my latest thing, which has been, uh, amazing actually has really helped the quality of my sleep. It's helped snoring a little bit.

I can't believe I'm talking about snoring.  No, it's important. It's a big deal. I know. I know. I did not optimize sleep. If that's You know, just a big part of the night. Totally. Yeah. Yes. But you know, it's the, the things like I, so this, this app allows me to test different things and it does in the background, like a causal analysis.

So it says, okay, so taking the allergy medicine didn't help, but the mouth taping definitely did help. So, um,  yeah, I've got that by my bed, but that's, that's it in terms of electronics. And it's, I have a very bare night.  I like that. I like that one book. So funny. The last guest I was just talking to before this one, we were talking about the, how the power of minimalism in our space and how that can be helpful to actually not have a lot of those things.

And I just wanted to check the app that you're using. Is it like SnoreLab or sleep? SnoreLab. Yes. SnoreLab. Okay. Yay. And you're liking it. Great. Yeah. I've been using it forever. Oh, amazing. I've dramatically reduced snoring using that app. Okay, and you found the mouth tape in particular to really make a difference?

Yeah, I've tried so many different things. You know, I tried the nose strips and I tried the nasal dilators and all sorts of different things. I've also been doing a lot of breath work.  Oxygen Advantage. I don't know if you've had Patrick on the show. Yeah. You should if you haven't. I haven't had Patrick actually which we have had a number of practitioners and other proponents of it.

But yeah, we do need to actually get him on. He's fantastic. Yeah. So, he's the one that got me into mouth taping. So, uh, it was very hard in the beginning like the first week, 2 weeks, I was waking up constantly and ripping it off because it just.  Didn't seem right. But then I noticed my my and all my measurement devices.

So I've got my um, My my different measurables my aura ring whoop strap  all this data coming in I'm noticing that my deep sleep improves my REM sleep is improving with the mouth taping as well as the snoring so That that's been a another big game changer for me Amazing. Okay. I have another thing that you might like to try.

Have you heard of excite osa?  I feel like you'll love this. So they're approved for snoring and mild sleep apnea as a daytime treatment. So it is a, you have to have a prescription for it, but with it, you, it's basically, it looks pretty funky, but you hold almost what's like a tens unit on your tongue for 20 minutes.

So you can be like, you know, I know.  So you're, you do look weird, but you can be  on your phone. You can be, um, you know, playing video games. You can be on your laptop. People actually, um, well, I shocked my tongue while you're shocked your tongue in LA traffic. You can, uh, be shocking your tongue. This is so LA.

This is so LA. Totally. 100%. And it's profound. It's wild. I've seen a number of people make a big, big difference in certainly not only just snoring, True apneas and they are also in clinical trials right now for moderate to severe sleep apnea with rumbles that it looks promising, but you know, so we'll see what happens with that, but certainly approved for mild sleep apnea and that snoring piece.

So yeah, I feel like for someone like you, that's likes to test and experiment and tinker well for everyone, but also particularly someone like yourself, I think might. Enjoy that. So awesome. I'm gonna look into that. Cool. And I love that you're practicing all those things to make a difference with the readouts for that.

So people that will use things like SnoreLab will find, Oh my gosh, if I eat late, wow, the impact that that can make on the amount of snoring, the alcohol, the amount that that can make an impact. I mean, just so many tangible things, sleep position, et cetera, et cetera. So it's really important to be in the game of these things and this thing that we're doing a third of our lives on average 26 years for the average person is spent sleeping.

So we might want to spend a little bit of time optimizing  this area. Really, really great. And then the last question would be, out of your whole experience in managing that sleep, you know, third of our life piece, what would you say has made the biggest change to your sleep game or said another way, what would you say has been the biggest aha moment in managing your sleep for yourself?

I would have to say the taping is up there. Yeah, it's pretty high up there, but  there's something else. Actually learn this.  I'm going to listen to more of your episodes because I learned this from one of your episodes.  I mentioned actually on our recording on our podcast is mindset. The mindset. Yeah.

Yeah. I am. So another confession, I got so wrapped up in all the sleep data. I think I became like a sleep neurotic. One specific measurable just kept on reminding me what my sleep debt was. And I was falling deeper and deeper into debt. And I was like, huh? And I would go to sleep. Like I got to get more sleep.

I got to get more sleep. I got to get more sleep. And that was just like going through my head. Yeah. Uh, and then I, yeah, I read this book, Mindset, Carol Dowiecki's book. Great book. Great, great book.  I had done this before when I was, I was doing HIIT training, high intensity interval training, and I hate, I hate the treadmill.

And so I'd get on the treadmill and I'd look at the treadmill and I'd look at the distance I had to go and I'm running as fast as I can. I'm like, I don't know if I can make it. I don't know if I can make it. And after reading, The wiki's book, I started to set little goals for myself and ask the question instead of I don't or the other statement.

I don't think I can make it ask the question.  I wonder if I could blank. I wonder if I could run this lap faster than last. I wonder if I could do a mile under eight. I wonder if I could. And so then I started to apply that to sleep. Yes. So as I, um,  was reading, I can't remember the name of the author. He wrote a book called dream yoga.

Yeah. It's all about lucid sleep. Andrew, I read that one actually. Okay, great, great book. But yeah, I started to read about dreams and lucid dreaming. I'm like, I wonder if I could do this. I wonder if I could remember my dreams. That's what it started with. So I started a dream journal  and  it became fascinating to me.

What I discovered in just dream journaling was how proximal My dreams were the things that happened right before I went to sleep. Yeah, like, um, before we started doing the dim lights and the activating content, my wife and I like crime shows and it was amazing in my dreams. Some of those crimes  coming out, I was like, how fascinating is this?

And I actually started looking forward to going to sleep. I was like, okay, I wonder what the dream is going to be tonight because I want to journal it and what am I going to learn from it? And I changed my mindset, and that really helped me break through this sleep neurosis I built through all my measurables.

Oh, that's fantastic. I mean, that speaks to just the power of our thoughts, the power of psychology, the power of that reframing to really impact our behaviors and our results. Certainly, I think, you know, to tie it all nicely, it's so true both with sleep and it's true with things like our day to day management of our choices, like what your company is really striving to do to help inform, you know, our actions and really help yield positive results on the other side of that.

And it's just so impactful how well these things play together, the sleep, the continuous glucose monitors, the awareness piece. And then I think one of the things I'm fascinated about all this is just not just for data for data's sake, but to what you're speaking to, how it can really improve the quality of your life, empower your choices and your results in a really, really important way.

So Just so, so important.  And I wanted to check in. Did we leave anything out that you felt is important to share about this whole world of continuous glucose monitors, sleep, anything we missed? You know, you and I could talk for hours. I know, it's so clear. So yeah, I mean, we could have another episode. I know.

I think we covered some of the highlights really well. Okay, beautiful. So what I want to say is I'm sure that people listening want to know how can they follow you? How can they test out signals themselves and experience the difference? You know, certainly there's a big difference between just getting a prescription, you know, CGM and getting something that is built intentionally to shift your behavior and inform you.

Because that's one of the things I've seen being unfortunate Transcribed situation for people is they might get just a plain prescription. It's nothing knocking in plain prescriptions, certainly better than nothing, but they might get this plain prescription for continuous glucose monitor. And then they say, well, I don't know what to do about this and then feel disempowered and then toss it.

Oh, I've seen this a lot and people just kind of put their head in the sand about it because they don't know what to do about it. Whereas one of the things I'm left with with CYGNOS is that part of the commitment is to get in there and experiment and shift until we really find something workable. So what would be the best ways for people to do that?

Definitely come to CYGNOS. com and there you can find out everything about what we offer. And just in a nutshell, if you join, you fill out a medical questionnaire that's sent to a physician who then writes a prescription for you. We take care of all of that. What we get. The CGM, the materials you need, the alcohol, alcohol swabs, even, and the patches to wear all in a nice little box that we send to you.

So we make that part seamless and the instructions are very easy to get this going on your iPhone or Android device. So signos. com, S I G N O S. com is where you go for that. Uh, you can also follow us on social at Signos Health. And definitely come check out the body signals podcast. So body signals on iTunes or any of the, um, the platforms you use to consume podcasts.

Amazing. Yes. Well, I'm sure we'll need to have another podcast in the future because like you said, we could talk about some of these things for hours if we're both equally fascinated at what can happen when we get more information and data instead of just being at the effect of, oh, why do I feel like crap?

Why do I feel tired? Why is this?  It doesn't have to be like that in our modern society anymore and we can use technology to our advantage to really make that difference. So love the work you're doing. Thank you so much and thank you for taking the time. It really, really made a difference. And thank you for, for having me and also thank you for all the wonderful work you're doing and your great podcast because it's been a great resource for me.

Oh, that makes me so happy. Will you rock, keep experimenting, and then we'll keep comparing notes because I know we're both really into this topic and it's just so, so important. I hope we can inspire other people to do the same. Absolutely.  You've been listening to the Sleep as a Skill podcast, the top podcast for people who want to take their sleep.

Skills to the next level. Every Monday I send out the sleep obsessions newsletter, which aims to be one of the most obsessive newsletters on the planet. Fun facts. I've never missed a Monday for over five years and counting. And it contains everything that you need to know in the fascinating world of sleep.

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 Welcome to the sleep as a skill podcast. My name is Mollie Eastman. I am the founder of sleep as a skill, a company that optimizes sleep through technology, accountability, and behavioral change. As an ex sleep sufferer turned sleep course creator, I am on a mission to transform the way the world thinks about.

sleep. Each week, I'll be interviewing world class experts ranging from researchers, doctors, innovators, and thought leaders to give actionable tips and strategies that you can implement to become a more skillful sleeper. Ultimately, I believe that living a circadian aligned lifestyle is going to be one of the biggest trends in wellness, and I'm committed to keep being you up to date on all the things that you can do today to transform your circadian health and by extension, allowing you to sleep and live better than ever before.

Welcome to the sleep is a skill podcast. Today we're going to be talking about blood sugar and sleep. Could some of those middle of the night awakenings that you've been having be related? to your blood sugar. We'll get into all that and more. Now we've had a number of podcasts where we've looked at examining this from different lenses through different experts.

We've had nutricents on the podcast levels vary. And today we are diving into the world of Signos. It's a CGM company that actually uses a bit of real time inspiration. So say you're spiking after a big bowl of pasta, right? Your CGM is spiking. Well, this product will actually alert you and prompt you to take some actions that it will offer you.

So for instance, you're spiking and it will suggest for you to do some squats or for you to in one way, shape, or form. to help bring down that spike and to mitigate some of that crash that we might have experienced without that intervention and so much more. So you can also kind of get into the weeds on how your friends might be doing with their glucose.

So there can be some of that transparency you can learn within the app, ways  to bring more balance and stability to your blood sugar, not just. Because, but because you'll feel in a whole different way and you will sleep differently if you get that really handled. So a little bit about our guests, Bill Tancer co founded Signos to apply data analysis to help solve the obesity epidemic and fulfill his personal passion to be healthier.

Bill is an expert in consumer behavior. He is a New York times bestselling author and former columnist for time magazine. Bill most recently served as GM and SVP for data and research at Experian. Bill has appeared as a featured guest on ABC's 2020 and Good Morning America, as well as CNBC, CNN, Fox, Business News, Bloomberg, et cetera.

And he frequently comments on the application of big data to understand consumer trends and so much more. I think you're going to really enjoy our conversation and we'll jump right into it. But first, a few words from our sponsors.  Here at the Sleep is a Skill podcast, we're all about enhancing your sleep and a cornerstone of that journey often revolves around stabilizing your blood sugar levels.

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Now invest in better sleep and in turn in a better, more energized life.  As we head into the fall and vacation season winds down, i. e. a time when late nights, irregular eating habits, and indulgence tend to become the norm, it's time to get back on track with our health and, of course, our sleep. Just a quick interesting fact about sleep to mention, drinking more than two servings of alcohol per day for men and more than one serving per day for women can decrease sleep quality by 39.

2%. A sleep foundation survey reports, not even mentioning all the indulgent food and late night effects that often come along with it. And as we know, sleep is the key to your body's rejuvenation and repair process. It controls hunger and weight loss, hormones, boost energy levels and impacts countless.

Other functions, a good night's sleep will improve your wellbeing much more than just about anything else I can possibly think of on the planet. You know, I'm biased, but gotta say that. And sleep is your major to focus on as we head into the fall season and hopefully beyond. And that's why I recommend that if you're going to start taking some supplements on your sleep, often magnesium is a great place to begin.

But not just any magnesium supplement. I do recommend getting the magnesium breakthrough by bio optimizers. Magnesium breakthrough contains all seven forms of magnesium designed to help you fall asleep, stay asleep, and wake up refreshed, which isn't that what we're all looking to do. The sleep benefits are really remarkable.

I use it every night. And once your sleep is optimized, you'll find it much easier to tackle all the other major aspects of your health. And trust me, it is a game changer to test it out. Visit mag breakthrough. com forward slash sleep as a skill. You can enter code sleep as a skill for 10 percent off for any order.

This special offer is only available at  magbreakthrough. com forward slash sleep is a skill. I will also include this in the show notes as well.  And welcome to the sleep is a skill podcast.  All right. I am very excited for this episode and my challenge is going to be to reign it in. I know we're going to have lots of things to discuss, but Bill, thank you so much for taking the time to be here.

Molly, I am so excited to be here because I got to tell you, I'm a huge fan of the Sleep as a Skill podcast. So it is an honor to be on your show. Oh, you are such just a, a gem of a human. I love our conversations. I had the honor of being on your podcast recently and every time I connect with you, I want to connect more.

You know, my challenge is going to be, I'm going to want to ask you questions. So if I start being the host, you just tell me to stop. I mean, it can be a ping pong, you know, back and forth. Okay. But yes, I am so excited to deliver your knowledge to the listener today because one of the things that we find makes such a difference for people in the management of their sleep is for many people surprising how much of a difference Glucose regulation, the management of what can be a roller coaster for many people if they are to wear continuous glucose monitors and they see these numbers, when they start realizing the impact that that can make on the quality of their sleep, the frequency of wake ups.

And that bi directional relationship that can be at play between then the poor sleep that they might get and what that does to glucose. I mean, this is a huge topic. So I'm really, really grateful for you to help us guide us in navigating this and then having tools in place that are really late breaking outside of the mold that can really make a difference in transforming this.

So thank you so much for your time. And how did you find yourself in this role of really pioneering? Uh, glucose management. How did this even happen? You know, it's kind of a funny story. It's a circuitous story But I am a data scientist. I used to work with a massive data set. So I used to analyze um internet behavior and I Was uh in charge of this data set of what 25 million people were doing worldwide on the internet And it was a data set that updated every single day and some things updated every five minutes  So, in my previous life, I really didn't get much sleep because I was analyzing so much data.

Yes. Understandable. So, so I'm a data geek. I think your audience needs to know that first. And I'm going to try and rein it in so I don't get too data geekish on this particular show. Yeah. Um, but from there, I advised a company. That was also using big data and the founder of that company then went on to start signals and right as the company was starting.

We had a dinner together in San Francisco. I was visiting from L. A. And ironically, it was a very carby meal late at night. It didn't include a few glasses of wine.  All the things I've learned not to do. Yeah. But over this carb meal, he said, you know, I have this idea of using these continuous glucose monitors to help people with weight loss and to help them get metabolically healthy.

And I wonder if you'd be interested in advising. And I said, absolutely. On the side, I was actually researching. This idea about using CGMs for weight loss because I'd just been to the doctor. And, um, so a little bit more about my story. I'd moved from San Francisco to LA and I just got married. I married a vegan, which to paraphrase Samuel Jackson, uh, kind of made me a vegan at that point.

And, uh, I thought, you know, I'm, I'm going to get a great physical. And the doctor came back with my lab results. He said, you're pre diabetic. If your glucose is high, you've got hypertension. You, um,  you've, you've, you're pretty much stacking up all of the factors of medi metabolic disease and metabolic syndrome.

So you really need to get the stuff under control. So I said, what do I do? He said, lose weight.  Okay, how do you do that? He's like, you know, just go to the bookstore, get a book, lose weight, lose weight.  So I was like trying to figure out how I was going to get my blood sugar under control and lose the weight.

I went to my doctor and he said, you don't need a CGM. So I went back, you know, as I asked for CGM, he's like, you don't need a CGM. That's for diabetics. Uh, just lose weight. Right. So that then that dinner happened with Sharon with the pizza reason why I'm probably overweight  and I've got bad glucose. It's like, he's like, he's the bread guy.

He's he actually baked sourdough bread. So we've got bread. We've got pizza. We got the wine going dessert  and he's we're talking about this idea of using cgms to help people lose weight and get their, um You Their metabolism under control and get healthier, optimize their, their, um, their metabolic condition.

And I thought I would love to advise. I put on a CGM that that was like, maybe a day or 2 after that.  And I ate the same bowl of oatmeal that I always eat. I've eaten for like two years. I'd researched this. This is the healthiest thing to do to get my cholesterol under control.  And my glucose went from like 99, which was my resting or fasting glucose at the time up to like 140, 150.

Oh my God,  I'm trying to lose weight. And here I am, like spiking my glucose.  I called him up. I said, okay, scratch the, uh, the advisor thing. I'm joining the company. You have to hire me. And so, that's how I started at Signos. Wow! Okay, so this is part of a personal transformation. How long ago was all that?

That was 2020,  just as the, uh, the pandemic was starting. So, it was like, in February, March. Wow. I think, yeah. Okay, and you don't appear to be overweight for when I can see what I know of you, at least of like the chest up. Yeah, I lost weight pretty quickly once I started, um, really paying attention to my glucose.

And the thing is, is that in prior attempts to lose weight, I, like many others, just did diets. I tried keto, I tried paleo, I tried the whole 360. And they were For a while, but they were all unsustainable. And what I found was so interesting about using the CGM is you could make small changes to your diet.

You can make changes to your exercise. You can make changes to managing stress. And what I found was really important sleep all of these things together, making little small changes. You could drastically improve. Um. Your weight and and your your metabolic health. So, uh, yeah, I'm just so excited about this technology and the data that we're getting  that it's just so exciting.

So, yeah,  I could talk, uh, on and on about my own. My own metabolic health, but, uh,  100%. No,  it's so true because it is very exciting from a perspective of actually, we have a mutual friend, Nick, who is wearing your product and continuously is not to use the word continuously repeatedly, but To who keeps commenting on this is of all the things he's doing.

This has made the most profound difference in his health because it's just such that real time feedback that just has us be clear on the thing that we just did this, the one action that we just took to see how is this impacting our health and wellbeing and all the subsequent, you know, spillover effects that can result from that.

So maybe even that could be interesting to parse out. Why don't we want to have the spike in a crash? What are some of the kind of deleterious effects of that and how do they relate to sleep? Yeah, so there's a number of reasons why we don't want the spikes and the crashes. The first one just being the insulin that's released as a result of spiking that over time you can become insulin resistant and then you've got higher resting glucose and and also higher circulating insulin which can lead to a lot of inflammation.

Uh, there's  a whole A bunch of studies around high glucose and sleep. And like you said, it's bidirectional. It's a two way street. So if you are, um, going into sleep with, um, with hyperglycemia, high blood sugar, or if it's erratic, it's going up and down. It's crashing. It's going high. It's going low. That's going to be disruptive to your sleep.

Interestingly, if you have bad sleep, that affects your glucose the next day and you have glucose dysregulation along with a couple of other things that happen from bad sleep, like the suppression of leptin, which is your satiety hormone and the increase of ghrelin, which is your hunger hormone, which causes you to eat Thank you.

More because you've had poor sleep. It's actually the body's way of trying to fuel you up since you didn't get enough rest from the night before. But if you are like me and you're trying to lose weight, trying to get healthy, it's not the, uh, not the thing you want. You don't want that suppression of leptin and the increase in ghrelin.

There's so much interesting. Uh, there's so much interesting data. One of the things that I do at Cygnus is I also for our staff, I run our experiments channel.  Mmm. And I kind of fell into this and oatmeal and sleep are one of the ways I fell into, um, to this particular experiment role. and my, my listeners on my own podcast joke about every single episode, all episode.

I, I've, I've done, I, I've mentioned oatmeal at least once, , and here I seem to be talking about it. It's a mandate exclusively. Yeah. . Yeah. So I'm gonna make sure my, my listeners jump over, but they're probably gonna come back to me and say, okay, it was all about a oatmeal. We've heard these stories  , so I dialed in that oatmeal so I wouldn't spike.

And I did it by adding all sorts of things. So adding some protein and adding some fat, putting some almond butter in there and some chia seeds and some, um. And parts and  doing all sorts of little micro changes to the oatmeal to the point where I wasn't spiking at all. And then 1 day, I had a poor night's sleep,  had that bowl of oatmeal and I spiked again  and I thought, well, something's wrong.

Maybe I've got a bad sensor. Something's not right. So the next time it happened, I had poor night's sleep. Maybe a week later, same thing. Big spike.  So then I start researching and I find all the research on at the, at this point, I'm very new at Cigna. So I'm just now ingesting all of this research and wasn't aware of the connection between bad night's sleep and glucose dysregulation the next day.

So I launched an experiment for the whole staff. So everybody try and regulate, um, to, uh, the same breakfast every day. And then if you've got a bad night's sleep report back on this channel and Slack and tell me about it. And people were like, Oh my God, yes, that happens to me.  We found it happens actually in two really interesting scenarios.

One is when you're really stressed and the other is when you've had a bad night's sleep. So, um, one of my co founders is an E. R. Physician at Stanford. And he's like, when I'm in the trauma Bay.  And I've got a patient come in and it's like a really bad case. I go into this, you know, fight or flight mode and I'm, it's, it's stressful.

And he said, without eating anything, I can go from a normal glucose to like 160  completely normal reaction. What's happening is the liver is dumping glycogen gluconeogenesis. dumping that glycogen into the bloodstream to fuel the body to handle whatever the stressful situation is. So we started noticing these things and that gave rise to this idea of, okay, let's really, um, let's, let's bring some life to these studies that we're reading about and doing these experiments.

And, and it's, um, You know, the other thing I'll mention about using cgm for for weight loss and to help with sleep and to help with stress is that there's a fun element to it. Okay, yes, I'm a, I'm a data geek, but the idea that I could do these experiments and actually see for myself, like you mentioned, it's that continuous feedback loop.

But when you start playing with it and making these small changes and seeing the improvements suddenly. Weight loss goes from this chore or this thing that sounds like it's going to be so hard to do to something that is actually fun. Yes. Oh my gosh. Okay. So much to say about what you just said there.

So on zooming out, that's completely how I've related to sleep from the technology piece is and one of the things I hope to instill for many people is that it can we can actually gamify and hopefully have fun in the process of yeah. learning, iterating, getting curious on some of the things that make a difference for sleep.

Now there's been the spillover effect because now almost becomes, and I've even toyed with the possibility of pretty much mandating that people have continuous glucose monitors in alignment with their mandated sleep wearables in our programs. So stay tuned because that might happen because it's just so important.

And to your point, It really does become fun. And that's one of the things I think really stands out about your company is that the interface on the Cygnos app, one of the things that I was struck by is it has some real time actions that can be taken that I think many people might miss, especially if they're just using plain continuous glucose monitor or, you know, they're Not and can become disempowered when they see the spike, they see the crash, but then it's like, okay, what do I do about this?

Now your app does a great job in helping to show one, what can you do in the moment when this is happening, which is really cool to how can you kind of join forces with friends, which is really interesting and providing that kind of gamification and, you know, kind of group dynamics at play. And then three, the education piece.

So I'm wondering if we can break down some of those unique offerings that are on your  Yeah, you know, I think one of the things that really differentiates us is that we built this, we, we've got some amazing engineers on our team and they have built these predictive algorithms using machine learning and, uh, an artificial intelligence to ingest all of the food logs that you put in and what your responses to those foods are to then build this predictive engine that can, you can enter in any food and we'll make a prediction of what that's going to do to your glucose.

So if you are having a meal and maybe it's dinner and you don't want to spike knowing that you're going to go to sleep in a couple of hours hour to you can put in those food items and we'll make a prediction  in terms of what that meal is going to do to your glucose. That's the first thing. The second thing that we do is movement.

We found is very important in terms of moderating your glucose.  So You put in what you're going to eat, you then start to eat it. If the system senses a spike, we make predictions in terms of what type of movement will help you mitigate that, that spike. So for a lot of us, it's simple as just getting up and going for a walk after meals.

Uh, for me though, sometimes if I, um, walk by the kitchen and there's chocolate chip cookies on the counter and I eat one, maybe it's like a zone three workout on the treadmill and I'm like running as fast as I can for 20 minutes. But normally all it takes is like a simple walk after a meal to help mitigate that response.

But the. The algorithm and the interface is, um, it's, it's just so fascinating to see those suggestions real time because little notification pops up and it says, Hey, do this, just get your heart rate up to this amount, which, you know, equates to a walk or to a jog on the treadmill or to just climbing some stairs.

Uh, so that's the predictive piece.  Then on top of that, what we realized very early on was that we really needed to help our members. With a curriculum, so one's just educating on the basics of glucose, but then it's about talking about how it's not just your nutrition, but we do go into that because that's a huge part of it.

It's also the movement, the exercise piece, and it's also stress and sleep. So here are the things that you can try.  To, um, to help moderate your glucose throughout the day to get more energy, uh, to get healthier and hopefully to lose weight. If that's the mission of a particular member.  Absolutely. I mean, one of the things that we're often speaking to is how behavioral change.

Is one of the biggest needle movers in transforming your sleep and I feel like you are really making this fun. This process of bringing these behavioral change elements and testing navigating. getting curious on this area that is just so transformative. And it's so transformative and so beautifully connects with sleep because many people come our way because they are tired and they are crashing throughout the course of the day.

And just it's an arduous task to get from the morning to the night. And one of the things that we see is when people do start managing their glucose and their metabolic health over time. Oh my gosh, I'm not. crashing after lunch anymore. I'm not just completely dragging and zombie like or anxious or getting headaches or all of those symptoms that can come about.

And so I really think it's so important some of the things that you're doing to make this fun and to get involved in it with the team, with your own team. And then sharing the findings like you do a great job with your emails and sharing what, you know, so it doesn't just stay insular in your team. It comes out to the masses so that we can all kind of follow along in your findings is what I've seen.

Yeah, absolutely. And I just mentioned one other thing is that we really encourage our members to do the same thing that we discovered on our staff that makes things so much fun, which is experiment, experiment, experiment. Yes. A lot of our system is built. On the idea that was behind the study that was published in Cell in 2015 by the Weitzman Institute about personalized nutrition and glycemic response.

And this particular study, they had, I think, it was 800 participants. They put CGMs on and they measured the response to about 46,  000 meals. 46, 000 meals.  And what they found was everyone responded to these foods differently. So our approach is we're not sure how you're going to respond to these different foods.

So experiment, try different foods, see how your body responds to those foods. And it, it goes beyond just the foods. Yeah. It's interesting. Real story. I'm on my rower because Cygnus told me I needed to work off totally and I've been there. Uh huh. Yeah,  and I'm listening to another very popular podcast.

Yeah. In this particular host, you probably know who it is, says,  I eat this big carby meal at the end of my night. Oh, I think I know who it is. You know who it is. I almost fell off the rower. I'm like,  that's the exact opposite advice we give everybody. Yes. Then I had, I thought, actually did some reading and I found that there are actually some different chronotypes.

And while it's relatively rare that I would ever give someone that advice,  there are some people who don't spike from carbs later in the day.  And it has to do with our chronotype. It has a lot to do with circadian rhythms, specifically in the microbiome that some people just have different circadian rhythms.

And so one thing I encouraged everyone to do is take that Carby breakfast item that you have maybe once a while or like me every single day and have it in the morning and then the next day have it at like five, six, seven o'clock at night and then see the difference.  Almost everybody sees a dramatic spike.

I had a difference of like 50 milligrams per deciliter difference between the morning and the night. It's a huge difference. Yes,  100%. But to all my experiments, it's really interesting. I have people Almost every time we do an experiment that respond in a complete opposite way that I expect  to this particular podcast host  credit.

If he's listening to your podcast. Yes, he actually that might work for him. He might have a different chronotype that. Allows him to do that, but you'll never know that unless you do the experiments and test the foods and test how exercise changes things and how mindfulness or meditation might change your response to foods, which for me is a huge one, by the way, I time things in the morning where I do my meditation right before breakfast.

And this actually another one of our head of product was telling me that she has her breakfast and it's always, um, she's she's managed it. Like I have managed mine to not spike. But 1 day she was getting her kid ready for school at the same time. And then there was something stressful in her email from work and she had this completely different response to that same meal  and she attributed to stress.

Anecdotal one data point, she wondered, so of course we launch an experiment and we ask people when you have a stressful morning, just record your glycemic response. And let us know what you see  and in this staff experiment. Yeah, a lot of us noticed that same thing. So I modified my morning ritual to have meditation before I ate to make sure that was nice and calm and stress free before I started breakfast.

And  did it work? Yeah, I haven't had a spike since, um. Again, this is just anecdotal, but it's it's it's what's also interesting about experiments is that it's behavior change. That is, um, it's fun and it's empowering to because  it's it's actually causing me to engage in these these positive behaviors,  um, just to improve my life and it's all kind of goes back to that continuous feedback loop where I can look, see, does this work?

Does this not work? Oh, so beautiful. I mean, I love what you're pointing to there in the experimentations on that call out. Do many of us are impacted by what we discovered glucose to have this kind of circadian component to it that we might not have realized in years past and now we're learning more and more that that same type of food you eat in the morning might respond really differently just given the time of day and how time affects our biology and then yet.

To your point, bio individuality, how we can't just blanket say, because people want to know, Oh, well, will this thing spike me or will it not? It's that's the reason that's the beauty of getting our own continuous glucose monitor, because I'll see people spike on coffee and the next person, not at all.

I'll see people spike on, you know, the certain type of wrap that they have and next person, not at all. It's just fascinating. So you really want to get in the game yourself to make that difference. And so I think what might be valuable, because I love. And one of the things that I get from you is just this excitement in even discovering through your own life, the profound difference that this has made and navigating sounds like continuing to navigate, which is certainly my mission in life is to, you know, never be done.

And we want to keep going, keep looking. So I think that this might be particularly interesting. These, the set of questions that we always ask everyone to really delve into what's going on for you now that you have this information. So we do ask everyone for questions and The first one is what is your nightly sleep routine?

So I'm curious now given what you've heard certain podcast hosts say and you know, all of this and all the data, how are you managing your nights and particularly the glucose piece, but then other components of your sleep? So Based on some things I actually heard on your podcast, my, my most recent modification is I'm going completely dim light when I'm getting ready to go to sleep.

So I have a wind down period. That's like an hour long. So TV is off. I'm trying to, um, to just do things that aren't activating, but all the lights in the house are either dimmed or off.  And then, um, right before I go to bed, I do, um, 20 minute meditation. I'm now into non dual meditation, which is  really cool.

Yes. It's a, there's a couple of great apps out there. So I use my, my apps to do meditation and then go to sleep.  So just to find that non dual for anyone listening that is new to that. Absolutely. So, uh, I started with just the, um, the basic mindfulness meditation. And I, I did that for several years and got a lot out of that, but then I wanted to take the next step.

And so in non dual meditation, there's a couple of different schools of it. And, and, uh, Buddhist thought Dzogchen is the one that Kind of the focus of what I do my meditation on is it's trying to deconstruct the self. So in our minds and our consciousness, we've constructed like almost like a little person in our head.

Yes.  And when you deconstruct that little person, some really interesting things happen. A lot of stress goes away. A lot of things that you take personally, like things that happened during the day, how in the world could he have said that to me? Or she said that to me when yourself isn't there. It's like, okay, these things happen, but it wasn't really about me.

This is just something that this person was saying, and I shouldn't take it personally. And I found that that type of meditation just really takes all the stress away. And.  I was a really bad, bad sleeper and one of the things if I ever had sleep onset problems, it was because I would be replaying something that happened  during work in my mind over and over again and writing stories about it and that really.

That would just get me worked up and I'm getting activated. I'm getting more and more awake as I'm trying to go to sleep by doing this, um, this meditation. There's a saying no self, no problem. So take the self away and then the stress just kind of naturally dissolves. Amazing. I love that. And I love that you're adding in the dim lighting in the evening.

That's fantastic. Are you noticing a difference with that? Yes. In fact, now I want to try. Were you the one that told me about the experiment where they did just candlelight? Oh, yes. So, this is, uh, yeah.  So, the NASA. That's the next step. Uh huh. Yeah. Okay. My wife's like totally into it. She's like, yes, we're going to do the candles.

That sounds awesome. Yes! Oh, my God. Your wife rocks. Okay. Fantastic. Yeah, because I owe it to her because one of the experiments we did, uh, on sleep was with bright lights, like 100 lumen versus 3 lumen. She's like, so mad at me. So I'm like, okay, we're going to do candlelight now. This is on the flip side.

Yes. The flip side.  Actually, I did want to hit on that because I don't think we discussed that yet. I was wondering if you can share a little bit about that because it's been a more recent finding and just, you know, the kind of the impacts of sleeping even with a little bit of light. Yeah, so classic example of what happens within the, uh, the team at CYGNOS is we're at an offsite and someone brings up a study that just came out from Northwestern and in the study, it was a really small study.

I think there was only an end of 20. So 20 participants, they took 10. They let them sleep in a dark environment. Then the other 10 and there's less than 3 lumens. The other 10 had to sleep in 100 lumens, and then they gave both oral glucose tolerance test the next morning to measure their, their glucose dysregulation or regulation.

And of course, the group that, um  That had the bright lights when they tried to sleep had a much worse response to that  than the control group that were sleeping in lumens. Less than three.  Interesting. It's you could argue that. Well, disruptive sleep is going to cause that same dysregulation.  I would have loved to see the study where they tried to disrupt the sleep some other way, but I still personally can tell you that it's hard to sleep  when you've got those bright lights on.

And they use polysomnography  to, to measure the different sleep stages. They also found that the people that were in the group that had the hundred lumens, they were getting hardly any REM or deep sleep. It was almost completely late sleep or into sleep. So, um, yeah, it was an interesting finding. We replicated that the few of my team members willing or had spouses willing to let them put a hundred lumen light, um, in their bedroom and try and sleep.

Uh, tried to replicate that. I'm also, I'm an amateur photographer. So I've got the light meter. I'm doing 100 lumens. I'm adjusting thing. Like, yeah, exactly. Like, like the hundredth of a lumen. Um, yeah, it's a, it's interesting, but I, that kind of made me realize that I needed to  blackout, you know, blackout shades, um, mask if I needed it at a hotel when I didn't, um, Didn't have the ability to black out all the light really makes a huge difference.

Huge. Absolutely. Yeah. 100%. That output of light can be so impactful on the quality of our sleep. And then that subsequent impact on our glucose is just fascinating. And I think just something that people do not. necessarily connect. It's just one of those actionable things right away that we can do to make a difference with how we're feeling the subsequent day and the quality of our sleep.

So it's kind of twofold. Amazing. So with that, then our second question is, does your morning sleep routine look like, and we say that meaning that with the argument that how you set up your days can impact your sleep results. So curious what we might see there. So kind of a mirror of what I do at night, so wake up and right off the bat before I do anything else back to meditation.

So another 20 minute meditation. Yeah. Like I mentioned before, that helps me meditate before I have a meal. I'm not sure which book or podcast I got this tip from, but a big tip. Big life changing, uh, change that I made that's really helped is I now will not check my email until after breakfast. Yes. So forcing that in the beginning.

It was very uncomfortable for me. It's like, I got to check the email. Got to check the email. Got to check the email. And when I like.  Stopped doing that and put off that until after breakfast, it allowed me to relax a little bit more in the morning and not kind of like be half sleeping, wanting to go check the email as soon as I woke up.

The 2nd, I woke up. Um, it just it really did help me. Um, in that last part of my sleep. Uh, you know, I, I wake up usually at 5  36.  So, um, that part of my sleep from like four to six is now a lot more restful now that I'm not anticipating what's in my email inbox. Ah, so important. Yeah, that sleep inertia that we're working through when we first wake up.

I think we might underestimate just and underappreciate how much of a transition it is from the brain to go from a totally sleep state to now being awake and kind of coming online. Um, and then. We might want to throw at ourselves tasks and things that we really want to be cognitively alert for or that could have that clear stress response when we're still sort of in this weird stupor.

And I think it's so important that you're putting in those boundaries and it's sometimes easier said than done. So the fact that you're able to like notice that and make that difference is really, really important. Have there certain structures that you put in place to make that happen or more than just a choice.

Maybe just, yeah, it's low power. It was, yeah, it was, yeah, exactly that. Okay. It's willpower. Yeah. Uh, I did this by accident, but the fact that my meditation is the next thing that I do before I, um, go on with my day also, I think was key because part of, uh, my meditation practice is, is making sure I've dropped everything, anything that's bothering me before I go into a meditation session.

So.  I now have this goal of not really letting anything bother me in the morning. So my meditation is okay, which then helps my sleep as well. Yes, so smart. Yeah, I think there's something powerful about kind of like the bookends to our how we start our day and how we end our day. And I love that you're sounds like being mindful on both sides of your day.

Super important. And then the third question would be what might we visually see on your nightstand or if you're traveling or out and about proverbial nightstand sort of apps, ambiance, gadgets, what have you. Yes. So right now, a couple books on my nightstand lamp and I hate to admit this. There's a cell phone charger for a reason, for a reason.

No. Yeah, I know. I'm on a sleep podcast. I'm going to, I'm going to make a confession here. Okay. Yes. But there's a reason to my confession because I'm, I'm always trying to improve things and improve things with data. So I found an app that can help with my snoring. So the only way I, I was for a long time putting my phone all the way in the bathroom, so it was out of reach so that I wouldn't wake up in the middle of the night and go and check something.

I mean,  it's amazing, like 2 in the morning, what goes through my head is like, Oh, what was the score in the game? I'm going to check.  Then leads to something. Oh, I saw just a notification pop. Oh, there's a message. Well, let me check my inbox. So I was putting the phone far away from the bed. Yeah. But now to measure my snoring, I've got it there.

And I'm just again, practicing willpower to not check the phone at all. Sure. And  it's been a huge help because I'm trying all sorts of different things like mouth taping. Yeah, like my latest thing, which has been, uh, amazing actually has really helped the quality of my sleep. It's helped snoring a little bit.

I can't believe I'm talking about snoring.  No, it's important. It's a big deal. I know. I know. I did not optimize sleep. If that's You know, just a big part of the night. Totally. Yeah. Yes. But you know, it's the, the things like I, so this, this app allows me to test different things and it does in the background, like a causal analysis.

So it says, okay, so taking the allergy medicine didn't help, but the mouth taping definitely did help. So, um,  yeah, I've got that by my bed, but that's, that's it in terms of electronics. And it's, I have a very bare night.  I like that. I like that one book. So funny. The last guest I was just talking to before this one, we were talking about the, how the power of minimalism in our space and how that can be helpful to actually not have a lot of those things.

And I just wanted to check the app that you're using. Is it like SnoreLab or sleep? SnoreLab. Yes. SnoreLab. Okay. Yay. And you're liking it. Great. Yeah. I've been using it forever. Oh, amazing. I've dramatically reduced snoring using that app. Okay, and you found the mouth tape in particular to really make a difference?

Yeah, I've tried so many different things. You know, I tried the nose strips and I tried the nasal dilators and all sorts of different things. I've also been doing a lot of breath work.  Oxygen Advantage. I don't know if you've had Patrick on the show. Yeah. You should if you haven't. I haven't had Patrick actually which we have had a number of practitioners and other proponents of it.

But yeah, we do need to actually get him on. He's fantastic. Yeah. So, he's the one that got me into mouth taping. So, uh, it was very hard in the beginning like the first week, 2 weeks, I was waking up constantly and ripping it off because it just.  Didn't seem right. But then I noticed my my and all my measurement devices.

So I've got my um, My my different measurables my aura ring whoop strap  all this data coming in I'm noticing that my deep sleep improves my REM sleep is improving with the mouth taping as well as the snoring so That that's been a another big game changer for me Amazing. Okay. I have another thing that you might like to try.

Have you heard of excite osa?  I feel like you'll love this. So they're approved for snoring and mild sleep apnea as a daytime treatment. So it is a, you have to have a prescription for it, but with it, you, it's basically, it looks pretty funky, but you hold almost what's like a tens unit on your tongue for 20 minutes.

So you can be like, you know, I know.  So you're, you do look weird, but you can be  on your phone. You can be, um, you know, playing video games. You can be on your laptop. People actually, um, well, I shocked my tongue while you're shocked your tongue in LA traffic. You can, uh, be shocking your tongue. This is so LA.

This is so LA. Totally. 100%. And it's profound. It's wild. I've seen a number of people make a big, big difference in certainly not only just snoring, True apneas and they are also in clinical trials right now for moderate to severe sleep apnea with rumbles that it looks promising, but you know, so we'll see what happens with that, but certainly approved for mild sleep apnea and that snoring piece.

So yeah, I feel like for someone like you, that's likes to test and experiment and tinker well for everyone, but also particularly someone like yourself, I think might. Enjoy that. So awesome. I'm gonna look into that. Cool. And I love that you're practicing all those things to make a difference with the readouts for that.

So people that will use things like SnoreLab will find, Oh my gosh, if I eat late, wow, the impact that that can make on the amount of snoring, the alcohol, the amount that that can make an impact. I mean, just so many tangible things, sleep position, et cetera, et cetera. So it's really important to be in the game of these things and this thing that we're doing a third of our lives on average 26 years for the average person is spent sleeping.

So we might want to spend a little bit of time optimizing  this area. Really, really great. And then the last question would be, out of your whole experience in managing that sleep, you know, third of our life piece, what would you say has made the biggest change to your sleep game or said another way, what would you say has been the biggest aha moment in managing your sleep for yourself?

I would have to say the taping is up there. Yeah, it's pretty high up there, but  there's something else. Actually learn this.  I'm going to listen to more of your episodes because I learned this from one of your episodes.  I mentioned actually on our recording on our podcast is mindset. The mindset. Yeah.

Yeah. I am. So another confession, I got so wrapped up in all the sleep data. I think I became like a sleep neurotic. One specific measurable just kept on reminding me what my sleep debt was. And I was falling deeper and deeper into debt. And I was like, huh? And I would go to sleep. Like I got to get more sleep.

I got to get more sleep. I got to get more sleep. And that was just like going through my head. Yeah. Uh, and then I, yeah, I read this book, Mindset, Carol Dowiecki's book. Great book. Great, great book.  I had done this before when I was, I was doing HIIT training, high intensity interval training, and I hate, I hate the treadmill.

And so I'd get on the treadmill and I'd look at the treadmill and I'd look at the distance I had to go and I'm running as fast as I can. I'm like, I don't know if I can make it. I don't know if I can make it. And after reading, The wiki's book, I started to set little goals for myself and ask the question instead of I don't or the other statement.

I don't think I can make it ask the question.  I wonder if I could blank. I wonder if I could run this lap faster than last. I wonder if I could do a mile under eight. I wonder if I could. And so then I started to apply that to sleep. Yes. So as I, um,  was reading, I can't remember the name of the author. He wrote a book called dream yoga.

Yeah. It's all about lucid sleep. Andrew, I read that one actually. Okay, great, great book. But yeah, I started to read about dreams and lucid dreaming. I'm like, I wonder if I could do this. I wonder if I could remember my dreams. That's what it started with. So I started a dream journal  and  it became fascinating to me.

What I discovered in just dream journaling was how proximal My dreams were the things that happened right before I went to sleep. Yeah, like, um, before we started doing the dim lights and the activating content, my wife and I like crime shows and it was amazing in my dreams. Some of those crimes  coming out, I was like, how fascinating is this?

And I actually started looking forward to going to sleep. I was like, okay, I wonder what the dream is going to be tonight because I want to journal it and what am I going to learn from it? And I changed my mindset, and that really helped me break through this sleep neurosis I built through all my measurables.

Oh, that's fantastic. I mean, that speaks to just the power of our thoughts, the power of psychology, the power of that reframing to really impact our behaviors and our results. Certainly, I think, you know, to tie it all nicely, it's so true both with sleep and it's true with things like our day to day management of our choices, like what your company is really striving to do to help inform, you know, our actions and really help yield positive results on the other side of that.

And it's just so impactful how well these things play together, the sleep, the continuous glucose monitors, the awareness piece. And then I think one of the things I'm fascinated about all this is just not just for data for data's sake, but to what you're speaking to, how it can really improve the quality of your life, empower your choices and your results in a really, really important way.

So Just so, so important.  And I wanted to check in. Did we leave anything out that you felt is important to share about this whole world of continuous glucose monitors, sleep, anything we missed? You know, you and I could talk for hours. I know, it's so clear. So yeah, I mean, we could have another episode. I know.

I think we covered some of the highlights really well. Okay, beautiful. So what I want to say is I'm sure that people listening want to know how can they follow you? How can they test out signals themselves and experience the difference? You know, certainly there's a big difference between just getting a prescription, you know, CGM and getting something that is built intentionally to shift your behavior and inform you.

Because that's one of the things I've seen being unfortunate Transcribed situation for people is they might get just a plain prescription. It's nothing knocking in plain prescriptions, certainly better than nothing, but they might get this plain prescription for continuous glucose monitor. And then they say, well, I don't know what to do about this and then feel disempowered and then toss it.

Oh, I've seen this a lot and people just kind of put their head in the sand about it because they don't know what to do about it. Whereas one of the things I'm left with with CYGNOS is that part of the commitment is to get in there and experiment and shift until we really find something workable. So what would be the best ways for people to do that?

Definitely come to CYGNOS. com and there you can find out everything about what we offer. And just in a nutshell, if you join, you fill out a medical questionnaire that's sent to a physician who then writes a prescription for you. We take care of all of that. What we get. The CGM, the materials you need, the alcohol, alcohol swabs, even, and the patches to wear all in a nice little box that we send to you.

So we make that part seamless and the instructions are very easy to get this going on your iPhone or Android device. So signos. com, S I G N O S. com is where you go for that. Uh, you can also follow us on social at Signos Health. And definitely come check out the body signals podcast. So body signals on iTunes or any of the, um, the platforms you use to consume podcasts.

Amazing. Yes. Well, I'm sure we'll need to have another podcast in the future because like you said, we could talk about some of these things for hours if we're both equally fascinated at what can happen when we get more information and data instead of just being at the effect of, oh, why do I feel like crap?

Why do I feel tired? Why is this?  It doesn't have to be like that in our modern society anymore and we can use technology to our advantage to really make that difference. So love the work you're doing. Thank you so much and thank you for taking the time. It really, really made a difference. And thank you for, for having me and also thank you for all the wonderful work you're doing and your great podcast because it's been a great resource for me.

Oh, that makes me so happy. Will you rock, keep experimenting, and then we'll keep comparing notes because I know we're both really into this topic and it's just so, so important. I hope we can inspire other people to do the same. Absolutely.  You've been listening to the Sleep as a Skill podcast, the top podcast for people who want to take their sleep.

Skills to the next level. Every Monday I send out the sleep obsessions newsletter, which aims to be one of the most obsessive newsletters on the planet. Fun facts. I've never missed a Monday for over five years and counting. And it contains everything that you need to know in the fascinating world of sleep.

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 Welcome to the sleep as a skill podcast. My name is Mollie Eastman. I am the founder of sleep as a skill, a company that optimizes sleep through technology, accountability, and behavioral change. As an ex sleep sufferer turned sleep course creator, I am on a mission to transform the way the world thinks about.

sleep. Each week, I'll be interviewing world class experts ranging from researchers, doctors, innovators, and thought leaders to give actionable tips and strategies that you can implement to become a more skillful sleeper. Ultimately, I believe that living a circadian aligned lifestyle is going to be one of the biggest trends in wellness, and I'm committed to keep being you up to date on all the things that you can do today to transform your circadian health and by extension, allowing you to sleep and live better than ever before.

Welcome to the sleep is a skill podcast. Today we're going to be talking about blood sugar and sleep. Could some of those middle of the night awakenings that you've been having be related? to your blood sugar. We'll get into all that and more. Now we've had a number of podcasts where we've looked at examining this from different lenses through different experts.

We've had nutricents on the podcast levels vary. And today we are diving into the world of Signos. It's a CGM company that actually uses a bit of real time inspiration. So say you're spiking after a big bowl of pasta, right? Your CGM is spiking. Well, this product will actually alert you and prompt you to take some actions that it will offer you.

So for instance, you're spiking and it will suggest for you to do some squats or for you to in one way, shape, or form. to help bring down that spike and to mitigate some of that crash that we might have experienced without that intervention and so much more. So you can also kind of get into the weeds on how your friends might be doing with their glucose.

So there can be some of that transparency you can learn within the app, ways  to bring more balance and stability to your blood sugar, not just. Because, but because you'll feel in a whole different way and you will sleep differently if you get that really handled. So a little bit about our guests, Bill Tancer co founded Signos to apply data analysis to help solve the obesity epidemic and fulfill his personal passion to be healthier.

Bill is an expert in consumer behavior. He is a New York times bestselling author and former columnist for time magazine. Bill most recently served as GM and SVP for data and research at Experian. Bill has appeared as a featured guest on ABC's 2020 and Good Morning America, as well as CNBC, CNN, Fox, Business News, Bloomberg, et cetera.

And he frequently comments on the application of big data to understand consumer trends and so much more. I think you're going to really enjoy our conversation and we'll jump right into it. But first, a few words from our sponsors.  Here at the Sleep is a Skill podcast, we're all about enhancing your sleep and a cornerstone of that journey often revolves around stabilizing your blood sugar levels.

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Now invest in better sleep and in turn in a better, more energized life.  As we head into the fall and vacation season winds down, i. e. a time when late nights, irregular eating habits, and indulgence tend to become the norm, it's time to get back on track with our health and, of course, our sleep. Just a quick interesting fact about sleep to mention, drinking more than two servings of alcohol per day for men and more than one serving per day for women can decrease sleep quality by 39.

2%. A sleep foundation survey reports, not even mentioning all the indulgent food and late night effects that often come along with it. And as we know, sleep is the key to your body's rejuvenation and repair process. It controls hunger and weight loss, hormones, boost energy levels and impacts countless.

Other functions, a good night's sleep will improve your wellbeing much more than just about anything else I can possibly think of on the planet. You know, I'm biased, but gotta say that. And sleep is your major to focus on as we head into the fall season and hopefully beyond. And that's why I recommend that if you're going to start taking some supplements on your sleep, often magnesium is a great place to begin.

But not just any magnesium supplement. I do recommend getting the magnesium breakthrough by bio optimizers. Magnesium breakthrough contains all seven forms of magnesium designed to help you fall asleep, stay asleep, and wake up refreshed, which isn't that what we're all looking to do. The sleep benefits are really remarkable.

I use it every night. And once your sleep is optimized, you'll find it much easier to tackle all the other major aspects of your health. And trust me, it is a game changer to test it out. Visit mag breakthrough. com forward slash sleep as a skill. You can enter code sleep as a skill for 10 percent off for any order.

This special offer is only available at  magbreakthrough. com forward slash sleep is a skill. I will also include this in the show notes as well.  And welcome to the sleep is a skill podcast.  All right. I am very excited for this episode and my challenge is going to be to reign it in. I know we're going to have lots of things to discuss, but Bill, thank you so much for taking the time to be here.

Molly, I am so excited to be here because I got to tell you, I'm a huge fan of the Sleep as a Skill podcast. So it is an honor to be on your show. Oh, you are such just a, a gem of a human. I love our conversations. I had the honor of being on your podcast recently and every time I connect with you, I want to connect more.

You know, my challenge is going to be, I'm going to want to ask you questions. So if I start being the host, you just tell me to stop. I mean, it can be a ping pong, you know, back and forth. Okay. But yes, I am so excited to deliver your knowledge to the listener today because one of the things that we find makes such a difference for people in the management of their sleep is for many people surprising how much of a difference Glucose regulation, the management of what can be a roller coaster for many people if they are to wear continuous glucose monitors and they see these numbers, when they start realizing the impact that that can make on the quality of their sleep, the frequency of wake ups.

And that bi directional relationship that can be at play between then the poor sleep that they might get and what that does to glucose. I mean, this is a huge topic. So I'm really, really grateful for you to help us guide us in navigating this and then having tools in place that are really late breaking outside of the mold that can really make a difference in transforming this.

So thank you so much for your time. And how did you find yourself in this role of really pioneering? Uh, glucose management. How did this even happen? You know, it's kind of a funny story. It's a circuitous story But I am a data scientist. I used to work with a massive data set. So I used to analyze um internet behavior and I Was uh in charge of this data set of what 25 million people were doing worldwide on the internet And it was a data set that updated every single day and some things updated every five minutes  So, in my previous life, I really didn't get much sleep because I was analyzing so much data.

Yes. Understandable. So, so I'm a data geek. I think your audience needs to know that first. And I'm going to try and rein it in so I don't get too data geekish on this particular show. Yeah. Um, but from there, I advised a company. That was also using big data and the founder of that company then went on to start signals and right as the company was starting.

We had a dinner together in San Francisco. I was visiting from L. A. And ironically, it was a very carby meal late at night. It didn't include a few glasses of wine.  All the things I've learned not to do. Yeah. But over this carb meal, he said, you know, I have this idea of using these continuous glucose monitors to help people with weight loss and to help them get metabolically healthy.

And I wonder if you'd be interested in advising. And I said, absolutely. On the side, I was actually researching. This idea about using CGMs for weight loss because I'd just been to the doctor. And, um, so a little bit more about my story. I'd moved from San Francisco to LA and I just got married. I married a vegan, which to paraphrase Samuel Jackson, uh, kind of made me a vegan at that point.

And, uh, I thought, you know, I'm, I'm going to get a great physical. And the doctor came back with my lab results. He said, you're pre diabetic. If your glucose is high, you've got hypertension. You, um,  you've, you've, you're pretty much stacking up all of the factors of medi metabolic disease and metabolic syndrome.

So you really need to get the stuff under control. So I said, what do I do? He said, lose weight.  Okay, how do you do that? He's like, you know, just go to the bookstore, get a book, lose weight, lose weight.  So I was like trying to figure out how I was going to get my blood sugar under control and lose the weight.

I went to my doctor and he said, you don't need a CGM. So I went back, you know, as I asked for CGM, he's like, you don't need a CGM. That's for diabetics. Uh, just lose weight. Right. So that then that dinner happened with Sharon with the pizza reason why I'm probably overweight  and I've got bad glucose. It's like, he's like, he's the bread guy.

He's he actually baked sourdough bread. So we've got bread. We've got pizza. We got the wine going dessert  and he's we're talking about this idea of using cgms to help people lose weight and get their, um You Their metabolism under control and get healthier, optimize their, their, um, their metabolic condition.

And I thought I would love to advise. I put on a CGM that that was like, maybe a day or 2 after that.  And I ate the same bowl of oatmeal that I always eat. I've eaten for like two years. I'd researched this. This is the healthiest thing to do to get my cholesterol under control.  And my glucose went from like 99, which was my resting or fasting glucose at the time up to like 140, 150.

Oh my God,  I'm trying to lose weight. And here I am, like spiking my glucose.  I called him up. I said, okay, scratch the, uh, the advisor thing. I'm joining the company. You have to hire me. And so, that's how I started at Signos. Wow! Okay, so this is part of a personal transformation. How long ago was all that?

That was 2020,  just as the, uh, the pandemic was starting. So, it was like, in February, March. Wow. I think, yeah. Okay, and you don't appear to be overweight for when I can see what I know of you, at least of like the chest up. Yeah, I lost weight pretty quickly once I started, um, really paying attention to my glucose.

And the thing is, is that in prior attempts to lose weight, I, like many others, just did diets. I tried keto, I tried paleo, I tried the whole 360. And they were For a while, but they were all unsustainable. And what I found was so interesting about using the CGM is you could make small changes to your diet.

You can make changes to your exercise. You can make changes to managing stress. And what I found was really important sleep all of these things together, making little small changes. You could drastically improve. Um. Your weight and and your your metabolic health. So, uh, yeah, I'm just so excited about this technology and the data that we're getting  that it's just so exciting.

So, yeah,  I could talk, uh, on and on about my own. My own metabolic health, but, uh,  100%. No,  it's so true because it is very exciting from a perspective of actually, we have a mutual friend, Nick, who is wearing your product and continuously is not to use the word continuously repeatedly, but To who keeps commenting on this is of all the things he's doing.

This has made the most profound difference in his health because it's just such that real time feedback that just has us be clear on the thing that we just did this, the one action that we just took to see how is this impacting our health and wellbeing and all the subsequent, you know, spillover effects that can result from that.

So maybe even that could be interesting to parse out. Why don't we want to have the spike in a crash? What are some of the kind of deleterious effects of that and how do they relate to sleep? Yeah, so there's a number of reasons why we don't want the spikes and the crashes. The first one just being the insulin that's released as a result of spiking that over time you can become insulin resistant and then you've got higher resting glucose and and also higher circulating insulin which can lead to a lot of inflammation.

Uh, there's  a whole A bunch of studies around high glucose and sleep. And like you said, it's bidirectional. It's a two way street. So if you are, um, going into sleep with, um, with hyperglycemia, high blood sugar, or if it's erratic, it's going up and down. It's crashing. It's going high. It's going low. That's going to be disruptive to your sleep.

Interestingly, if you have bad sleep, that affects your glucose the next day and you have glucose dysregulation along with a couple of other things that happen from bad sleep, like the suppression of leptin, which is your satiety hormone and the increase of ghrelin, which is your hunger hormone, which causes you to eat Thank you.

More because you've had poor sleep. It's actually the body's way of trying to fuel you up since you didn't get enough rest from the night before. But if you are like me and you're trying to lose weight, trying to get healthy, it's not the, uh, not the thing you want. You don't want that suppression of leptin and the increase in ghrelin.

There's so much interesting. Uh, there's so much interesting data. One of the things that I do at Cygnus is I also for our staff, I run our experiments channel.  Mmm. And I kind of fell into this and oatmeal and sleep are one of the ways I fell into, um, to this particular experiment role. and my, my listeners on my own podcast joke about every single episode, all episode.

I, I've, I've done, I, I've mentioned oatmeal at least once, , and here I seem to be talking about it. It's a mandate exclusively. Yeah. . Yeah. So I'm gonna make sure my, my listeners jump over, but they're probably gonna come back to me and say, okay, it was all about a oatmeal. We've heard these stories  , so I dialed in that oatmeal so I wouldn't spike.

And I did it by adding all sorts of things. So adding some protein and adding some fat, putting some almond butter in there and some chia seeds and some, um. And parts and  doing all sorts of little micro changes to the oatmeal to the point where I wasn't spiking at all. And then 1 day, I had a poor night's sleep,  had that bowl of oatmeal and I spiked again  and I thought, well, something's wrong.

Maybe I've got a bad sensor. Something's not right. So the next time it happened, I had poor night's sleep. Maybe a week later, same thing. Big spike.  So then I start researching and I find all the research on at the, at this point, I'm very new at Cigna. So I'm just now ingesting all of this research and wasn't aware of the connection between bad night's sleep and glucose dysregulation the next day.

So I launched an experiment for the whole staff. So everybody try and regulate, um, to, uh, the same breakfast every day. And then if you've got a bad night's sleep report back on this channel and Slack and tell me about it. And people were like, Oh my God, yes, that happens to me.  We found it happens actually in two really interesting scenarios.

One is when you're really stressed and the other is when you've had a bad night's sleep. So, um, one of my co founders is an E. R. Physician at Stanford. And he's like, when I'm in the trauma Bay.  And I've got a patient come in and it's like a really bad case. I go into this, you know, fight or flight mode and I'm, it's, it's stressful.

And he said, without eating anything, I can go from a normal glucose to like 160  completely normal reaction. What's happening is the liver is dumping glycogen gluconeogenesis. dumping that glycogen into the bloodstream to fuel the body to handle whatever the stressful situation is. So we started noticing these things and that gave rise to this idea of, okay, let's really, um, let's, let's bring some life to these studies that we're reading about and doing these experiments.

And, and it's, um, You know, the other thing I'll mention about using cgm for for weight loss and to help with sleep and to help with stress is that there's a fun element to it. Okay, yes, I'm a, I'm a data geek, but the idea that I could do these experiments and actually see for myself, like you mentioned, it's that continuous feedback loop.

But when you start playing with it and making these small changes and seeing the improvements suddenly. Weight loss goes from this chore or this thing that sounds like it's going to be so hard to do to something that is actually fun. Yes. Oh my gosh. Okay. So much to say about what you just said there.

So on zooming out, that's completely how I've related to sleep from the technology piece is and one of the things I hope to instill for many people is that it can we can actually gamify and hopefully have fun in the process of yeah. learning, iterating, getting curious on some of the things that make a difference for sleep.

Now there's been the spillover effect because now almost becomes, and I've even toyed with the possibility of pretty much mandating that people have continuous glucose monitors in alignment with their mandated sleep wearables in our programs. So stay tuned because that might happen because it's just so important.

And to your point, It really does become fun. And that's one of the things I think really stands out about your company is that the interface on the Cygnos app, one of the things that I was struck by is it has some real time actions that can be taken that I think many people might miss, especially if they're just using plain continuous glucose monitor or, you know, they're Not and can become disempowered when they see the spike, they see the crash, but then it's like, okay, what do I do about this?

Now your app does a great job in helping to show one, what can you do in the moment when this is happening, which is really cool to how can you kind of join forces with friends, which is really interesting and providing that kind of gamification and, you know, kind of group dynamics at play. And then three, the education piece.

So I'm wondering if we can break down some of those unique offerings that are on your  Yeah, you know, I think one of the things that really differentiates us is that we built this, we, we've got some amazing engineers on our team and they have built these predictive algorithms using machine learning and, uh, an artificial intelligence to ingest all of the food logs that you put in and what your responses to those foods are to then build this predictive engine that can, you can enter in any food and we'll make a prediction of what that's going to do to your glucose.

So if you are having a meal and maybe it's dinner and you don't want to spike knowing that you're going to go to sleep in a couple of hours hour to you can put in those food items and we'll make a prediction  in terms of what that meal is going to do to your glucose. That's the first thing. The second thing that we do is movement.

We found is very important in terms of moderating your glucose.  So You put in what you're going to eat, you then start to eat it. If the system senses a spike, we make predictions in terms of what type of movement will help you mitigate that, that spike. So for a lot of us, it's simple as just getting up and going for a walk after meals.

Uh, for me though, sometimes if I, um, walk by the kitchen and there's chocolate chip cookies on the counter and I eat one, maybe it's like a zone three workout on the treadmill and I'm like running as fast as I can for 20 minutes. But normally all it takes is like a simple walk after a meal to help mitigate that response.

But the. The algorithm and the interface is, um, it's, it's just so fascinating to see those suggestions real time because little notification pops up and it says, Hey, do this, just get your heart rate up to this amount, which, you know, equates to a walk or to a jog on the treadmill or to just climbing some stairs.

Uh, so that's the predictive piece.  Then on top of that, what we realized very early on was that we really needed to help our members. With a curriculum, so one's just educating on the basics of glucose, but then it's about talking about how it's not just your nutrition, but we do go into that because that's a huge part of it.

It's also the movement, the exercise piece, and it's also stress and sleep. So here are the things that you can try.  To, um, to help moderate your glucose throughout the day to get more energy, uh, to get healthier and hopefully to lose weight. If that's the mission of a particular member.  Absolutely. I mean, one of the things that we're often speaking to is how behavioral change.

Is one of the biggest needle movers in transforming your sleep and I feel like you are really making this fun. This process of bringing these behavioral change elements and testing navigating. getting curious on this area that is just so transformative. And it's so transformative and so beautifully connects with sleep because many people come our way because they are tired and they are crashing throughout the course of the day.

And just it's an arduous task to get from the morning to the night. And one of the things that we see is when people do start managing their glucose and their metabolic health over time. Oh my gosh, I'm not. crashing after lunch anymore. I'm not just completely dragging and zombie like or anxious or getting headaches or all of those symptoms that can come about.

And so I really think it's so important some of the things that you're doing to make this fun and to get involved in it with the team, with your own team. And then sharing the findings like you do a great job with your emails and sharing what, you know, so it doesn't just stay insular in your team. It comes out to the masses so that we can all kind of follow along in your findings is what I've seen.

Yeah, absolutely. And I just mentioned one other thing is that we really encourage our members to do the same thing that we discovered on our staff that makes things so much fun, which is experiment, experiment, experiment. Yes. A lot of our system is built. On the idea that was behind the study that was published in Cell in 2015 by the Weitzman Institute about personalized nutrition and glycemic response.

And this particular study, they had, I think, it was 800 participants. They put CGMs on and they measured the response to about 46,  000 meals. 46, 000 meals.  And what they found was everyone responded to these foods differently. So our approach is we're not sure how you're going to respond to these different foods.

So experiment, try different foods, see how your body responds to those foods. And it, it goes beyond just the foods. Yeah. It's interesting. Real story. I'm on my rower because Cygnus told me I needed to work off totally and I've been there. Uh huh. Yeah,  and I'm listening to another very popular podcast.

Yeah. In this particular host, you probably know who it is, says,  I eat this big carby meal at the end of my night. Oh, I think I know who it is. You know who it is. I almost fell off the rower. I'm like,  that's the exact opposite advice we give everybody. Yes. Then I had, I thought, actually did some reading and I found that there are actually some different chronotypes.

And while it's relatively rare that I would ever give someone that advice,  there are some people who don't spike from carbs later in the day.  And it has to do with our chronotype. It has a lot to do with circadian rhythms, specifically in the microbiome that some people just have different circadian rhythms.

And so one thing I encouraged everyone to do is take that Carby breakfast item that you have maybe once a while or like me every single day and have it in the morning and then the next day have it at like five, six, seven o'clock at night and then see the difference.  Almost everybody sees a dramatic spike.

I had a difference of like 50 milligrams per deciliter difference between the morning and the night. It's a huge difference. Yes,  100%. But to all my experiments, it's really interesting. I have people Almost every time we do an experiment that respond in a complete opposite way that I expect  to this particular podcast host  credit.

If he's listening to your podcast. Yes, he actually that might work for him. He might have a different chronotype that. Allows him to do that, but you'll never know that unless you do the experiments and test the foods and test how exercise changes things and how mindfulness or meditation might change your response to foods, which for me is a huge one, by the way, I time things in the morning where I do my meditation right before breakfast.

And this actually another one of our head of product was telling me that she has her breakfast and it's always, um, she's she's managed it. Like I have managed mine to not spike. But 1 day she was getting her kid ready for school at the same time. And then there was something stressful in her email from work and she had this completely different response to that same meal  and she attributed to stress.

Anecdotal one data point, she wondered, so of course we launch an experiment and we ask people when you have a stressful morning, just record your glycemic response. And let us know what you see  and in this staff experiment. Yeah, a lot of us noticed that same thing. So I modified my morning ritual to have meditation before I ate to make sure that was nice and calm and stress free before I started breakfast.

And  did it work? Yeah, I haven't had a spike since, um. Again, this is just anecdotal, but it's it's it's what's also interesting about experiments is that it's behavior change. That is, um, it's fun and it's empowering to because  it's it's actually causing me to engage in these these positive behaviors,  um, just to improve my life and it's all kind of goes back to that continuous feedback loop where I can look, see, does this work?

Does this not work? Oh, so beautiful. I mean, I love what you're pointing to there in the experimentations on that call out. Do many of us are impacted by what we discovered glucose to have this kind of circadian component to it that we might not have realized in years past and now we're learning more and more that that same type of food you eat in the morning might respond really differently just given the time of day and how time affects our biology and then yet.

To your point, bio individuality, how we can't just blanket say, because people want to know, Oh, well, will this thing spike me or will it not? It's that's the reason that's the beauty of getting our own continuous glucose monitor, because I'll see people spike on coffee and the next person, not at all.

I'll see people spike on, you know, the certain type of wrap that they have and next person, not at all. It's just fascinating. So you really want to get in the game yourself to make that difference. And so I think what might be valuable, because I love. And one of the things that I get from you is just this excitement in even discovering through your own life, the profound difference that this has made and navigating sounds like continuing to navigate, which is certainly my mission in life is to, you know, never be done.

And we want to keep going, keep looking. So I think that this might be particularly interesting. These, the set of questions that we always ask everyone to really delve into what's going on for you now that you have this information. So we do ask everyone for questions and The first one is what is your nightly sleep routine?

So I'm curious now given what you've heard certain podcast hosts say and you know, all of this and all the data, how are you managing your nights and particularly the glucose piece, but then other components of your sleep? So Based on some things I actually heard on your podcast, my, my most recent modification is I'm going completely dim light when I'm getting ready to go to sleep.

So I have a wind down period. That's like an hour long. So TV is off. I'm trying to, um, to just do things that aren't activating, but all the lights in the house are either dimmed or off.  And then, um, right before I go to bed, I do, um, 20 minute meditation. I'm now into non dual meditation, which is  really cool.

Yes. It's a, there's a couple of great apps out there. So I use my, my apps to do meditation and then go to sleep.  So just to find that non dual for anyone listening that is new to that. Absolutely. So, uh, I started with just the, um, the basic mindfulness meditation. And I, I did that for several years and got a lot out of that, but then I wanted to take the next step.

And so in non dual meditation, there's a couple of different schools of it. And, and, uh, Buddhist thought Dzogchen is the one that Kind of the focus of what I do my meditation on is it's trying to deconstruct the self. So in our minds and our consciousness, we've constructed like almost like a little person in our head.

Yes.  And when you deconstruct that little person, some really interesting things happen. A lot of stress goes away. A lot of things that you take personally, like things that happened during the day, how in the world could he have said that to me? Or she said that to me when yourself isn't there. It's like, okay, these things happen, but it wasn't really about me.

This is just something that this person was saying, and I shouldn't take it personally. And I found that that type of meditation just really takes all the stress away. And.  I was a really bad, bad sleeper and one of the things if I ever had sleep onset problems, it was because I would be replaying something that happened  during work in my mind over and over again and writing stories about it and that really.

That would just get me worked up and I'm getting activated. I'm getting more and more awake as I'm trying to go to sleep by doing this, um, this meditation. There's a saying no self, no problem. So take the self away and then the stress just kind of naturally dissolves. Amazing. I love that. And I love that you're adding in the dim lighting in the evening.

That's fantastic. Are you noticing a difference with that? Yes. In fact, now I want to try. Were you the one that told me about the experiment where they did just candlelight? Oh, yes. So, this is, uh, yeah.  So, the NASA. That's the next step. Uh huh. Yeah. Okay. My wife's like totally into it. She's like, yes, we're going to do the candles.

That sounds awesome. Yes! Oh, my God. Your wife rocks. Okay. Fantastic. Yeah, because I owe it to her because one of the experiments we did, uh, on sleep was with bright lights, like 100 lumen versus 3 lumen. She's like, so mad at me. So I'm like, okay, we're going to do candlelight now. This is on the flip side.

Yes. The flip side.  Actually, I did want to hit on that because I don't think we discussed that yet. I was wondering if you can share a little bit about that because it's been a more recent finding and just, you know, the kind of the impacts of sleeping even with a little bit of light. Yeah, so classic example of what happens within the, uh, the team at CYGNOS is we're at an offsite and someone brings up a study that just came out from Northwestern and in the study, it was a really small study.

I think there was only an end of 20. So 20 participants, they took 10. They let them sleep in a dark environment. Then the other 10 and there's less than 3 lumens. The other 10 had to sleep in 100 lumens, and then they gave both oral glucose tolerance test the next morning to measure their, their glucose dysregulation or regulation.

And of course, the group that, um  That had the bright lights when they tried to sleep had a much worse response to that  than the control group that were sleeping in lumens. Less than three.  Interesting. It's you could argue that. Well, disruptive sleep is going to cause that same dysregulation.  I would have loved to see the study where they tried to disrupt the sleep some other way, but I still personally can tell you that it's hard to sleep  when you've got those bright lights on.

And they use polysomnography  to, to measure the different sleep stages. They also found that the people that were in the group that had the hundred lumens, they were getting hardly any REM or deep sleep. It was almost completely late sleep or into sleep. So, um, yeah, it was an interesting finding. We replicated that the few of my team members willing or had spouses willing to let them put a hundred lumen light, um, in their bedroom and try and sleep.

Uh, tried to replicate that. I'm also, I'm an amateur photographer. So I've got the light meter. I'm doing 100 lumens. I'm adjusting thing. Like, yeah, exactly. Like, like the hundredth of a lumen. Um, yeah, it's a, it's interesting, but I, that kind of made me realize that I needed to  blackout, you know, blackout shades, um, mask if I needed it at a hotel when I didn't, um, Didn't have the ability to black out all the light really makes a huge difference.

Huge. Absolutely. Yeah. 100%. That output of light can be so impactful on the quality of our sleep. And then that subsequent impact on our glucose is just fascinating. And I think just something that people do not. necessarily connect. It's just one of those actionable things right away that we can do to make a difference with how we're feeling the subsequent day and the quality of our sleep.

So it's kind of twofold. Amazing. So with that, then our second question is, does your morning sleep routine look like, and we say that meaning that with the argument that how you set up your days can impact your sleep results. So curious what we might see there. So kind of a mirror of what I do at night, so wake up and right off the bat before I do anything else back to meditation.

So another 20 minute meditation. Yeah. Like I mentioned before, that helps me meditate before I have a meal. I'm not sure which book or podcast I got this tip from, but a big tip. Big life changing, uh, change that I made that's really helped is I now will not check my email until after breakfast. Yes. So forcing that in the beginning.

It was very uncomfortable for me. It's like, I got to check the email. Got to check the email. Got to check the email. And when I like.  Stopped doing that and put off that until after breakfast, it allowed me to relax a little bit more in the morning and not kind of like be half sleeping, wanting to go check the email as soon as I woke up.

The 2nd, I woke up. Um, it just it really did help me. Um, in that last part of my sleep. Uh, you know, I, I wake up usually at 5  36.  So, um, that part of my sleep from like four to six is now a lot more restful now that I'm not anticipating what's in my email inbox. Ah, so important. Yeah, that sleep inertia that we're working through when we first wake up.

I think we might underestimate just and underappreciate how much of a transition it is from the brain to go from a totally sleep state to now being awake and kind of coming online. Um, and then. We might want to throw at ourselves tasks and things that we really want to be cognitively alert for or that could have that clear stress response when we're still sort of in this weird stupor.

And I think it's so important that you're putting in those boundaries and it's sometimes easier said than done. So the fact that you're able to like notice that and make that difference is really, really important. Have there certain structures that you put in place to make that happen or more than just a choice.

Maybe just, yeah, it's low power. It was, yeah, it was, yeah, exactly that. Okay. It's willpower. Yeah. Uh, I did this by accident, but the fact that my meditation is the next thing that I do before I, um, go on with my day also, I think was key because part of, uh, my meditation practice is, is making sure I've dropped everything, anything that's bothering me before I go into a meditation session.

So.  I now have this goal of not really letting anything bother me in the morning. So my meditation is okay, which then helps my sleep as well. Yes, so smart. Yeah, I think there's something powerful about kind of like the bookends to our how we start our day and how we end our day. And I love that you're sounds like being mindful on both sides of your day.

Super important. And then the third question would be what might we visually see on your nightstand or if you're traveling or out and about proverbial nightstand sort of apps, ambiance, gadgets, what have you. Yes. So right now, a couple books on my nightstand lamp and I hate to admit this. There's a cell phone charger for a reason, for a reason.

No. Yeah, I know. I'm on a sleep podcast. I'm going to, I'm going to make a confession here. Okay. Yes. But there's a reason to my confession because I'm, I'm always trying to improve things and improve things with data. So I found an app that can help with my snoring. So the only way I, I was for a long time putting my phone all the way in the bathroom, so it was out of reach so that I wouldn't wake up in the middle of the night and go and check something.

I mean,  it's amazing, like 2 in the morning, what goes through my head is like, Oh, what was the score in the game? I'm going to check.  Then leads to something. Oh, I saw just a notification pop. Oh, there's a message. Well, let me check my inbox. So I was putting the phone far away from the bed. Yeah. But now to measure my snoring, I've got it there.

And I'm just again, practicing willpower to not check the phone at all. Sure. And  it's been a huge help because I'm trying all sorts of different things like mouth taping. Yeah, like my latest thing, which has been, uh, amazing actually has really helped the quality of my sleep. It's helped snoring a little bit.

I can't believe I'm talking about snoring.  No, it's important. It's a big deal. I know. I know. I did not optimize sleep. If that's You know, just a big part of the night. Totally. Yeah. Yes. But you know, it's the, the things like I, so this, this app allows me to test different things and it does in the background, like a causal analysis.

So it says, okay, so taking the allergy medicine didn't help, but the mouth taping definitely did help. So, um,  yeah, I've got that by my bed, but that's, that's it in terms of electronics. And it's, I have a very bare night.  I like that. I like that one book. So funny. The last guest I was just talking to before this one, we were talking about the, how the power of minimalism in our space and how that can be helpful to actually not have a lot of those things.

And I just wanted to check the app that you're using. Is it like SnoreLab or sleep? SnoreLab. Yes. SnoreLab. Okay. Yay. And you're liking it. Great. Yeah. I've been using it forever. Oh, amazing. I've dramatically reduced snoring using that app. Okay, and you found the mouth tape in particular to really make a difference?

Yeah, I've tried so many different things. You know, I tried the nose strips and I tried the nasal dilators and all sorts of different things. I've also been doing a lot of breath work.  Oxygen Advantage. I don't know if you've had Patrick on the show. Yeah. You should if you haven't. I haven't had Patrick actually which we have had a number of practitioners and other proponents of it.

But yeah, we do need to actually get him on. He's fantastic. Yeah. So, he's the one that got me into mouth taping. So, uh, it was very hard in the beginning like the first week, 2 weeks, I was waking up constantly and ripping it off because it just.  Didn't seem right. But then I noticed my my and all my measurement devices.

So I've got my um, My my different measurables my aura ring whoop strap  all this data coming in I'm noticing that my deep sleep improves my REM sleep is improving with the mouth taping as well as the snoring so That that's been a another big game changer for me Amazing. Okay. I have another thing that you might like to try.

Have you heard of excite osa?  I feel like you'll love this. So they're approved for snoring and mild sleep apnea as a daytime treatment. So it is a, you have to have a prescription for it, but with it, you, it's basically, it looks pretty funky, but you hold almost what's like a tens unit on your tongue for 20 minutes.

So you can be like, you know, I know.  So you're, you do look weird, but you can be  on your phone. You can be, um, you know, playing video games. You can be on your laptop. People actually, um, well, I shocked my tongue while you're shocked your tongue in LA traffic. You can, uh, be shocking your tongue. This is so LA.

This is so LA. Totally. 100%. And it's profound. It's wild. I've seen a number of people make a big, big difference in certainly not only just snoring, True apneas and they are also in clinical trials right now for moderate to severe sleep apnea with rumbles that it looks promising, but you know, so we'll see what happens with that, but certainly approved for mild sleep apnea and that snoring piece.

So yeah, I feel like for someone like you, that's likes to test and experiment and tinker well for everyone, but also particularly someone like yourself, I think might. Enjoy that. So awesome. I'm gonna look into that. Cool. And I love that you're practicing all those things to make a difference with the readouts for that.

So people that will use things like SnoreLab will find, Oh my gosh, if I eat late, wow, the impact that that can make on the amount of snoring, the alcohol, the amount that that can make an impact. I mean, just so many tangible things, sleep position, et cetera, et cetera. So it's really important to be in the game of these things and this thing that we're doing a third of our lives on average 26 years for the average person is spent sleeping.

So we might want to spend a little bit of time optimizing  this area. Really, really great. And then the last question would be, out of your whole experience in managing that sleep, you know, third of our life piece, what would you say has made the biggest change to your sleep game or said another way, what would you say has been the biggest aha moment in managing your sleep for yourself?

I would have to say the taping is up there. Yeah, it's pretty high up there, but  there's something else. Actually learn this.  I'm going to listen to more of your episodes because I learned this from one of your episodes.  I mentioned actually on our recording on our podcast is mindset. The mindset. Yeah.

Yeah. I am. So another confession, I got so wrapped up in all the sleep data. I think I became like a sleep neurotic. One specific measurable just kept on reminding me what my sleep debt was. And I was falling deeper and deeper into debt. And I was like, huh? And I would go to sleep. Like I got to get more sleep.

I got to get more sleep. I got to get more sleep. And that was just like going through my head. Yeah. Uh, and then I, yeah, I read this book, Mindset, Carol Dowiecki's book. Great book. Great, great book.  I had done this before when I was, I was doing HIIT training, high intensity interval training, and I hate, I hate the treadmill.

And so I'd get on the treadmill and I'd look at the treadmill and I'd look at the distance I had to go and I'm running as fast as I can. I'm like, I don't know if I can make it. I don't know if I can make it. And after reading, The wiki's book, I started to set little goals for myself and ask the question instead of I don't or the other statement.

I don't think I can make it ask the question.  I wonder if I could blank. I wonder if I could run this lap faster than last. I wonder if I could do a mile under eight. I wonder if I could. And so then I started to apply that to sleep. Yes. So as I, um,  was reading, I can't remember the name of the author. He wrote a book called dream yoga.

Yeah. It's all about lucid sleep. Andrew, I read that one actually. Okay, great, great book. But yeah, I started to read about dreams and lucid dreaming. I'm like, I wonder if I could do this. I wonder if I could remember my dreams. That's what it started with. So I started a dream journal  and  it became fascinating to me.

What I discovered in just dream journaling was how proximal My dreams were the things that happened right before I went to sleep. Yeah, like, um, before we started doing the dim lights and the activating content, my wife and I like crime shows and it was amazing in my dreams. Some of those crimes  coming out, I was like, how fascinating is this?

And I actually started looking forward to going to sleep. I was like, okay, I wonder what the dream is going to be tonight because I want to journal it and what am I going to learn from it? And I changed my mindset, and that really helped me break through this sleep neurosis I built through all my measurables.

Oh, that's fantastic. I mean, that speaks to just the power of our thoughts, the power of psychology, the power of that reframing to really impact our behaviors and our results. Certainly, I think, you know, to tie it all nicely, it's so true both with sleep and it's true with things like our day to day management of our choices, like what your company is really striving to do to help inform, you know, our actions and really help yield positive results on the other side of that.

And it's just so impactful how well these things play together, the sleep, the continuous glucose monitors, the awareness piece. And then I think one of the things I'm fascinated about all this is just not just for data for data's sake, but to what you're speaking to, how it can really improve the quality of your life, empower your choices and your results in a really, really important way.

So Just so, so important.  And I wanted to check in. Did we leave anything out that you felt is important to share about this whole world of continuous glucose monitors, sleep, anything we missed? You know, you and I could talk for hours. I know, it's so clear. So yeah, I mean, we could have another episode. I know.

I think we covered some of the highlights really well. Okay, beautiful. So what I want to say is I'm sure that people listening want to know how can they follow you? How can they test out signals themselves and experience the difference? You know, certainly there's a big difference between just getting a prescription, you know, CGM and getting something that is built intentionally to shift your behavior and inform you.

Because that's one of the things I've seen being unfortunate Transcribed situation for people is they might get just a plain prescription. It's nothing knocking in plain prescriptions, certainly better than nothing, but they might get this plain prescription for continuous glucose monitor. And then they say, well, I don't know what to do about this and then feel disempowered and then toss it.

Oh, I've seen this a lot and people just kind of put their head in the sand about it because they don't know what to do about it. Whereas one of the things I'm left with with CYGNOS is that part of the commitment is to get in there and experiment and shift until we really find something workable. So what would be the best ways for people to do that?

Definitely come to CYGNOS. com and there you can find out everything about what we offer. And just in a nutshell, if you join, you fill out a medical questionnaire that's sent to a physician who then writes a prescription for you. We take care of all of that. What we get. The CGM, the materials you need, the alcohol, alcohol swabs, even, and the patches to wear all in a nice little box that we send to you.

So we make that part seamless and the instructions are very easy to get this going on your iPhone or Android device. So signos. com, S I G N O S. com is where you go for that. Uh, you can also follow us on social at Signos Health. And definitely come check out the body signals podcast. So body signals on iTunes or any of the, um, the platforms you use to consume podcasts.

Amazing. Yes. Well, I'm sure we'll need to have another podcast in the future because like you said, we could talk about some of these things for hours if we're both equally fascinated at what can happen when we get more information and data instead of just being at the effect of, oh, why do I feel like crap?

Why do I feel tired? Why is this?  It doesn't have to be like that in our modern society anymore and we can use technology to our advantage to really make that difference. So love the work you're doing. Thank you so much and thank you for taking the time. It really, really made a difference. And thank you for, for having me and also thank you for all the wonderful work you're doing and your great podcast because it's been a great resource for me.

Oh, that makes me so happy. Will you rock, keep experimenting, and then we'll keep comparing notes because I know we're both really into this topic and it's just so, so important. I hope we can inspire other people to do the same. Absolutely.  You've been listening to the Sleep as a Skill podcast, the top podcast for people who want to take their sleep.

Skills to the next level. Every Monday I send out the sleep obsessions newsletter, which aims to be one of the most obsessive newsletters on the planet. Fun facts. I've never missed a Monday for over five years and counting. And it contains everything that you need to know in the fascinating world of sleep.

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Welcome to the sleep as a skill podcast. My name is Mollie Eastman. I am the founder of sleep as a skill, a company that optimizes sleep through technology, accountability, and behavioral change. As an ex sleep sufferer turned sleep course creator, I am on a mission to transform the way the world thinks about.

sleep. Each week, I'll be interviewing world class experts ranging from researchers, doctors, innovators, and thought leaders to give actionable tips and strategies that you can implement to become a more skillful sleeper. Ultimately, I believe that living a circadian aligned lifestyle is going to be one of the biggest trends in wellness, and I'm committed to keep being you up to date on all the things that you can do today to transform your circadian health and by extension, allowing you to sleep and live better than ever before.

Welcome to the sleep is a skill podcast. Today we're going to be talking about blood sugar and sleep. Could some of those middle of the night awakenings that you've been having be related? to your blood sugar. We'll get into all that and more. Now we've had a number of podcasts where we've looked at examining this from different lenses through different experts.

We've had nutricents on the podcast levels vary. And today we are diving into the world of Signos. It's a CGM company that actually uses a bit of real time inspiration. So say you're spiking after a big bowl of pasta, right? Your CGM is spiking. Well, this product will actually alert you and prompt you to take some actions that it will offer you.

So for instance, you're spiking and it will suggest for you to do some squats or for you to in one way, shape, or form. to help bring down that spike and to mitigate some of that crash that we might have experienced without that intervention and so much more. So you can also kind of get into the weeds on how your friends might be doing with their glucose.

So there can be some of that transparency you can learn within the app, ways  to bring more balance and stability to your blood sugar, not just. Because, but because you'll feel in a whole different way and you will sleep differently if you get that really handled. So a little bit about our guests, Bill Tancer co founded Signos to apply data analysis to help solve the obesity epidemic and fulfill his personal passion to be healthier.

Bill is an expert in consumer behavior. He is a New York times bestselling author and former columnist for time magazine. Bill most recently served as GM and SVP for data and research at Experian. Bill has appeared as a featured guest on ABC's 2020 and Good Morning America, as well as CNBC, CNN, Fox, Business News, Bloomberg, et cetera.

And he frequently comments on the application of big data to understand consumer trends and so much more. I think you're going to really enjoy our conversation and we'll jump right into it. But first, a few words from our sponsors.  Here at the Sleep is a Skill podcast, we're all about enhancing your sleep and a cornerstone of that journey often revolves around stabilizing your blood sugar levels.

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Now invest in better sleep and in turn in a better, more energized life.  As we head into the fall and vacation season winds down, i. e. a time when late nights, irregular eating habits, and indulgence tend to become the norm, it's time to get back on track with our health and, of course, our sleep. Just a quick interesting fact about sleep to mention, drinking more than two servings of alcohol per day for men and more than one serving per day for women can decrease sleep quality by 39.

2%. A sleep foundation survey reports, not even mentioning all the indulgent food and late night effects that often come along with it. And as we know, sleep is the key to your body's rejuvenation and repair process. It controls hunger and weight loss, hormones, boost energy levels and impacts countless.

Other functions, a good night's sleep will improve your wellbeing much more than just about anything else I can possibly think of on the planet. You know, I'm biased, but gotta say that. And sleep is your major to focus on as we head into the fall season and hopefully beyond. And that's why I recommend that if you're going to start taking some supplements on your sleep, often magnesium is a great place to begin.

But not just any magnesium supplement. I do recommend getting the magnesium breakthrough by bio optimizers. Magnesium breakthrough contains all seven forms of magnesium designed to help you fall asleep, stay asleep, and wake up refreshed, which isn't that what we're all looking to do. The sleep benefits are really remarkable.

I use it every night. And once your sleep is optimized, you'll find it much easier to tackle all the other major aspects of your health. And trust me, it is a game changer to test it out. Visit mag breakthrough. com forward slash sleep as a skill. You can enter code sleep as a skill for 10 percent off for any order.

This special offer is only available at  magbreakthrough. com forward slash sleep is a skill. I will also include this in the show notes as well.  And welcome to the sleep is a skill podcast.  All right. I am very excited for this episode and my challenge is going to be to reign it in. I know we're going to have lots of things to discuss, but Bill, thank you so much for taking the time to be here.

Molly, I am so excited to be here because I got to tell you, I'm a huge fan of the Sleep as a Skill podcast. So it is an honor to be on your show. Oh, you are such just a, a gem of a human. I love our conversations. I had the honor of being on your podcast recently and every time I connect with you, I want to connect more.

You know, my challenge is going to be, I'm going to want to ask you questions. So if I start being the host, you just tell me to stop. I mean, it can be a ping pong, you know, back and forth. Okay. But yes, I am so excited to deliver your knowledge to the listener today because one of the things that we find makes such a difference for people in the management of their sleep is for many people surprising how much of a difference Glucose regulation, the management of what can be a roller coaster for many people if they are to wear continuous glucose monitors and they see these numbers, when they start realizing the impact that that can make on the quality of their sleep, the frequency of wake ups.

And that bi directional relationship that can be at play between then the poor sleep that they might get and what that does to glucose. I mean, this is a huge topic. So I'm really, really grateful for you to help us guide us in navigating this and then having tools in place that are really late breaking outside of the mold that can really make a difference in transforming this.

So thank you so much for your time. And how did you find yourself in this role of really pioneering? Uh, glucose management. How did this even happen? You know, it's kind of a funny story. It's a circuitous story But I am a data scientist. I used to work with a massive data set. So I used to analyze um internet behavior and I Was uh in charge of this data set of what 25 million people were doing worldwide on the internet And it was a data set that updated every single day and some things updated every five minutes  So, in my previous life, I really didn't get much sleep because I was analyzing so much data.

Yes. Understandable. So, so I'm a data geek. I think your audience needs to know that first. And I'm going to try and rein it in so I don't get too data geekish on this particular show. Yeah. Um, but from there, I advised a company. That was also using big data and the founder of that company then went on to start signals and right as the company was starting.

We had a dinner together in San Francisco. I was visiting from L. A. And ironically, it was a very carby meal late at night. It didn't include a few glasses of wine.  All the things I've learned not to do. Yeah. But over this carb meal, he said, you know, I have this idea of using these continuous glucose monitors to help people with weight loss and to help them get metabolically healthy.

And I wonder if you'd be interested in advising. And I said, absolutely. On the side, I was actually researching. This idea about using CGMs for weight loss because I'd just been to the doctor. And, um, so a little bit more about my story. I'd moved from San Francisco to LA and I just got married. I married a vegan, which to paraphrase Samuel Jackson, uh, kind of made me a vegan at that point.

And, uh, I thought, you know, I'm, I'm going to get a great physical. And the doctor came back with my lab results. He said, you're pre diabetic. If your glucose is high, you've got hypertension. You, um,  you've, you've, you're pretty much stacking up all of the factors of medi metabolic disease and metabolic syndrome.

So you really need to get the stuff under control. So I said, what do I do? He said, lose weight.  Okay, how do you do that? He's like, you know, just go to the bookstore, get a book, lose weight, lose weight.  So I was like trying to figure out how I was going to get my blood sugar under control and lose the weight.

I went to my doctor and he said, you don't need a CGM. So I went back, you know, as I asked for CGM, he's like, you don't need a CGM. That's for diabetics. Uh, just lose weight. Right. So that then that dinner happened with Sharon with the pizza reason why I'm probably overweight  and I've got bad glucose. It's like, he's like, he's the bread guy.

He's he actually baked sourdough bread. So we've got bread. We've got pizza. We got the wine going dessert  and he's we're talking about this idea of using cgms to help people lose weight and get their, um You Their metabolism under control and get healthier, optimize their, their, um, their metabolic condition.

And I thought I would love to advise. I put on a CGM that that was like, maybe a day or 2 after that.  And I ate the same bowl of oatmeal that I always eat. I've eaten for like two years. I'd researched this. This is the healthiest thing to do to get my cholesterol under control.  And my glucose went from like 99, which was my resting or fasting glucose at the time up to like 140, 150.

Oh my God,  I'm trying to lose weight. And here I am, like spiking my glucose.  I called him up. I said, okay, scratch the, uh, the advisor thing. I'm joining the company. You have to hire me. And so, that's how I started at Signos. Wow! Okay, so this is part of a personal transformation. How long ago was all that?

That was 2020,  just as the, uh, the pandemic was starting. So, it was like, in February, March. Wow. I think, yeah. Okay, and you don't appear to be overweight for when I can see what I know of you, at least of like the chest up. Yeah, I lost weight pretty quickly once I started, um, really paying attention to my glucose.

And the thing is, is that in prior attempts to lose weight, I, like many others, just did diets. I tried keto, I tried paleo, I tried the whole 360. And they were For a while, but they were all unsustainable. And what I found was so interesting about using the CGM is you could make small changes to your diet.

You can make changes to your exercise. You can make changes to managing stress. And what I found was really important sleep all of these things together, making little small changes. You could drastically improve. Um. Your weight and and your your metabolic health. So, uh, yeah, I'm just so excited about this technology and the data that we're getting  that it's just so exciting.

So, yeah,  I could talk, uh, on and on about my own. My own metabolic health, but, uh,  100%. No,  it's so true because it is very exciting from a perspective of actually, we have a mutual friend, Nick, who is wearing your product and continuously is not to use the word continuously repeatedly, but To who keeps commenting on this is of all the things he's doing.

This has made the most profound difference in his health because it's just such that real time feedback that just has us be clear on the thing that we just did this, the one action that we just took to see how is this impacting our health and wellbeing and all the subsequent, you know, spillover effects that can result from that.

So maybe even that could be interesting to parse out. Why don't we want to have the spike in a crash? What are some of the kind of deleterious effects of that and how do they relate to sleep? Yeah, so there's a number of reasons why we don't want the spikes and the crashes. The first one just being the insulin that's released as a result of spiking that over time you can become insulin resistant and then you've got higher resting glucose and and also higher circulating insulin which can lead to a lot of inflammation.

Uh, there's  a whole A bunch of studies around high glucose and sleep. And like you said, it's bidirectional. It's a two way street. So if you are, um, going into sleep with, um, with hyperglycemia, high blood sugar, or if it's erratic, it's going up and down. It's crashing. It's going high. It's going low. That's going to be disruptive to your sleep.

Interestingly, if you have bad sleep, that affects your glucose the next day and you have glucose dysregulation along with a couple of other things that happen from bad sleep, like the suppression of leptin, which is your satiety hormone and the increase of ghrelin, which is your hunger hormone, which causes you to eat Thank you.

More because you've had poor sleep. It's actually the body's way of trying to fuel you up since you didn't get enough rest from the night before. But if you are like me and you're trying to lose weight, trying to get healthy, it's not the, uh, not the thing you want. You don't want that suppression of leptin and the increase in ghrelin.

There's so much interesting. Uh, there's so much interesting data. One of the things that I do at Cygnus is I also for our staff, I run our experiments channel.  Mmm. And I kind of fell into this and oatmeal and sleep are one of the ways I fell into, um, to this particular experiment role. and my, my listeners on my own podcast joke about every single episode, all episode.

I, I've, I've done, I, I've mentioned oatmeal at least once, , and here I seem to be talking about it. It's a mandate exclusively. Yeah. . Yeah. So I'm gonna make sure my, my listeners jump over, but they're probably gonna come back to me and say, okay, it was all about a oatmeal. We've heard these stories  , so I dialed in that oatmeal so I wouldn't spike.

And I did it by adding all sorts of things. So adding some protein and adding some fat, putting some almond butter in there and some chia seeds and some, um. And parts and  doing all sorts of little micro changes to the oatmeal to the point where I wasn't spiking at all. And then 1 day, I had a poor night's sleep,  had that bowl of oatmeal and I spiked again  and I thought, well, something's wrong.

Maybe I've got a bad sensor. Something's not right. So the next time it happened, I had poor night's sleep. Maybe a week later, same thing. Big spike.  So then I start researching and I find all the research on at the, at this point, I'm very new at Cigna. So I'm just now ingesting all of this research and wasn't aware of the connection between bad night's sleep and glucose dysregulation the next day.

So I launched an experiment for the whole staff. So everybody try and regulate, um, to, uh, the same breakfast every day. And then if you've got a bad night's sleep report back on this channel and Slack and tell me about it. And people were like, Oh my God, yes, that happens to me.  We found it happens actually in two really interesting scenarios.

One is when you're really stressed and the other is when you've had a bad night's sleep. So, um, one of my co founders is an E. R. Physician at Stanford. And he's like, when I'm in the trauma Bay.  And I've got a patient come in and it's like a really bad case. I go into this, you know, fight or flight mode and I'm, it's, it's stressful.

And he said, without eating anything, I can go from a normal glucose to like 160  completely normal reaction. What's happening is the liver is dumping glycogen gluconeogenesis. dumping that glycogen into the bloodstream to fuel the body to handle whatever the stressful situation is. So we started noticing these things and that gave rise to this idea of, okay, let's really, um, let's, let's bring some life to these studies that we're reading about and doing these experiments.

And, and it's, um, You know, the other thing I'll mention about using cgm for for weight loss and to help with sleep and to help with stress is that there's a fun element to it. Okay, yes, I'm a, I'm a data geek, but the idea that I could do these experiments and actually see for myself, like you mentioned, it's that continuous feedback loop.

But when you start playing with it and making these small changes and seeing the improvements suddenly. Weight loss goes from this chore or this thing that sounds like it's going to be so hard to do to something that is actually fun. Yes. Oh my gosh. Okay. So much to say about what you just said there.

So on zooming out, that's completely how I've related to sleep from the technology piece is and one of the things I hope to instill for many people is that it can we can actually gamify and hopefully have fun in the process of yeah. learning, iterating, getting curious on some of the things that make a difference for sleep.

Now there's been the spillover effect because now almost becomes, and I've even toyed with the possibility of pretty much mandating that people have continuous glucose monitors in alignment with their mandated sleep wearables in our programs. So stay tuned because that might happen because it's just so important.

And to your point, It really does become fun. And that's one of the things I think really stands out about your company is that the interface on the Cygnos app, one of the things that I was struck by is it has some real time actions that can be taken that I think many people might miss, especially if they're just using plain continuous glucose monitor or, you know, they're Not and can become disempowered when they see the spike, they see the crash, but then it's like, okay, what do I do about this?

Now your app does a great job in helping to show one, what can you do in the moment when this is happening, which is really cool to how can you kind of join forces with friends, which is really interesting and providing that kind of gamification and, you know, kind of group dynamics at play. And then three, the education piece.

So I'm wondering if we can break down some of those unique offerings that are on your  Yeah, you know, I think one of the things that really differentiates us is that we built this, we, we've got some amazing engineers on our team and they have built these predictive algorithms using machine learning and, uh, an artificial intelligence to ingest all of the food logs that you put in and what your responses to those foods are to then build this predictive engine that can, you can enter in any food and we'll make a prediction of what that's going to do to your glucose.

So if you are having a meal and maybe it's dinner and you don't want to spike knowing that you're going to go to sleep in a couple of hours hour to you can put in those food items and we'll make a prediction  in terms of what that meal is going to do to your glucose. That's the first thing. The second thing that we do is movement.

We found is very important in terms of moderating your glucose.  So You put in what you're going to eat, you then start to eat it. If the system senses a spike, we make predictions in terms of what type of movement will help you mitigate that, that spike. So for a lot of us, it's simple as just getting up and going for a walk after meals.

Uh, for me though, sometimes if I, um, walk by the kitchen and there's chocolate chip cookies on the counter and I eat one, maybe it's like a zone three workout on the treadmill and I'm like running as fast as I can for 20 minutes. But normally all it takes is like a simple walk after a meal to help mitigate that response.

But the. The algorithm and the interface is, um, it's, it's just so fascinating to see those suggestions real time because little notification pops up and it says, Hey, do this, just get your heart rate up to this amount, which, you know, equates to a walk or to a jog on the treadmill or to just climbing some stairs.

Uh, so that's the predictive piece.  Then on top of that, what we realized very early on was that we really needed to help our members. With a curriculum, so one's just educating on the basics of glucose, but then it's about talking about how it's not just your nutrition, but we do go into that because that's a huge part of it.

It's also the movement, the exercise piece, and it's also stress and sleep. So here are the things that you can try.  To, um, to help moderate your glucose throughout the day to get more energy, uh, to get healthier and hopefully to lose weight. If that's the mission of a particular member.  Absolutely. I mean, one of the things that we're often speaking to is how behavioral change.

Is one of the biggest needle movers in transforming your sleep and I feel like you are really making this fun. This process of bringing these behavioral change elements and testing navigating. getting curious on this area that is just so transformative. And it's so transformative and so beautifully connects with sleep because many people come our way because they are tired and they are crashing throughout the course of the day.

And just it's an arduous task to get from the morning to the night. And one of the things that we see is when people do start managing their glucose and their metabolic health over time. Oh my gosh, I'm not. crashing after lunch anymore. I'm not just completely dragging and zombie like or anxious or getting headaches or all of those symptoms that can come about.

And so I really think it's so important some of the things that you're doing to make this fun and to get involved in it with the team, with your own team. And then sharing the findings like you do a great job with your emails and sharing what, you know, so it doesn't just stay insular in your team. It comes out to the masses so that we can all kind of follow along in your findings is what I've seen.

Yeah, absolutely. And I just mentioned one other thing is that we really encourage our members to do the same thing that we discovered on our staff that makes things so much fun, which is experiment, experiment, experiment. Yes. A lot of our system is built. On the idea that was behind the study that was published in Cell in 2015 by the Weitzman Institute about personalized nutrition and glycemic response.

And this particular study, they had, I think, it was 800 participants. They put CGMs on and they measured the response to about 46,  000 meals. 46, 000 meals.  And what they found was everyone responded to these foods differently. So our approach is we're not sure how you're going to respond to these different foods.

So experiment, try different foods, see how your body responds to those foods. And it, it goes beyond just the foods. Yeah. It's interesting. Real story. I'm on my rower because Cygnus told me I needed to work off totally and I've been there. Uh huh. Yeah,  and I'm listening to another very popular podcast.

Yeah. In this particular host, you probably know who it is, says,  I eat this big carby meal at the end of my night. Oh, I think I know who it is. You know who it is. I almost fell off the rower. I'm like,  that's the exact opposite advice we give everybody. Yes. Then I had, I thought, actually did some reading and I found that there are actually some different chronotypes.

And while it's relatively rare that I would ever give someone that advice,  there are some people who don't spike from carbs later in the day.  And it has to do with our chronotype. It has a lot to do with circadian rhythms, specifically in the microbiome that some people just have different circadian rhythms.

And so one thing I encouraged everyone to do is take that Carby breakfast item that you have maybe once a while or like me every single day and have it in the morning and then the next day have it at like five, six, seven o'clock at night and then see the difference.  Almost everybody sees a dramatic spike.

I had a difference of like 50 milligrams per deciliter difference between the morning and the night. It's a huge difference. Yes,  100%. But to all my experiments, it's really interesting. I have people Almost every time we do an experiment that respond in a complete opposite way that I expect  to this particular podcast host  credit.

If he's listening to your podcast. Yes, he actually that might work for him. He might have a different chronotype that. Allows him to do that, but you'll never know that unless you do the experiments and test the foods and test how exercise changes things and how mindfulness or meditation might change your response to foods, which for me is a huge one, by the way, I time things in the morning where I do my meditation right before breakfast.

And this actually another one of our head of product was telling me that she has her breakfast and it's always, um, she's she's managed it. Like I have managed mine to not spike. But 1 day she was getting her kid ready for school at the same time. And then there was something stressful in her email from work and she had this completely different response to that same meal  and she attributed to stress.

Anecdotal one data point, she wondered, so of course we launch an experiment and we ask people when you have a stressful morning, just record your glycemic response. And let us know what you see  and in this staff experiment. Yeah, a lot of us noticed that same thing. So I modified my morning ritual to have meditation before I ate to make sure that was nice and calm and stress free before I started breakfast.

And  did it work? Yeah, I haven't had a spike since, um. Again, this is just anecdotal, but it's it's it's what's also interesting about experiments is that it's behavior change. That is, um, it's fun and it's empowering to because  it's it's actually causing me to engage in these these positive behaviors,  um, just to improve my life and it's all kind of goes back to that continuous feedback loop where I can look, see, does this work?

Does this not work? Oh, so beautiful. I mean, I love what you're pointing to there in the experimentations on that call out. Do many of us are impacted by what we discovered glucose to have this kind of circadian component to it that we might not have realized in years past and now we're learning more and more that that same type of food you eat in the morning might respond really differently just given the time of day and how time affects our biology and then yet.

To your point, bio individuality, how we can't just blanket say, because people want to know, Oh, well, will this thing spike me or will it not? It's that's the reason that's the beauty of getting our own continuous glucose monitor, because I'll see people spike on coffee and the next person, not at all.

I'll see people spike on, you know, the certain type of wrap that they have and next person, not at all. It's just fascinating. So you really want to get in the game yourself to make that difference. And so I think what might be valuable, because I love. And one of the things that I get from you is just this excitement in even discovering through your own life, the profound difference that this has made and navigating sounds like continuing to navigate, which is certainly my mission in life is to, you know, never be done.

And we want to keep going, keep looking. So I think that this might be particularly interesting. These, the set of questions that we always ask everyone to really delve into what's going on for you now that you have this information. So we do ask everyone for questions and The first one is what is your nightly sleep routine?

So I'm curious now given what you've heard certain podcast hosts say and you know, all of this and all the data, how are you managing your nights and particularly the glucose piece, but then other components of your sleep? So Based on some things I actually heard on your podcast, my, my most recent modification is I'm going completely dim light when I'm getting ready to go to sleep.

So I have a wind down period. That's like an hour long. So TV is off. I'm trying to, um, to just do things that aren't activating, but all the lights in the house are either dimmed or off.  And then, um, right before I go to bed, I do, um, 20 minute meditation. I'm now into non dual meditation, which is  really cool.

Yes. It's a, there's a couple of great apps out there. So I use my, my apps to do meditation and then go to sleep.  So just to find that non dual for anyone listening that is new to that. Absolutely. So, uh, I started with just the, um, the basic mindfulness meditation. And I, I did that for several years and got a lot out of that, but then I wanted to take the next step.

And so in non dual meditation, there's a couple of different schools of it. And, and, uh, Buddhist thought Dzogchen is the one that Kind of the focus of what I do my meditation on is it's trying to deconstruct the self. So in our minds and our consciousness, we've constructed like almost like a little person in our head.

Yes.  And when you deconstruct that little person, some really interesting things happen. A lot of stress goes away. A lot of things that you take personally, like things that happened during the day, how in the world could he have said that to me? Or she said that to me when yourself isn't there. It's like, okay, these things happen, but it wasn't really about me.

This is just something that this person was saying, and I shouldn't take it personally. And I found that that type of meditation just really takes all the stress away. And.  I was a really bad, bad sleeper and one of the things if I ever had sleep onset problems, it was because I would be replaying something that happened  during work in my mind over and over again and writing stories about it and that really.

That would just get me worked up and I'm getting activated. I'm getting more and more awake as I'm trying to go to sleep by doing this, um, this meditation. There's a saying no self, no problem. So take the self away and then the stress just kind of naturally dissolves. Amazing. I love that. And I love that you're adding in the dim lighting in the evening.

That's fantastic. Are you noticing a difference with that? Yes. In fact, now I want to try. Were you the one that told me about the experiment where they did just candlelight? Oh, yes. So, this is, uh, yeah.  So, the NASA. That's the next step. Uh huh. Yeah. Okay. My wife's like totally into it. She's like, yes, we're going to do the candles.

That sounds awesome. Yes! Oh, my God. Your wife rocks. Okay. Fantastic. Yeah, because I owe it to her because one of the experiments we did, uh, on sleep was with bright lights, like 100 lumen versus 3 lumen. She's like, so mad at me. So I'm like, okay, we're going to do candlelight now. This is on the flip side.

Yes. The flip side.  Actually, I did want to hit on that because I don't think we discussed that yet. I was wondering if you can share a little bit about that because it's been a more recent finding and just, you know, the kind of the impacts of sleeping even with a little bit of light. Yeah, so classic example of what happens within the, uh, the team at CYGNOS is we're at an offsite and someone brings up a study that just came out from Northwestern and in the study, it was a really small study.

I think there was only an end of 20. So 20 participants, they took 10. They let them sleep in a dark environment. Then the other 10 and there's less than 3 lumens. The other 10 had to sleep in 100 lumens, and then they gave both oral glucose tolerance test the next morning to measure their, their glucose dysregulation or regulation.

And of course, the group that, um  That had the bright lights when they tried to sleep had a much worse response to that  than the control group that were sleeping in lumens. Less than three.  Interesting. It's you could argue that. Well, disruptive sleep is going to cause that same dysregulation.  I would have loved to see the study where they tried to disrupt the sleep some other way, but I still personally can tell you that it's hard to sleep  when you've got those bright lights on.

And they use polysomnography  to, to measure the different sleep stages. They also found that the people that were in the group that had the hundred lumens, they were getting hardly any REM or deep sleep. It was almost completely late sleep or into sleep. So, um, yeah, it was an interesting finding. We replicated that the few of my team members willing or had spouses willing to let them put a hundred lumen light, um, in their bedroom and try and sleep.

Uh, tried to replicate that. I'm also, I'm an amateur photographer. So I've got the light meter. I'm doing 100 lumens. I'm adjusting thing. Like, yeah, exactly. Like, like the hundredth of a lumen. Um, yeah, it's a, it's interesting, but I, that kind of made me realize that I needed to  blackout, you know, blackout shades, um, mask if I needed it at a hotel when I didn't, um, Didn't have the ability to black out all the light really makes a huge difference.

Huge. Absolutely. Yeah. 100%. That output of light can be so impactful on the quality of our sleep. And then that subsequent impact on our glucose is just fascinating. And I think just something that people do not. necessarily connect. It's just one of those actionable things right away that we can do to make a difference with how we're feeling the subsequent day and the quality of our sleep.

So it's kind of twofold. Amazing. So with that, then our second question is, does your morning sleep routine look like, and we say that meaning that with the argument that how you set up your days can impact your sleep results. So curious what we might see there. So kind of a mirror of what I do at night, so wake up and right off the bat before I do anything else back to meditation.

So another 20 minute meditation. Yeah. Like I mentioned before, that helps me meditate before I have a meal. I'm not sure which book or podcast I got this tip from, but a big tip. Big life changing, uh, change that I made that's really helped is I now will not check my email until after breakfast. Yes. So forcing that in the beginning.

It was very uncomfortable for me. It's like, I got to check the email. Got to check the email. Got to check the email. And when I like.  Stopped doing that and put off that until after breakfast, it allowed me to relax a little bit more in the morning and not kind of like be half sleeping, wanting to go check the email as soon as I woke up.

The 2nd, I woke up. Um, it just it really did help me. Um, in that last part of my sleep. Uh, you know, I, I wake up usually at 5  36.  So, um, that part of my sleep from like four to six is now a lot more restful now that I'm not anticipating what's in my email inbox. Ah, so important. Yeah, that sleep inertia that we're working through when we first wake up.

I think we might underestimate just and underappreciate how much of a transition it is from the brain to go from a totally sleep state to now being awake and kind of coming online. Um, and then. We might want to throw at ourselves tasks and things that we really want to be cognitively alert for or that could have that clear stress response when we're still sort of in this weird stupor.

And I think it's so important that you're putting in those boundaries and it's sometimes easier said than done. So the fact that you're able to like notice that and make that difference is really, really important. Have there certain structures that you put in place to make that happen or more than just a choice.

Maybe just, yeah, it's low power. It was, yeah, it was, yeah, exactly that. Okay. It's willpower. Yeah. Uh, I did this by accident, but the fact that my meditation is the next thing that I do before I, um, go on with my day also, I think was key because part of, uh, my meditation practice is, is making sure I've dropped everything, anything that's bothering me before I go into a meditation session.

So.  I now have this goal of not really letting anything bother me in the morning. So my meditation is okay, which then helps my sleep as well. Yes, so smart. Yeah, I think there's something powerful about kind of like the bookends to our how we start our day and how we end our day. And I love that you're sounds like being mindful on both sides of your day.

Super important. And then the third question would be what might we visually see on your nightstand or if you're traveling or out and about proverbial nightstand sort of apps, ambiance, gadgets, what have you. Yes. So right now, a couple books on my nightstand lamp and I hate to admit this. There's a cell phone charger for a reason, for a reason.

No. Yeah, I know. I'm on a sleep podcast. I'm going to, I'm going to make a confession here. Okay. Yes. But there's a reason to my confession because I'm, I'm always trying to improve things and improve things with data. So I found an app that can help with my snoring. So the only way I, I was for a long time putting my phone all the way in the bathroom, so it was out of reach so that I wouldn't wake up in the middle of the night and go and check something.

I mean,  it's amazing, like 2 in the morning, what goes through my head is like, Oh, what was the score in the game? I'm going to check.  Then leads to something. Oh, I saw just a notification pop. Oh, there's a message. Well, let me check my inbox. So I was putting the phone far away from the bed. Yeah. But now to measure my snoring, I've got it there.

And I'm just again, practicing willpower to not check the phone at all. Sure. And  it's been a huge help because I'm trying all sorts of different things like mouth taping. Yeah, like my latest thing, which has been, uh, amazing actually has really helped the quality of my sleep. It's helped snoring a little bit.

I can't believe I'm talking about snoring.  No, it's important. It's a big deal. I know. I know. I did not optimize sleep. If that's You know, just a big part of the night. Totally. Yeah. Yes. But you know, it's the, the things like I, so this, this app allows me to test different things and it does in the background, like a causal analysis.

So it says, okay, so taking the allergy medicine didn't help, but the mouth taping definitely did help. So, um,  yeah, I've got that by my bed, but that's, that's it in terms of electronics. And it's, I have a very bare night.  I like that. I like that one book. So funny. The last guest I was just talking to before this one, we were talking about the, how the power of minimalism in our space and how that can be helpful to actually not have a lot of those things.

And I just wanted to check the app that you're using. Is it like SnoreLab or sleep? SnoreLab. Yes. SnoreLab. Okay. Yay. And you're liking it. Great. Yeah. I've been using it forever. Oh, amazing. I've dramatically reduced snoring using that app. Okay, and you found the mouth tape in particular to really make a difference?

Yeah, I've tried so many different things. You know, I tried the nose strips and I tried the nasal dilators and all sorts of different things. I've also been doing a lot of breath work.  Oxygen Advantage. I don't know if you've had Patrick on the show. Yeah. You should if you haven't. I haven't had Patrick actually which we have had a number of practitioners and other proponents of it.

But yeah, we do need to actually get him on. He's fantastic. Yeah. So, he's the one that got me into mouth taping. So, uh, it was very hard in the beginning like the first week, 2 weeks, I was waking up constantly and ripping it off because it just.  Didn't seem right. But then I noticed my my and all my measurement devices.

So I've got my um, My my different measurables my aura ring whoop strap  all this data coming in I'm noticing that my deep sleep improves my REM sleep is improving with the mouth taping as well as the snoring so That that's been a another big game changer for me Amazing. Okay. I have another thing that you might like to try.

Have you heard of excite osa?  I feel like you'll love this. So they're approved for snoring and mild sleep apnea as a daytime treatment. So it is a, you have to have a prescription for it, but with it, you, it's basically, it looks pretty funky, but you hold almost what's like a tens unit on your tongue for 20 minutes.

So you can be like, you know, I know.  So you're, you do look weird, but you can be  on your phone. You can be, um, you know, playing video games. You can be on your laptop. People actually, um, well, I shocked my tongue while you're shocked your tongue in LA traffic. You can, uh, be shocking your tongue. This is so LA.

This is so LA. Totally. 100%. And it's profound. It's wild. I've seen a number of people make a big, big difference in certainly not only just snoring, True apneas and they are also in clinical trials right now for moderate to severe sleep apnea with rumbles that it looks promising, but you know, so we'll see what happens with that, but certainly approved for mild sleep apnea and that snoring piece.

So yeah, I feel like for someone like you, that's likes to test and experiment and tinker well for everyone, but also particularly someone like yourself, I think might. Enjoy that. So awesome. I'm gonna look into that. Cool. And I love that you're practicing all those things to make a difference with the readouts for that.

So people that will use things like SnoreLab will find, Oh my gosh, if I eat late, wow, the impact that that can make on the amount of snoring, the alcohol, the amount that that can make an impact. I mean, just so many tangible things, sleep position, et cetera, et cetera. So it's really important to be in the game of these things and this thing that we're doing a third of our lives on average 26 years for the average person is spent sleeping.

So we might want to spend a little bit of time optimizing  this area. Really, really great. And then the last question would be, out of your whole experience in managing that sleep, you know, third of our life piece, what would you say has made the biggest change to your sleep game or said another way, what would you say has been the biggest aha moment in managing your sleep for yourself?

I would have to say the taping is up there. Yeah, it's pretty high up there, but  there's something else. Actually learn this.  I'm going to listen to more of your episodes because I learned this from one of your episodes.  I mentioned actually on our recording on our podcast is mindset. The mindset. Yeah.

Yeah. I am. So another confession, I got so wrapped up in all the sleep data. I think I became like a sleep neurotic. One specific measurable just kept on reminding me what my sleep debt was. And I was falling deeper and deeper into debt. And I was like, huh? And I would go to sleep. Like I got to get more sleep.

I got to get more sleep. I got to get more sleep. And that was just like going through my head. Yeah. Uh, and then I, yeah, I read this book, Mindset, Carol Dowiecki's book. Great book. Great, great book.  I had done this before when I was, I was doing HIIT training, high intensity interval training, and I hate, I hate the treadmill.

And so I'd get on the treadmill and I'd look at the treadmill and I'd look at the distance I had to go and I'm running as fast as I can. I'm like, I don't know if I can make it. I don't know if I can make it. And after reading, The wiki's book, I started to set little goals for myself and ask the question instead of I don't or the other statement.

I don't think I can make it ask the question.  I wonder if I could blank. I wonder if I could run this lap faster than last. I wonder if I could do a mile under eight. I wonder if I could. And so then I started to apply that to sleep. Yes. So as I, um,  was reading, I can't remember the name of the author. He wrote a book called dream yoga.

Yeah. It's all about lucid sleep. Andrew, I read that one actually. Okay, great, great book. But yeah, I started to read about dreams and lucid dreaming. I'm like, I wonder if I could do this. I wonder if I could remember my dreams. That's what it started with. So I started a dream journal  and  it became fascinating to me.

What I discovered in just dream journaling was how proximal My dreams were the things that happened right before I went to sleep. Yeah, like, um, before we started doing the dim lights and the activating content, my wife and I like crime shows and it was amazing in my dreams. Some of those crimes  coming out, I was like, how fascinating is this?

And I actually started looking forward to going to sleep. I was like, okay, I wonder what the dream is going to be tonight because I want to journal it and what am I going to learn from it? And I changed my mindset, and that really helped me break through this sleep neurosis I built through all my measurables.

Oh, that's fantastic. I mean, that speaks to just the power of our thoughts, the power of psychology, the power of that reframing to really impact our behaviors and our results. Certainly, I think, you know, to tie it all nicely, it's so true both with sleep and it's true with things like our day to day management of our choices, like what your company is really striving to do to help inform, you know, our actions and really help yield positive results on the other side of that.

And it's just so impactful how well these things play together, the sleep, the continuous glucose monitors, the awareness piece. And then I think one of the things I'm fascinated about all this is just not just for data for data's sake, but to what you're speaking to, how it can really improve the quality of your life, empower your choices and your results in a really, really important way.

So Just so, so important.  And I wanted to check in. Did we leave anything out that you felt is important to share about this whole world of continuous glucose monitors, sleep, anything we missed? You know, you and I could talk for hours. I know, it's so clear. So yeah, I mean, we could have another episode. I know.

I think we covered some of the highlights really well. Okay, beautiful. So what I want to say is I'm sure that people listening want to know how can they follow you? How can they test out signals themselves and experience the difference? You know, certainly there's a big difference between just getting a prescription, you know, CGM and getting something that is built intentionally to shift your behavior and inform you.

Because that's one of the things I've seen being unfortunate Transcribed situation for people is they might get just a plain prescription. It's nothing knocking in plain prescriptions, certainly better than nothing, but they might get this plain prescription for continuous glucose monitor. And then they say, well, I don't know what to do about this and then feel disempowered and then toss it.

Oh, I've seen this a lot and people just kind of put their head in the sand about it because they don't know what to do about it. Whereas one of the things I'm left with with CYGNOS is that part of the commitment is to get in there and experiment and shift until we really find something workable. So what would be the best ways for people to do that?

Definitely come to CYGNOS. com and there you can find out everything about what we offer. And just in a nutshell, if you join, you fill out a medical questionnaire that's sent to a physician who then writes a prescription for you. We take care of all of that. What we get. The CGM, the materials you need, the alcohol, alcohol swabs, even, and the patches to wear all in a nice little box that we send to you.

So we make that part seamless and the instructions are very easy to get this going on your iPhone or Android device. So signos. com, S I G N O S. com is where you go for that. Uh, you can also follow us on social at Signos Health. And definitely come check out the body signals podcast. So body signals on iTunes or any of the, um, the platforms you use to consume podcasts.

Amazing. Yes. Well, I'm sure we'll need to have another podcast in the future because like you said, we could talk about some of these things for hours if we're both equally fascinated at what can happen when we get more information and data instead of just being at the effect of, oh, why do I feel like crap?

Why do I feel tired? Why is this?  It doesn't have to be like that in our modern society anymore and we can use technology to our advantage to really make that difference. So love the work you're doing. Thank you so much and thank you for taking the time. It really, really made a difference. And thank you for, for having me and also thank you for all the wonderful work you're doing and your great podcast because it's been a great resource for me.

Oh, that makes me so happy. Will you rock, keep experimenting, and then we'll keep comparing notes because I know we're both really into this topic and it's just so, so important. I hope we can inspire other people to do the same. Absolutely.  You've been listening to the Sleep as a Skill podcast, the top podcast for people who want to take their sleep.

Skills to the next level. Every Monday I send out the sleep obsessions newsletter, which aims to be one of the most obsessive newsletters on the planet. Fun facts. I've never missed a Monday for over five years and counting. And it contains everything that you need to know in the fascinating world of sleep.

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 Welcome to the sleep as a skill podcast. My name is Mollie Eastman. I am the founder of sleep as a skill, a company that optimizes sleep through technology, accountability, and behavioral change. As an ex sleep sufferer turned sleep course creator, I am on a mission to transform the way the world thinks about.

sleep. Each week, I'll be interviewing world class experts ranging from researchers, doctors, innovators, and thought leaders to give actionable tips and strategies that you can implement to become a more skillful sleeper. Ultimately, I believe that living a circadian aligned lifestyle is going to be one of the biggest trends in wellness, and I'm committed to keep being you up to date on all the things that you can do today to transform your circadian health and by extension, allowing you to sleep and live better than ever before.

Welcome to the sleep is a skill podcast. Today we're going to be talking about blood sugar and sleep. Could some of those middle of the night awakenings that you've been having be related? to your blood sugar. We'll get into all that and more. Now we've had a number of podcasts where we've looked at examining this from different lenses through different experts.

We've had nutricents on the podcast levels vary. And today we are diving into the world of Signos. It's a CGM company that actually uses a bit of real time inspiration. So say you're spiking after a big bowl of pasta, right? Your CGM is spiking. Well, this product will actually alert you and prompt you to take some actions that it will offer you.

So for instance, you're spiking and it will suggest for you to do some squats or for you to in one way, shape, or form. to help bring down that spike and to mitigate some of that crash that we might have experienced without that intervention and so much more. So you can also kind of get into the weeds on how your friends might be doing with their glucose.

So there can be some of that transparency you can learn within the app, ways  to bring more balance and stability to your blood sugar, not just. Because, but because you'll feel in a whole different way and you will sleep differently if you get that really handled. So a little bit about our guests, Bill Tancer co founded Signos to apply data analysis to help solve the obesity epidemic and fulfill his personal passion to be healthier.

Bill is an expert in consumer behavior. He is a New York times bestselling author and former columnist for time magazine. Bill most recently served as GM and SVP for data and research at Experian. Bill has appeared as a featured guest on ABC's 2020 and Good Morning America, as well as CNBC, CNN, Fox, Business News, Bloomberg, et cetera.

And he frequently comments on the application of big data to understand consumer trends and so much more. I think you're going to really enjoy our conversation and we'll jump right into it. But first, a few words from our sponsors.  Here at the Sleep is a Skill podcast, we're all about enhancing your sleep and a cornerstone of that journey often revolves around stabilizing your blood sugar levels.

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Now invest in better sleep and in turn in a better, more energized life.  As we head into the fall and vacation season winds down, i. e. a time when late nights, irregular eating habits, and indulgence tend to become the norm, it's time to get back on track with our health and, of course, our sleep. Just a quick interesting fact about sleep to mention, drinking more than two servings of alcohol per day for men and more than one serving per day for women can decrease sleep quality by 39.

2%. A sleep foundation survey reports, not even mentioning all the indulgent food and late night effects that often come along with it. And as we know, sleep is the key to your body's rejuvenation and repair process. It controls hunger and weight loss, hormones, boost energy levels and impacts countless.

Other functions, a good night's sleep will improve your wellbeing much more than just about anything else I can possibly think of on the planet. You know, I'm biased, but gotta say that. And sleep is your major to focus on as we head into the fall season and hopefully beyond. And that's why I recommend that if you're going to start taking some supplements on your sleep, often magnesium is a great place to begin.

But not just any magnesium supplement. I do recommend getting the magnesium breakthrough by bio optimizers. Magnesium breakthrough contains all seven forms of magnesium designed to help you fall asleep, stay asleep, and wake up refreshed, which isn't that what we're all looking to do. The sleep benefits are really remarkable.

I use it every night. And once your sleep is optimized, you'll find it much easier to tackle all the other major aspects of your health. And trust me, it is a game changer to test it out. Visit mag breakthrough. com forward slash sleep as a skill. You can enter code sleep as a skill for 10 percent off for any order.

This special offer is only available at  magbreakthrough. com forward slash sleep is a skill. I will also include this in the show notes as well.  And welcome to the sleep is a skill podcast.  All right. I am very excited for this episode and my challenge is going to be to reign it in. I know we're going to have lots of things to discuss, but Bill, thank you so much for taking the time to be here.

Molly, I am so excited to be here because I got to tell you, I'm a huge fan of the Sleep as a Skill podcast. So it is an honor to be on your show. Oh, you are such just a, a gem of a human. I love our conversations. I had the honor of being on your podcast recently and every time I connect with you, I want to connect more.

You know, my challenge is going to be, I'm going to want to ask you questions. So if I start being the host, you just tell me to stop. I mean, it can be a ping pong, you know, back and forth. Okay. But yes, I am so excited to deliver your knowledge to the listener today because one of the things that we find makes such a difference for people in the management of their sleep is for many people surprising how much of a difference Glucose regulation, the management of what can be a roller coaster for many people if they are to wear continuous glucose monitors and they see these numbers, when they start realizing the impact that that can make on the quality of their sleep, the frequency of wake ups.

And that bi directional relationship that can be at play between then the poor sleep that they might get and what that does to glucose. I mean, this is a huge topic. So I'm really, really grateful for you to help us guide us in navigating this and then having tools in place that are really late breaking outside of the mold that can really make a difference in transforming this.

So thank you so much for your time. And how did you find yourself in this role of really pioneering? Uh, glucose management. How did this even happen? You know, it's kind of a funny story. It's a circuitous story But I am a data scientist. I used to work with a massive data set. So I used to analyze um internet behavior and I Was uh in charge of this data set of what 25 million people were doing worldwide on the internet And it was a data set that updated every single day and some things updated every five minutes  So, in my previous life, I really didn't get much sleep because I was analyzing so much data.

Yes. Understandable. So, so I'm a data geek. I think your audience needs to know that first. And I'm going to try and rein it in so I don't get too data geekish on this particular show. Yeah. Um, but from there, I advised a company. That was also using big data and the founder of that company then went on to start signals and right as the company was starting.

We had a dinner together in San Francisco. I was visiting from L. A. And ironically, it was a very carby meal late at night. It didn't include a few glasses of wine.  All the things I've learned not to do. Yeah. But over this carb meal, he said, you know, I have this idea of using these continuous glucose monitors to help people with weight loss and to help them get metabolically healthy.

And I wonder if you'd be interested in advising. And I said, absolutely. On the side, I was actually researching. This idea about using CGMs for weight loss because I'd just been to the doctor. And, um, so a little bit more about my story. I'd moved from San Francisco to LA and I just got married. I married a vegan, which to paraphrase Samuel Jackson, uh, kind of made me a vegan at that point.

And, uh, I thought, you know, I'm, I'm going to get a great physical. And the doctor came back with my lab results. He said, you're pre diabetic. If your glucose is high, you've got hypertension. You, um,  you've, you've, you're pretty much stacking up all of the factors of medi metabolic disease and metabolic syndrome.

So you really need to get the stuff under control. So I said, what do I do? He said, lose weight.  Okay, how do you do that? He's like, you know, just go to the bookstore, get a book, lose weight, lose weight.  So I was like trying to figure out how I was going to get my blood sugar under control and lose the weight.

I went to my doctor and he said, you don't need a CGM. So I went back, you know, as I asked for CGM, he's like, you don't need a CGM. That's for diabetics. Uh, just lose weight. Right. So that then that dinner happened with Sharon with the pizza reason why I'm probably overweight  and I've got bad glucose. It's like, he's like, he's the bread guy.

He's he actually baked sourdough bread. So we've got bread. We've got pizza. We got the wine going dessert  and he's we're talking about this idea of using cgms to help people lose weight and get their, um You Their metabolism under control and get healthier, optimize their, their, um, their metabolic condition.

And I thought I would love to advise. I put on a CGM that that was like, maybe a day or 2 after that.  And I ate the same bowl of oatmeal that I always eat. I've eaten for like two years. I'd researched this. This is the healthiest thing to do to get my cholesterol under control.  And my glucose went from like 99, which was my resting or fasting glucose at the time up to like 140, 150.

Oh my God,  I'm trying to lose weight. And here I am, like spiking my glucose.  I called him up. I said, okay, scratch the, uh, the advisor thing. I'm joining the company. You have to hire me. And so, that's how I started at Signos. Wow! Okay, so this is part of a personal transformation. How long ago was all that?

That was 2020,  just as the, uh, the pandemic was starting. So, it was like, in February, March. Wow. I think, yeah. Okay, and you don't appear to be overweight for when I can see what I know of you, at least of like the chest up. Yeah, I lost weight pretty quickly once I started, um, really paying attention to my glucose.

And the thing is, is that in prior attempts to lose weight, I, like many others, just did diets. I tried keto, I tried paleo, I tried the whole 360. And they were For a while, but they were all unsustainable. And what I found was so interesting about using the CGM is you could make small changes to your diet.

You can make changes to your exercise. You can make changes to managing stress. And what I found was really important sleep all of these things together, making little small changes. You could drastically improve. Um. Your weight and and your your metabolic health. So, uh, yeah, I'm just so excited about this technology and the data that we're getting  that it's just so exciting.

So, yeah,  I could talk, uh, on and on about my own. My own metabolic health, but, uh,  100%. No,  it's so true because it is very exciting from a perspective of actually, we have a mutual friend, Nick, who is wearing your product and continuously is not to use the word continuously repeatedly, but To who keeps commenting on this is of all the things he's doing.

This has made the most profound difference in his health because it's just such that real time feedback that just has us be clear on the thing that we just did this, the one action that we just took to see how is this impacting our health and wellbeing and all the subsequent, you know, spillover effects that can result from that.

So maybe even that could be interesting to parse out. Why don't we want to have the spike in a crash? What are some of the kind of deleterious effects of that and how do they relate to sleep? Yeah, so there's a number of reasons why we don't want the spikes and the crashes. The first one just being the insulin that's released as a result of spiking that over time you can become insulin resistant and then you've got higher resting glucose and and also higher circulating insulin which can lead to a lot of inflammation.

Uh, there's  a whole A bunch of studies around high glucose and sleep. And like you said, it's bidirectional. It's a two way street. So if you are, um, going into sleep with, um, with hyperglycemia, high blood sugar, or if it's erratic, it's going up and down. It's crashing. It's going high. It's going low. That's going to be disruptive to your sleep.

Interestingly, if you have bad sleep, that affects your glucose the next day and you have glucose dysregulation along with a couple of other things that happen from bad sleep, like the suppression of leptin, which is your satiety hormone and the increase of ghrelin, which is your hunger hormone, which causes you to eat Thank you.

More because you've had poor sleep. It's actually the body's way of trying to fuel you up since you didn't get enough rest from the night before. But if you are like me and you're trying to lose weight, trying to get healthy, it's not the, uh, not the thing you want. You don't want that suppression of leptin and the increase in ghrelin.

There's so much interesting. Uh, there's so much interesting data. One of the things that I do at Cygnus is I also for our staff, I run our experiments channel.  Mmm. And I kind of fell into this and oatmeal and sleep are one of the ways I fell into, um, to this particular experiment role. and my, my listeners on my own podcast joke about every single episode, all episode.

I, I've, I've done, I, I've mentioned oatmeal at least once, , and here I seem to be talking about it. It's a mandate exclusively. Yeah. . Yeah. So I'm gonna make sure my, my listeners jump over, but they're probably gonna come back to me and say, okay, it was all about a oatmeal. We've heard these stories  , so I dialed in that oatmeal so I wouldn't spike.

And I did it by adding all sorts of things. So adding some protein and adding some fat, putting some almond butter in there and some chia seeds and some, um. And parts and  doing all sorts of little micro changes to the oatmeal to the point where I wasn't spiking at all. And then 1 day, I had a poor night's sleep,  had that bowl of oatmeal and I spiked again  and I thought, well, something's wrong.

Maybe I've got a bad sensor. Something's not right. So the next time it happened, I had poor night's sleep. Maybe a week later, same thing. Big spike.  So then I start researching and I find all the research on at the, at this point, I'm very new at Cigna. So I'm just now ingesting all of this research and wasn't aware of the connection between bad night's sleep and glucose dysregulation the next day.

So I launched an experiment for the whole staff. So everybody try and regulate, um, to, uh, the same breakfast every day. And then if you've got a bad night's sleep report back on this channel and Slack and tell me about it. And people were like, Oh my God, yes, that happens to me.  We found it happens actually in two really interesting scenarios.

One is when you're really stressed and the other is when you've had a bad night's sleep. So, um, one of my co founders is an E. R. Physician at Stanford. And he's like, when I'm in the trauma Bay.  And I've got a patient come in and it's like a really bad case. I go into this, you know, fight or flight mode and I'm, it's, it's stressful.

And he said, without eating anything, I can go from a normal glucose to like 160  completely normal reaction. What's happening is the liver is dumping glycogen gluconeogenesis. dumping that glycogen into the bloodstream to fuel the body to handle whatever the stressful situation is. So we started noticing these things and that gave rise to this idea of, okay, let's really, um, let's, let's bring some life to these studies that we're reading about and doing these experiments.

And, and it's, um, You know, the other thing I'll mention about using cgm for for weight loss and to help with sleep and to help with stress is that there's a fun element to it. Okay, yes, I'm a, I'm a data geek, but the idea that I could do these experiments and actually see for myself, like you mentioned, it's that continuous feedback loop.

But when you start playing with it and making these small changes and seeing the improvements suddenly. Weight loss goes from this chore or this thing that sounds like it's going to be so hard to do to something that is actually fun. Yes. Oh my gosh. Okay. So much to say about what you just said there.

So on zooming out, that's completely how I've related to sleep from the technology piece is and one of the things I hope to instill for many people is that it can we can actually gamify and hopefully have fun in the process of yeah. learning, iterating, getting curious on some of the things that make a difference for sleep.

Now there's been the spillover effect because now almost becomes, and I've even toyed with the possibility of pretty much mandating that people have continuous glucose monitors in alignment with their mandated sleep wearables in our programs. So stay tuned because that might happen because it's just so important.

And to your point, It really does become fun. And that's one of the things I think really stands out about your company is that the interface on the Cygnos app, one of the things that I was struck by is it has some real time actions that can be taken that I think many people might miss, especially if they're just using plain continuous glucose monitor or, you know, they're Not and can become disempowered when they see the spike, they see the crash, but then it's like, okay, what do I do about this?

Now your app does a great job in helping to show one, what can you do in the moment when this is happening, which is really cool to how can you kind of join forces with friends, which is really interesting and providing that kind of gamification and, you know, kind of group dynamics at play. And then three, the education piece.

So I'm wondering if we can break down some of those unique offerings that are on your  Yeah, you know, I think one of the things that really differentiates us is that we built this, we, we've got some amazing engineers on our team and they have built these predictive algorithms using machine learning and, uh, an artificial intelligence to ingest all of the food logs that you put in and what your responses to those foods are to then build this predictive engine that can, you can enter in any food and we'll make a prediction of what that's going to do to your glucose.

So if you are having a meal and maybe it's dinner and you don't want to spike knowing that you're going to go to sleep in a couple of hours hour to you can put in those food items and we'll make a prediction  in terms of what that meal is going to do to your glucose. That's the first thing. The second thing that we do is movement.

We found is very important in terms of moderating your glucose.  So You put in what you're going to eat, you then start to eat it. If the system senses a spike, we make predictions in terms of what type of movement will help you mitigate that, that spike. So for a lot of us, it's simple as just getting up and going for a walk after meals.

Uh, for me though, sometimes if I, um, walk by the kitchen and there's chocolate chip cookies on the counter and I eat one, maybe it's like a zone three workout on the treadmill and I'm like running as fast as I can for 20 minutes. But normally all it takes is like a simple walk after a meal to help mitigate that response.

But the. The algorithm and the interface is, um, it's, it's just so fascinating to see those suggestions real time because little notification pops up and it says, Hey, do this, just get your heart rate up to this amount, which, you know, equates to a walk or to a jog on the treadmill or to just climbing some stairs.

Uh, so that's the predictive piece.  Then on top of that, what we realized very early on was that we really needed to help our members. With a curriculum, so one's just educating on the basics of glucose, but then it's about talking about how it's not just your nutrition, but we do go into that because that's a huge part of it.

It's also the movement, the exercise piece, and it's also stress and sleep. So here are the things that you can try.  To, um, to help moderate your glucose throughout the day to get more energy, uh, to get healthier and hopefully to lose weight. If that's the mission of a particular member.  Absolutely. I mean, one of the things that we're often speaking to is how behavioral change.

Is one of the biggest needle movers in transforming your sleep and I feel like you are really making this fun. This process of bringing these behavioral change elements and testing navigating. getting curious on this area that is just so transformative. And it's so transformative and so beautifully connects with sleep because many people come our way because they are tired and they are crashing throughout the course of the day.

And just it's an arduous task to get from the morning to the night. And one of the things that we see is when people do start managing their glucose and their metabolic health over time. Oh my gosh, I'm not. crashing after lunch anymore. I'm not just completely dragging and zombie like or anxious or getting headaches or all of those symptoms that can come about.

And so I really think it's so important some of the things that you're doing to make this fun and to get involved in it with the team, with your own team. And then sharing the findings like you do a great job with your emails and sharing what, you know, so it doesn't just stay insular in your team. It comes out to the masses so that we can all kind of follow along in your findings is what I've seen.

Yeah, absolutely. And I just mentioned one other thing is that we really encourage our members to do the same thing that we discovered on our staff that makes things so much fun, which is experiment, experiment, experiment. Yes. A lot of our system is built. On the idea that was behind the study that was published in Cell in 2015 by the Weitzman Institute about personalized nutrition and glycemic response.

And this particular study, they had, I think, it was 800 participants. They put CGMs on and they measured the response to about 46,  000 meals. 46, 000 meals.  And what they found was everyone responded to these foods differently. So our approach is we're not sure how you're going to respond to these different foods.

So experiment, try different foods, see how your body responds to those foods. And it, it goes beyond just the foods. Yeah. It's interesting. Real story. I'm on my rower because Cygnus told me I needed to work off totally and I've been there. Uh huh. Yeah,  and I'm listening to another very popular podcast.

Yeah. In this particular host, you probably know who it is, says,  I eat this big carby meal at the end of my night. Oh, I think I know who it is. You know who it is. I almost fell off the rower. I'm like,  that's the exact opposite advice we give everybody. Yes. Then I had, I thought, actually did some reading and I found that there are actually some different chronotypes.

And while it's relatively rare that I would ever give someone that advice,  there are some people who don't spike from carbs later in the day.  And it has to do with our chronotype. It has a lot to do with circadian rhythms, specifically in the microbiome that some people just have different circadian rhythms.

And so one thing I encouraged everyone to do is take that Carby breakfast item that you have maybe once a while or like me every single day and have it in the morning and then the next day have it at like five, six, seven o'clock at night and then see the difference.  Almost everybody sees a dramatic spike.

I had a difference of like 50 milligrams per deciliter difference between the morning and the night. It's a huge difference. Yes,  100%. But to all my experiments, it's really interesting. I have people Almost every time we do an experiment that respond in a complete opposite way that I expect  to this particular podcast host  credit.

If he's listening to your podcast. Yes, he actually that might work for him. He might have a different chronotype that. Allows him to do that, but you'll never know that unless you do the experiments and test the foods and test how exercise changes things and how mindfulness or meditation might change your response to foods, which for me is a huge one, by the way, I time things in the morning where I do my meditation right before breakfast.

And this actually another one of our head of product was telling me that she has her breakfast and it's always, um, she's she's managed it. Like I have managed mine to not spike. But 1 day she was getting her kid ready for school at the same time. And then there was something stressful in her email from work and she had this completely different response to that same meal  and she attributed to stress.

Anecdotal one data point, she wondered, so of course we launch an experiment and we ask people when you have a stressful morning, just record your glycemic response. And let us know what you see  and in this staff experiment. Yeah, a lot of us noticed that same thing. So I modified my morning ritual to have meditation before I ate to make sure that was nice and calm and stress free before I started breakfast.

And  did it work? Yeah, I haven't had a spike since, um. Again, this is just anecdotal, but it's it's it's what's also interesting about experiments is that it's behavior change. That is, um, it's fun and it's empowering to because  it's it's actually causing me to engage in these these positive behaviors,  um, just to improve my life and it's all kind of goes back to that continuous feedback loop where I can look, see, does this work?

Does this not work? Oh, so beautiful. I mean, I love what you're pointing to there in the experimentations on that call out. Do many of us are impacted by what we discovered glucose to have this kind of circadian component to it that we might not have realized in years past and now we're learning more and more that that same type of food you eat in the morning might respond really differently just given the time of day and how time affects our biology and then yet.

To your point, bio individuality, how we can't just blanket say, because people want to know, Oh, well, will this thing spike me or will it not? It's that's the reason that's the beauty of getting our own continuous glucose monitor, because I'll see people spike on coffee and the next person, not at all.

I'll see people spike on, you know, the certain type of wrap that they have and next person, not at all. It's just fascinating. So you really want to get in the game yourself to make that difference. And so I think what might be valuable, because I love. And one of the things that I get from you is just this excitement in even discovering through your own life, the profound difference that this has made and navigating sounds like continuing to navigate, which is certainly my mission in life is to, you know, never be done.

And we want to keep going, keep looking. So I think that this might be particularly interesting. These, the set of questions that we always ask everyone to really delve into what's going on for you now that you have this information. So we do ask everyone for questions and The first one is what is your nightly sleep routine?

So I'm curious now given what you've heard certain podcast hosts say and you know, all of this and all the data, how are you managing your nights and particularly the glucose piece, but then other components of your sleep? So Based on some things I actually heard on your podcast, my, my most recent modification is I'm going completely dim light when I'm getting ready to go to sleep.

So I have a wind down period. That's like an hour long. So TV is off. I'm trying to, um, to just do things that aren't activating, but all the lights in the house are either dimmed or off.  And then, um, right before I go to bed, I do, um, 20 minute meditation. I'm now into non dual meditation, which is  really cool.

Yes. It's a, there's a couple of great apps out there. So I use my, my apps to do meditation and then go to sleep.  So just to find that non dual for anyone listening that is new to that. Absolutely. So, uh, I started with just the, um, the basic mindfulness meditation. And I, I did that for several years and got a lot out of that, but then I wanted to take the next step.

And so in non dual meditation, there's a couple of different schools of it. And, and, uh, Buddhist thought Dzogchen is the one that Kind of the focus of what I do my meditation on is it's trying to deconstruct the self. So in our minds and our consciousness, we've constructed like almost like a little person in our head.

Yes.  And when you deconstruct that little person, some really interesting things happen. A lot of stress goes away. A lot of things that you take personally, like things that happened during the day, how in the world could he have said that to me? Or she said that to me when yourself isn't there. It's like, okay, these things happen, but it wasn't really about me.

This is just something that this person was saying, and I shouldn't take it personally. And I found that that type of meditation just really takes all the stress away. And.  I was a really bad, bad sleeper and one of the things if I ever had sleep onset problems, it was because I would be replaying something that happened  during work in my mind over and over again and writing stories about it and that really.

That would just get me worked up and I'm getting activated. I'm getting more and more awake as I'm trying to go to sleep by doing this, um, this meditation. There's a saying no self, no problem. So take the self away and then the stress just kind of naturally dissolves. Amazing. I love that. And I love that you're adding in the dim lighting in the evening.

That's fantastic. Are you noticing a difference with that? Yes. In fact, now I want to try. Were you the one that told me about the experiment where they did just candlelight? Oh, yes. So, this is, uh, yeah.  So, the NASA. That's the next step. Uh huh. Yeah. Okay. My wife's like totally into it. She's like, yes, we're going to do the candles.

That sounds awesome. Yes! Oh, my God. Your wife rocks. Okay. Fantastic. Yeah, because I owe it to her because one of the experiments we did, uh, on sleep was with bright lights, like 100 lumen versus 3 lumen. She's like, so mad at me. So I'm like, okay, we're going to do candlelight now. This is on the flip side.

Yes. The flip side.  Actually, I did want to hit on that because I don't think we discussed that yet. I was wondering if you can share a little bit about that because it's been a more recent finding and just, you know, the kind of the impacts of sleeping even with a little bit of light. Yeah, so classic example of what happens within the, uh, the team at CYGNOS is we're at an offsite and someone brings up a study that just came out from Northwestern and in the study, it was a really small study.

I think there was only an end of 20. So 20 participants, they took 10. They let them sleep in a dark environment. Then the other 10 and there's less than 3 lumens. The other 10 had to sleep in 100 lumens, and then they gave both oral glucose tolerance test the next morning to measure their, their glucose dysregulation or regulation.

And of course, the group that, um  That had the bright lights when they tried to sleep had a much worse response to that  than the control group that were sleeping in lumens. Less than three.  Interesting. It's you could argue that. Well, disruptive sleep is going to cause that same dysregulation.  I would have loved to see the study where they tried to disrupt the sleep some other way, but I still personally can tell you that it's hard to sleep  when you've got those bright lights on.

And they use polysomnography  to, to measure the different sleep stages. They also found that the people that were in the group that had the hundred lumens, they were getting hardly any REM or deep sleep. It was almost completely late sleep or into sleep. So, um, yeah, it was an interesting finding. We replicated that the few of my team members willing or had spouses willing to let them put a hundred lumen light, um, in their bedroom and try and sleep.

Uh, tried to replicate that. I'm also, I'm an amateur photographer. So I've got the light meter. I'm doing 100 lumens. I'm adjusting thing. Like, yeah, exactly. Like, like the hundredth of a lumen. Um, yeah, it's a, it's interesting, but I, that kind of made me realize that I needed to  blackout, you know, blackout shades, um, mask if I needed it at a hotel when I didn't, um, Didn't have the ability to black out all the light really makes a huge difference.

Huge. Absolutely. Yeah. 100%. That output of light can be so impactful on the quality of our sleep. And then that subsequent impact on our glucose is just fascinating. And I think just something that people do not. necessarily connect. It's just one of those actionable things right away that we can do to make a difference with how we're feeling the subsequent day and the quality of our sleep.

So it's kind of twofold. Amazing. So with that, then our second question is, does your morning sleep routine look like, and we say that meaning that with the argument that how you set up your days can impact your sleep results. So curious what we might see there. So kind of a mirror of what I do at night, so wake up and right off the bat before I do anything else back to meditation.

So another 20 minute meditation. Yeah. Like I mentioned before, that helps me meditate before I have a meal. I'm not sure which book or podcast I got this tip from, but a big tip. Big life changing, uh, change that I made that's really helped is I now will not check my email until after breakfast. Yes. So forcing that in the beginning.

It was very uncomfortable for me. It's like, I got to check the email. Got to check the email. Got to check the email. And when I like.  Stopped doing that and put off that until after breakfast, it allowed me to relax a little bit more in the morning and not kind of like be half sleeping, wanting to go check the email as soon as I woke up.

The 2nd, I woke up. Um, it just it really did help me. Um, in that last part of my sleep. Uh, you know, I, I wake up usually at 5  36.  So, um, that part of my sleep from like four to six is now a lot more restful now that I'm not anticipating what's in my email inbox. Ah, so important. Yeah, that sleep inertia that we're working through when we first wake up.

I think we might underestimate just and underappreciate how much of a transition it is from the brain to go from a totally sleep state to now being awake and kind of coming online. Um, and then. We might want to throw at ourselves tasks and things that we really want to be cognitively alert for or that could have that clear stress response when we're still sort of in this weird stupor.

And I think it's so important that you're putting in those boundaries and it's sometimes easier said than done. So the fact that you're able to like notice that and make that difference is really, really important. Have there certain structures that you put in place to make that happen or more than just a choice.

Maybe just, yeah, it's low power. It was, yeah, it was, yeah, exactly that. Okay. It's willpower. Yeah. Uh, I did this by accident, but the fact that my meditation is the next thing that I do before I, um, go on with my day also, I think was key because part of, uh, my meditation practice is, is making sure I've dropped everything, anything that's bothering me before I go into a meditation session.

So.  I now have this goal of not really letting anything bother me in the morning. So my meditation is okay, which then helps my sleep as well. Yes, so smart. Yeah, I think there's something powerful about kind of like the bookends to our how we start our day and how we end our day. And I love that you're sounds like being mindful on both sides of your day.

Super important. And then the third question would be what might we visually see on your nightstand or if you're traveling or out and about proverbial nightstand sort of apps, ambiance, gadgets, what have you. Yes. So right now, a couple books on my nightstand lamp and I hate to admit this. There's a cell phone charger for a reason, for a reason.

No. Yeah, I know. I'm on a sleep podcast. I'm going to, I'm going to make a confession here. Okay. Yes. But there's a reason to my confession because I'm, I'm always trying to improve things and improve things with data. So I found an app that can help with my snoring. So the only way I, I was for a long time putting my phone all the way in the bathroom, so it was out of reach so that I wouldn't wake up in the middle of the night and go and check something.

I mean,  it's amazing, like 2 in the morning, what goes through my head is like, Oh, what was the score in the game? I'm going to check.  Then leads to something. Oh, I saw just a notification pop. Oh, there's a message. Well, let me check my inbox. So I was putting the phone far away from the bed. Yeah. But now to measure my snoring, I've got it there.

And I'm just again, practicing willpower to not check the phone at all. Sure. And  it's been a huge help because I'm trying all sorts of different things like mouth taping. Yeah, like my latest thing, which has been, uh, amazing actually has really helped the quality of my sleep. It's helped snoring a little bit.

I can't believe I'm talking about snoring.  No, it's important. It's a big deal. I know. I know. I did not optimize sleep. If that's You know, just a big part of the night. Totally. Yeah. Yes. But you know, it's the, the things like I, so this, this app allows me to test different things and it does in the background, like a causal analysis.

So it says, okay, so taking the allergy medicine didn't help, but the mouth taping definitely did help. So, um,  yeah, I've got that by my bed, but that's, that's it in terms of electronics. And it's, I have a very bare night.  I like that. I like that one book. So funny. The last guest I was just talking to before this one, we were talking about the, how the power of minimalism in our space and how that can be helpful to actually not have a lot of those things.

And I just wanted to check the app that you're using. Is it like SnoreLab or sleep? SnoreLab. Yes. SnoreLab. Okay. Yay. And you're liking it. Great. Yeah. I've been using it forever. Oh, amazing. I've dramatically reduced snoring using that app. Okay, and you found the mouth tape in particular to really make a difference?

Yeah, I've tried so many different things. You know, I tried the nose strips and I tried the nasal dilators and all sorts of different things. I've also been doing a lot of breath work.  Oxygen Advantage. I don't know if you've had Patrick on the show. Yeah. You should if you haven't. I haven't had Patrick actually which we have had a number of practitioners and other proponents of it.

But yeah, we do need to actually get him on. He's fantastic. Yeah. So, he's the one that got me into mouth taping. So, uh, it was very hard in the beginning like the first week, 2 weeks, I was waking up constantly and ripping it off because it just.  Didn't seem right. But then I noticed my my and all my measurement devices.

So I've got my um, My my different measurables my aura ring whoop strap  all this data coming in I'm noticing that my deep sleep improves my REM sleep is improving with the mouth taping as well as the snoring so That that's been a another big game changer for me Amazing. Okay. I have another thing that you might like to try.

Have you heard of excite osa?  I feel like you'll love this. So they're approved for snoring and mild sleep apnea as a daytime treatment. So it is a, you have to have a prescription for it, but with it, you, it's basically, it looks pretty funky, but you hold almost what's like a tens unit on your tongue for 20 minutes.

So you can be like, you know, I know.  So you're, you do look weird, but you can be  on your phone. You can be, um, you know, playing video games. You can be on your laptop. People actually, um, well, I shocked my tongue while you're shocked your tongue in LA traffic. You can, uh, be shocking your tongue. This is so LA.

This is so LA. Totally. 100%. And it's profound. It's wild. I've seen a number of people make a big, big difference in certainly not only just snoring, True apneas and they are also in clinical trials right now for moderate to severe sleep apnea with rumbles that it looks promising, but you know, so we'll see what happens with that, but certainly approved for mild sleep apnea and that snoring piece.

So yeah, I feel like for someone like you, that's likes to test and experiment and tinker well for everyone, but also particularly someone like yourself, I think might. Enjoy that. So awesome. I'm gonna look into that. Cool. And I love that you're practicing all those things to make a difference with the readouts for that.

So people that will use things like SnoreLab will find, Oh my gosh, if I eat late, wow, the impact that that can make on the amount of snoring, the alcohol, the amount that that can make an impact. I mean, just so many tangible things, sleep position, et cetera, et cetera. So it's really important to be in the game of these things and this thing that we're doing a third of our lives on average 26 years for the average person is spent sleeping.

So we might want to spend a little bit of time optimizing  this area. Really, really great. And then the last question would be, out of your whole experience in managing that sleep, you know, third of our life piece, what would you say has made the biggest change to your sleep game or said another way, what would you say has been the biggest aha moment in managing your sleep for yourself?

I would have to say the taping is up there. Yeah, it's pretty high up there, but  there's something else. Actually learn this.  I'm going to listen to more of your episodes because I learned this from one of your episodes.  I mentioned actually on our recording on our podcast is mindset. The mindset. Yeah.

Yeah. I am. So another confession, I got so wrapped up in all the sleep data. I think I became like a sleep neurotic. One specific measurable just kept on reminding me what my sleep debt was. And I was falling deeper and deeper into debt. And I was like, huh? And I would go to sleep. Like I got to get more sleep.

I got to get more sleep. I got to get more sleep. And that was just like going through my head. Yeah. Uh, and then I, yeah, I read this book, Mindset, Carol Dowiecki's book. Great book. Great, great book.  I had done this before when I was, I was doing HIIT training, high intensity interval training, and I hate, I hate the treadmill.

And so I'd get on the treadmill and I'd look at the treadmill and I'd look at the distance I had to go and I'm running as fast as I can. I'm like, I don't know if I can make it. I don't know if I can make it. And after reading, The wiki's book, I started to set little goals for myself and ask the question instead of I don't or the other statement.

I don't think I can make it ask the question.  I wonder if I could blank. I wonder if I could run this lap faster than last. I wonder if I could do a mile under eight. I wonder if I could. And so then I started to apply that to sleep. Yes. So as I, um,  was reading, I can't remember the name of the author. He wrote a book called dream yoga.

Yeah. It's all about lucid sleep. Andrew, I read that one actually. Okay, great, great book. But yeah, I started to read about dreams and lucid dreaming. I'm like, I wonder if I could do this. I wonder if I could remember my dreams. That's what it started with. So I started a dream journal  and  it became fascinating to me.

What I discovered in just dream journaling was how proximal My dreams were the things that happened right before I went to sleep. Yeah, like, um, before we started doing the dim lights and the activating content, my wife and I like crime shows and it was amazing in my dreams. Some of those crimes  coming out, I was like, how fascinating is this?

And I actually started looking forward to going to sleep. I was like, okay, I wonder what the dream is going to be tonight because I want to journal it and what am I going to learn from it? And I changed my mindset, and that really helped me break through this sleep neurosis I built through all my measurables.

Oh, that's fantastic. I mean, that speaks to just the power of our thoughts, the power of psychology, the power of that reframing to really impact our behaviors and our results. Certainly, I think, you know, to tie it all nicely, it's so true both with sleep and it's true with things like our day to day management of our choices, like what your company is really striving to do to help inform, you know, our actions and really help yield positive results on the other side of that.

And it's just so impactful how well these things play together, the sleep, the continuous glucose monitors, the awareness piece. And then I think one of the things I'm fascinated about all this is just not just for data for data's sake, but to what you're speaking to, how it can really improve the quality of your life, empower your choices and your results in a really, really important way.

So Just so, so important.  And I wanted to check in. Did we leave anything out that you felt is important to share about this whole world of continuous glucose monitors, sleep, anything we missed? You know, you and I could talk for hours. I know, it's so clear. So yeah, I mean, we could have another episode. I know.

I think we covered some of the highlights really well. Okay, beautiful. So what I want to say is I'm sure that people listening want to know how can they follow you? How can they test out signals themselves and experience the difference? You know, certainly there's a big difference between just getting a prescription, you know, CGM and getting something that is built intentionally to shift your behavior and inform you.

Because that's one of the things I've seen being unfortunate Transcribed situation for people is they might get just a plain prescription. It's nothing knocking in plain prescriptions, certainly better than nothing, but they might get this plain prescription for continuous glucose monitor. And then they say, well, I don't know what to do about this and then feel disempowered and then toss it.

Oh, I've seen this a lot and people just kind of put their head in the sand about it because they don't know what to do about it. Whereas one of the things I'm left with with CYGNOS is that part of the commitment is to get in there and experiment and shift until we really find something workable. So what would be the best ways for people to do that?

Definitely come to CYGNOS. com and there you can find out everything about what we offer. And just in a nutshell, if you join, you fill out a medical questionnaire that's sent to a physician who then writes a prescription for you. We take care of all of that. What we get. The CGM, the materials you need, the alcohol, alcohol swabs, even, and the patches to wear all in a nice little box that we send to you.

So we make that part seamless and the instructions are very easy to get this going on your iPhone or Android device. So signos. com, S I G N O S. com is where you go for that. Uh, you can also follow us on social at Signos Health. And definitely come check out the body signals podcast. So body signals on iTunes or any of the, um, the platforms you use to consume podcasts.

Amazing. Yes. Well, I'm sure we'll need to have another podcast in the future because like you said, we could talk about some of these things for hours if we're both equally fascinated at what can happen when we get more information and data instead of just being at the effect of, oh, why do I feel like crap?

Why do I feel tired? Why is this?  It doesn't have to be like that in our modern society anymore and we can use technology to our advantage to really make that difference. So love the work you're doing. Thank you so much and thank you for taking the time. It really, really made a difference. And thank you for, for having me and also thank you for all the wonderful work you're doing and your great podcast because it's been a great resource for me.

Oh, that makes me so happy. Will you rock, keep experimenting, and then we'll keep comparing notes because I know we're both really into this topic and it's just so, so important. I hope we can inspire other people to do the same. Absolutely.  You've been listening to the Sleep as a Skill podcast, the top podcast for people who want to take their sleep.

Skills to the next level. Every Monday I send out the sleep obsessions newsletter, which aims to be one of the most obsessive newsletters on the planet. Fun facts. I've never missed a Monday for over five years and counting. And it contains everything that you need to know in the fascinating world of sleep.

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 Welcome to the sleep as a skill podcast. My name is Mollie Eastman. I am the founder of sleep as a skill, a company that optimizes sleep through technology, accountability, and behavioral change. As an ex sleep sufferer turned sleep course creator, I am on a mission to transform the way the world thinks about.

sleep. Each week, I'll be interviewing world class experts ranging from researchers, doctors, innovators, and thought leaders to give actionable tips and strategies that you can implement to become a more skillful sleeper. Ultimately, I believe that living a circadian aligned lifestyle is going to be one of the biggest trends in wellness, and I'm committed to keep being you up to date on all the things that you can do today to transform your circadian health and by extension, allowing you to sleep and live better than ever before.

Welcome to the sleep is a skill podcast. Today we're going to be talking about blood sugar and sleep. Could some of those middle of the night awakenings that you've been having be related? to your blood sugar. We'll get into all that and more. Now we've had a number of podcasts where we've looked at examining this from different lenses through different experts.

We've had nutricents on the podcast levels vary. And today we are diving into the world of Signos. It's a CGM company that actually uses a bit of real time inspiration. So say you're spiking after a big bowl of pasta, right? Your CGM is spiking. Well, this product will actually alert you and prompt you to take some actions that it will offer you.

So for instance, you're spiking and it will suggest for you to do some squats or for you to in one way, shape, or form. to help bring down that spike and to mitigate some of that crash that we might have experienced without that intervention and so much more. So you can also kind of get into the weeds on how your friends might be doing with their glucose.

So there can be some of that transparency you can learn within the app, ways  to bring more balance and stability to your blood sugar, not just. Because, but because you'll feel in a whole different way and you will sleep differently if you get that really handled. So a little bit about our guests, Bill Tancer co founded Signos to apply data analysis to help solve the obesity epidemic and fulfill his personal passion to be healthier.

Bill is an expert in consumer behavior. He is a New York times bestselling author and former columnist for time magazine. Bill most recently served as GM and SVP for data and research at Experian. Bill has appeared as a featured guest on ABC's 2020 and Good Morning America, as well as CNBC, CNN, Fox, Business News, Bloomberg, et cetera.

And he frequently comments on the application of big data to understand consumer trends and so much more. I think you're going to really enjoy our conversation and we'll jump right into it. But first, a few words from our sponsors.  Here at the Sleep is a Skill podcast, we're all about enhancing your sleep and a cornerstone of that journey often revolves around stabilizing your blood sugar levels.

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Now invest in better sleep and in turn in a better, more energized life.  As we head into the fall and vacation season winds down, i. e. a time when late nights, irregular eating habits, and indulgence tend to become the norm, it's time to get back on track with our health and, of course, our sleep. Just a quick interesting fact about sleep to mention, drinking more than two servings of alcohol per day for men and more than one serving per day for women can decrease sleep quality by 39.

2%. A sleep foundation survey reports, not even mentioning all the indulgent food and late night effects that often come along with it. And as we know, sleep is the key to your body's rejuvenation and repair process. It controls hunger and weight loss, hormones, boost energy levels and impacts countless.

Other functions, a good night's sleep will improve your wellbeing much more than just about anything else I can possibly think of on the planet. You know, I'm biased, but gotta say that. And sleep is your major to focus on as we head into the fall season and hopefully beyond. And that's why I recommend that if you're going to start taking some supplements on your sleep, often magnesium is a great place to begin.

But not just any magnesium supplement. I do recommend getting the magnesium breakthrough by bio optimizers. Magnesium breakthrough contains all seven forms of magnesium designed to help you fall asleep, stay asleep, and wake up refreshed, which isn't that what we're all looking to do. The sleep benefits are really remarkable.

I use it every night. And once your sleep is optimized, you'll find it much easier to tackle all the other major aspects of your health. And trust me, it is a game changer to test it out. Visit mag breakthrough. com forward slash sleep as a skill. You can enter code sleep as a skill for 10 percent off for any order.

This special offer is only available at  magbreakthrough. com forward slash sleep is a skill. I will also include this in the show notes as well.  And welcome to the sleep is a skill podcast.  All right. I am very excited for this episode and my challenge is going to be to reign it in. I know we're going to have lots of things to discuss, but Bill, thank you so much for taking the time to be here.

Molly, I am so excited to be here because I got to tell you, I'm a huge fan of the Sleep as a Skill podcast. So it is an honor to be on your show. Oh, you are such just a, a gem of a human. I love our conversations. I had the honor of being on your podcast recently and every time I connect with you, I want to connect more.

You know, my challenge is going to be, I'm going to want to ask you questions. So if I start being the host, you just tell me to stop. I mean, it can be a ping pong, you know, back and forth. Okay. But yes, I am so excited to deliver your knowledge to the listener today because one of the things that we find makes such a difference for people in the management of their sleep is for many people surprising how much of a difference Glucose regulation, the management of what can be a roller coaster for many people if they are to wear continuous glucose monitors and they see these numbers, when they start realizing the impact that that can make on the quality of their sleep, the frequency of wake ups.

And that bi directional relationship that can be at play between then the poor sleep that they might get and what that does to glucose. I mean, this is a huge topic. So I'm really, really grateful for you to help us guide us in navigating this and then having tools in place that are really late breaking outside of the mold that can really make a difference in transforming this.

So thank you so much for your time. And how did you find yourself in this role of really pioneering? Uh, glucose management. How did this even happen? You know, it's kind of a funny story. It's a circuitous story But I am a data scientist. I used to work with a massive data set. So I used to analyze um internet behavior and I Was uh in charge of this data set of what 25 million people were doing worldwide on the internet And it was a data set that updated every single day and some things updated every five minutes  So, in my previous life, I really didn't get much sleep because I was analyzing so much data.

Yes. Understandable. So, so I'm a data geek. I think your audience needs to know that first. And I'm going to try and rein it in so I don't get too data geekish on this particular show. Yeah. Um, but from there, I advised a company. That was also using big data and the founder of that company then went on to start signals and right as the company was starting.

We had a dinner together in San Francisco. I was visiting from L. A. And ironically, it was a very carby meal late at night. It didn't include a few glasses of wine.  All the things I've learned not to do. Yeah. But over this carb meal, he said, you know, I have this idea of using these continuous glucose monitors to help people with weight loss and to help them get metabolically healthy.

And I wonder if you'd be interested in advising. And I said, absolutely. On the side, I was actually researching. This idea about using CGMs for weight loss because I'd just been to the doctor. And, um, so a little bit more about my story. I'd moved from San Francisco to LA and I just got married. I married a vegan, which to paraphrase Samuel Jackson, uh, kind of made me a vegan at that point.

And, uh, I thought, you know, I'm, I'm going to get a great physical. And the doctor came back with my lab results. He said, you're pre diabetic. If your glucose is high, you've got hypertension. You, um,  you've, you've, you're pretty much stacking up all of the factors of medi metabolic disease and metabolic syndrome.

So you really need to get the stuff under control. So I said, what do I do? He said, lose weight.  Okay, how do you do that? He's like, you know, just go to the bookstore, get a book, lose weight, lose weight.  So I was like trying to figure out how I was going to get my blood sugar under control and lose the weight.

I went to my doctor and he said, you don't need a CGM. So I went back, you know, as I asked for CGM, he's like, you don't need a CGM. That's for diabetics. Uh, just lose weight. Right. So that then that dinner happened with Sharon with the pizza reason why I'm probably overweight  and I've got bad glucose. It's like, he's like, he's the bread guy.

He's he actually baked sourdough bread. So we've got bread. We've got pizza. We got the wine going dessert  and he's we're talking about this idea of using cgms to help people lose weight and get their, um You Their metabolism under control and get healthier, optimize their, their, um, their metabolic condition.

And I thought I would love to advise. I put on a CGM that that was like, maybe a day or 2 after that.  And I ate the same bowl of oatmeal that I always eat. I've eaten for like two years. I'd researched this. This is the healthiest thing to do to get my cholesterol under control.  And my glucose went from like 99, which was my resting or fasting glucose at the time up to like 140, 150.

Oh my God,  I'm trying to lose weight. And here I am, like spiking my glucose.  I called him up. I said, okay, scratch the, uh, the advisor thing. I'm joining the company. You have to hire me. And so, that's how I started at Signos. Wow! Okay, so this is part of a personal transformation. How long ago was all that?

That was 2020,  just as the, uh, the pandemic was starting. So, it was like, in February, March. Wow. I think, yeah. Okay, and you don't appear to be overweight for when I can see what I know of you, at least of like the chest up. Yeah, I lost weight pretty quickly once I started, um, really paying attention to my glucose.

And the thing is, is that in prior attempts to lose weight, I, like many others, just did diets. I tried keto, I tried paleo, I tried the whole 360. And they were For a while, but they were all unsustainable. And what I found was so interesting about using the CGM is you could make small changes to your diet.

You can make changes to your exercise. You can make changes to managing stress. And what I found was really important sleep all of these things together, making little small changes. You could drastically improve. Um. Your weight and and your your metabolic health. So, uh, yeah, I'm just so excited about this technology and the data that we're getting  that it's just so exciting.

So, yeah,  I could talk, uh, on and on about my own. My own metabolic health, but, uh,  100%. No,  it's so true because it is very exciting from a perspective of actually, we have a mutual friend, Nick, who is wearing your product and continuously is not to use the word continuously repeatedly, but To who keeps commenting on this is of all the things he's doing.

This has made the most profound difference in his health because it's just such that real time feedback that just has us be clear on the thing that we just did this, the one action that we just took to see how is this impacting our health and wellbeing and all the subsequent, you know, spillover effects that can result from that.

So maybe even that could be interesting to parse out. Why don't we want to have the spike in a crash? What are some of the kind of deleterious effects of that and how do they relate to sleep? Yeah, so there's a number of reasons why we don't want the spikes and the crashes. The first one just being the insulin that's released as a result of spiking that over time you can become insulin resistant and then you've got higher resting glucose and and also higher circulating insulin which can lead to a lot of inflammation.

Uh, there's  a whole A bunch of studies around high glucose and sleep. And like you said, it's bidirectional. It's a two way street. So if you are, um, going into sleep with, um, with hyperglycemia, high blood sugar, or if it's erratic, it's going up and down. It's crashing. It's going high. It's going low. That's going to be disruptive to your sleep.

Interestingly, if you have bad sleep, that affects your glucose the next day and you have glucose dysregulation along with a couple of other things that happen from bad sleep, like the suppression of leptin, which is your satiety hormone and the increase of ghrelin, which is your hunger hormone, which causes you to eat Thank you.

More because you've had poor sleep. It's actually the body's way of trying to fuel you up since you didn't get enough rest from the night before. But if you are like me and you're trying to lose weight, trying to get healthy, it's not the, uh, not the thing you want. You don't want that suppression of leptin and the increase in ghrelin.

There's so much interesting. Uh, there's so much interesting data. One of the things that I do at Cygnus is I also for our staff, I run our experiments channel.  Mmm. And I kind of fell into this and oatmeal and sleep are one of the ways I fell into, um, to this particular experiment role. and my, my listeners on my own podcast joke about every single episode, all episode.

I, I've, I've done, I, I've mentioned oatmeal at least once, , and here I seem to be talking about it. It's a mandate exclusively. Yeah. . Yeah. So I'm gonna make sure my, my listeners jump over, but they're probably gonna come back to me and say, okay, it was all about a oatmeal. We've heard these stories  , so I dialed in that oatmeal so I wouldn't spike.

And I did it by adding all sorts of things. So adding some protein and adding some fat, putting some almond butter in there and some chia seeds and some, um. And parts and  doing all sorts of little micro changes to the oatmeal to the point where I wasn't spiking at all. And then 1 day, I had a poor night's sleep,  had that bowl of oatmeal and I spiked again  and I thought, well, something's wrong.

Maybe I've got a bad sensor. Something's not right. So the next time it happened, I had poor night's sleep. Maybe a week later, same thing. Big spike.  So then I start researching and I find all the research on at the, at this point, I'm very new at Cigna. So I'm just now ingesting all of this research and wasn't aware of the connection between bad night's sleep and glucose dysregulation the next day.

So I launched an experiment for the whole staff. So everybody try and regulate, um, to, uh, the same breakfast every day. And then if you've got a bad night's sleep report back on this channel and Slack and tell me about it. And people were like, Oh my God, yes, that happens to me.  We found it happens actually in two really interesting scenarios.

One is when you're really stressed and the other is when you've had a bad night's sleep. So, um, one of my co founders is an E. R. Physician at Stanford. And he's like, when I'm in the trauma Bay.  And I've got a patient come in and it's like a really bad case. I go into this, you know, fight or flight mode and I'm, it's, it's stressful.

And he said, without eating anything, I can go from a normal glucose to like 160  completely normal reaction. What's happening is the liver is dumping glycogen gluconeogenesis. dumping that glycogen into the bloodstream to fuel the body to handle whatever the stressful situation is. So we started noticing these things and that gave rise to this idea of, okay, let's really, um, let's, let's bring some life to these studies that we're reading about and doing these experiments.

And, and it's, um, You know, the other thing I'll mention about using cgm for for weight loss and to help with sleep and to help with stress is that there's a fun element to it. Okay, yes, I'm a, I'm a data geek, but the idea that I could do these experiments and actually see for myself, like you mentioned, it's that continuous feedback loop.

But when you start playing with it and making these small changes and seeing the improvements suddenly. Weight loss goes from this chore or this thing that sounds like it's going to be so hard to do to something that is actually fun. Yes. Oh my gosh. Okay. So much to say about what you just said there.

So on zooming out, that's completely how I've related to sleep from the technology piece is and one of the things I hope to instill for many people is that it can we can actually gamify and hopefully have fun in the process of yeah. learning, iterating, getting curious on some of the things that make a difference for sleep.

Now there's been the spillover effect because now almost becomes, and I've even toyed with the possibility of pretty much mandating that people have continuous glucose monitors in alignment with their mandated sleep wearables in our programs. So stay tuned because that might happen because it's just so important.

And to your point, It really does become fun. And that's one of the things I think really stands out about your company is that the interface on the Cygnos app, one of the things that I was struck by is it has some real time actions that can be taken that I think many people might miss, especially if they're just using plain continuous glucose monitor or, you know, they're Not and can become disempowered when they see the spike, they see the crash, but then it's like, okay, what do I do about this?

Now your app does a great job in helping to show one, what can you do in the moment when this is happening, which is really cool to how can you kind of join forces with friends, which is really interesting and providing that kind of gamification and, you know, kind of group dynamics at play. And then three, the education piece.

So I'm wondering if we can break down some of those unique offerings that are on your  Yeah, you know, I think one of the things that really differentiates us is that we built this, we, we've got some amazing engineers on our team and they have built these predictive algorithms using machine learning and, uh, an artificial intelligence to ingest all of the food logs that you put in and what your responses to those foods are to then build this predictive engine that can, you can enter in any food and we'll make a prediction of what that's going to do to your glucose.

So if you are having a meal and maybe it's dinner and you don't want to spike knowing that you're going to go to sleep in a couple of hours hour to you can put in those food items and we'll make a prediction  in terms of what that meal is going to do to your glucose. That's the first thing. The second thing that we do is movement.

We found is very important in terms of moderating your glucose.  So You put in what you're going to eat, you then start to eat it. If the system senses a spike, we make predictions in terms of what type of movement will help you mitigate that, that spike. So for a lot of us, it's simple as just getting up and going for a walk after meals.

Uh, for me though, sometimes if I, um, walk by the kitchen and there's chocolate chip cookies on the counter and I eat one, maybe it's like a zone three workout on the treadmill and I'm like running as fast as I can for 20 minutes. But normally all it takes is like a simple walk after a meal to help mitigate that response.

But the. The algorithm and the interface is, um, it's, it's just so fascinating to see those suggestions real time because little notification pops up and it says, Hey, do this, just get your heart rate up to this amount, which, you know, equates to a walk or to a jog on the treadmill or to just climbing some stairs.

Uh, so that's the predictive piece.  Then on top of that, what we realized very early on was that we really needed to help our members. With a curriculum, so one's just educating on the basics of glucose, but then it's about talking about how it's not just your nutrition, but we do go into that because that's a huge part of it.

It's also the movement, the exercise piece, and it's also stress and sleep. So here are the things that you can try.  To, um, to help moderate your glucose throughout the day to get more energy, uh, to get healthier and hopefully to lose weight. If that's the mission of a particular member.  Absolutely. I mean, one of the things that we're often speaking to is how behavioral change.

Is one of the biggest needle movers in transforming your sleep and I feel like you are really making this fun. This process of bringing these behavioral change elements and testing navigating. getting curious on this area that is just so transformative. And it's so transformative and so beautifully connects with sleep because many people come our way because they are tired and they are crashing throughout the course of the day.

And just it's an arduous task to get from the morning to the night. And one of the things that we see is when people do start managing their glucose and their metabolic health over time. Oh my gosh, I'm not. crashing after lunch anymore. I'm not just completely dragging and zombie like or anxious or getting headaches or all of those symptoms that can come about.

And so I really think it's so important some of the things that you're doing to make this fun and to get involved in it with the team, with your own team. And then sharing the findings like you do a great job with your emails and sharing what, you know, so it doesn't just stay insular in your team. It comes out to the masses so that we can all kind of follow along in your findings is what I've seen.

Yeah, absolutely. And I just mentioned one other thing is that we really encourage our members to do the same thing that we discovered on our staff that makes things so much fun, which is experiment, experiment, experiment. Yes. A lot of our system is built. On the idea that was behind the study that was published in Cell in 2015 by the Weitzman Institute about personalized nutrition and glycemic response.

And this particular study, they had, I think, it was 800 participants. They put CGMs on and they measured the response to about 46,  000 meals. 46, 000 meals.  And what they found was everyone responded to these foods differently. So our approach is we're not sure how you're going to respond to these different foods.

So experiment, try different foods, see how your body responds to those foods. And it, it goes beyond just the foods. Yeah. It's interesting. Real story. I'm on my rower because Cygnus told me I needed to work off totally and I've been there. Uh huh. Yeah,  and I'm listening to another very popular podcast.

Yeah. In this particular host, you probably know who it is, says,  I eat this big carby meal at the end of my night. Oh, I think I know who it is. You know who it is. I almost fell off the rower. I'm like,  that's the exact opposite advice we give everybody. Yes. Then I had, I thought, actually did some reading and I found that there are actually some different chronotypes.

And while it's relatively rare that I would ever give someone that advice,  there are some people who don't spike from carbs later in the day.  And it has to do with our chronotype. It has a lot to do with circadian rhythms, specifically in the microbiome that some people just have different circadian rhythms.

And so one thing I encouraged everyone to do is take that Carby breakfast item that you have maybe once a while or like me every single day and have it in the morning and then the next day have it at like five, six, seven o'clock at night and then see the difference.  Almost everybody sees a dramatic spike.

I had a difference of like 50 milligrams per deciliter difference between the morning and the night. It's a huge difference. Yes,  100%. But to all my experiments, it's really interesting. I have people Almost every time we do an experiment that respond in a complete opposite way that I expect  to this particular podcast host  credit.

If he's listening to your podcast. Yes, he actually that might work for him. He might have a different chronotype that. Allows him to do that, but you'll never know that unless you do the experiments and test the foods and test how exercise changes things and how mindfulness or meditation might change your response to foods, which for me is a huge one, by the way, I time things in the morning where I do my meditation right before breakfast.

And this actually another one of our head of product was telling me that she has her breakfast and it's always, um, she's she's managed it. Like I have managed mine to not spike. But 1 day she was getting her kid ready for school at the same time. And then there was something stressful in her email from work and she had this completely different response to that same meal  and she attributed to stress.

Anecdotal one data point, she wondered, so of course we launch an experiment and we ask people when you have a stressful morning, just record your glycemic response. And let us know what you see  and in this staff experiment. Yeah, a lot of us noticed that same thing. So I modified my morning ritual to have meditation before I ate to make sure that was nice and calm and stress free before I started breakfast.

And  did it work? Yeah, I haven't had a spike since, um. Again, this is just anecdotal, but it's it's it's what's also interesting about experiments is that it's behavior change. That is, um, it's fun and it's empowering to because  it's it's actually causing me to engage in these these positive behaviors,  um, just to improve my life and it's all kind of goes back to that continuous feedback loop where I can look, see, does this work?

Does this not work? Oh, so beautiful. I mean, I love what you're pointing to there in the experimentations on that call out. Do many of us are impacted by what we discovered glucose to have this kind of circadian component to it that we might not have realized in years past and now we're learning more and more that that same type of food you eat in the morning might respond really differently just given the time of day and how time affects our biology and then yet.

To your point, bio individuality, how we can't just blanket say, because people want to know, Oh, well, will this thing spike me or will it not? It's that's the reason that's the beauty of getting our own continuous glucose monitor, because I'll see people spike on coffee and the next person, not at all.

I'll see people spike on, you know, the certain type of wrap that they have and next person, not at all. It's just fascinating. So you really want to get in the game yourself to make that difference. And so I think what might be valuable, because I love. And one of the things that I get from you is just this excitement in even discovering through your own life, the profound difference that this has made and navigating sounds like continuing to navigate, which is certainly my mission in life is to, you know, never be done.

And we want to keep going, keep looking. So I think that this might be particularly interesting. These, the set of questions that we always ask everyone to really delve into what's going on for you now that you have this information. So we do ask everyone for questions and The first one is what is your nightly sleep routine?

So I'm curious now given what you've heard certain podcast hosts say and you know, all of this and all the data, how are you managing your nights and particularly the glucose piece, but then other components of your sleep? So Based on some things I actually heard on your podcast, my, my most recent modification is I'm going completely dim light when I'm getting ready to go to sleep.

So I have a wind down period. That's like an hour long. So TV is off. I'm trying to, um, to just do things that aren't activating, but all the lights in the house are either dimmed or off.  And then, um, right before I go to bed, I do, um, 20 minute meditation. I'm now into non dual meditation, which is  really cool.

Yes. It's a, there's a couple of great apps out there. So I use my, my apps to do meditation and then go to sleep.  So just to find that non dual for anyone listening that is new to that. Absolutely. So, uh, I started with just the, um, the basic mindfulness meditation. And I, I did that for several years and got a lot out of that, but then I wanted to take the next step.

And so in non dual meditation, there's a couple of different schools of it. And, and, uh, Buddhist thought Dzogchen is the one that Kind of the focus of what I do my meditation on is it's trying to deconstruct the self. So in our minds and our consciousness, we've constructed like almost like a little person in our head.

Yes.  And when you deconstruct that little person, some really interesting things happen. A lot of stress goes away. A lot of things that you take personally, like things that happened during the day, how in the world could he have said that to me? Or she said that to me when yourself isn't there. It's like, okay, these things happen, but it wasn't really about me.

This is just something that this person was saying, and I shouldn't take it personally. And I found that that type of meditation just really takes all the stress away. And.  I was a really bad, bad sleeper and one of the things if I ever had sleep onset problems, it was because I would be replaying something that happened  during work in my mind over and over again and writing stories about it and that really.

That would just get me worked up and I'm getting activated. I'm getting more and more awake as I'm trying to go to sleep by doing this, um, this meditation. There's a saying no self, no problem. So take the self away and then the stress just kind of naturally dissolves. Amazing. I love that. And I love that you're adding in the dim lighting in the evening.

That's fantastic. Are you noticing a difference with that? Yes. In fact, now I want to try. Were you the one that told me about the experiment where they did just candlelight? Oh, yes. So, this is, uh, yeah.  So, the NASA. That's the next step. Uh huh. Yeah. Okay. My wife's like totally into it. She's like, yes, we're going to do the candles.

That sounds awesome. Yes! Oh, my God. Your wife rocks. Okay. Fantastic. Yeah, because I owe it to her because one of the experiments we did, uh, on sleep was with bright lights, like 100 lumen versus 3 lumen. She's like, so mad at me. So I'm like, okay, we're going to do candlelight now. This is on the flip side.

Yes. The flip side.  Actually, I did want to hit on that because I don't think we discussed that yet. I was wondering if you can share a little bit about that because it's been a more recent finding and just, you know, the kind of the impacts of sleeping even with a little bit of light. Yeah, so classic example of what happens within the, uh, the team at CYGNOS is we're at an offsite and someone brings up a study that just came out from Northwestern and in the study, it was a really small study.

I think there was only an end of 20. So 20 participants, they took 10. They let them sleep in a dark environment. Then the other 10 and there's less than 3 lumens. The other 10 had to sleep in 100 lumens, and then they gave both oral glucose tolerance test the next morning to measure their, their glucose dysregulation or regulation.

And of course, the group that, um  That had the bright lights when they tried to sleep had a much worse response to that  than the control group that were sleeping in lumens. Less than three.  Interesting. It's you could argue that. Well, disruptive sleep is going to cause that same dysregulation.  I would have loved to see the study where they tried to disrupt the sleep some other way, but I still personally can tell you that it's hard to sleep  when you've got those bright lights on.

And they use polysomnography  to, to measure the different sleep stages. They also found that the people that were in the group that had the hundred lumens, they were getting hardly any REM or deep sleep. It was almost completely late sleep or into sleep. So, um, yeah, it was an interesting finding. We replicated that the few of my team members willing or had spouses willing to let them put a hundred lumen light, um, in their bedroom and try and sleep.

Uh, tried to replicate that. I'm also, I'm an amateur photographer. So I've got the light meter. I'm doing 100 lumens. I'm adjusting thing. Like, yeah, exactly. Like, like the hundredth of a lumen. Um, yeah, it's a, it's interesting, but I, that kind of made me realize that I needed to  blackout, you know, blackout shades, um, mask if I needed it at a hotel when I didn't, um, Didn't have the ability to black out all the light really makes a huge difference.

Huge. Absolutely. Yeah. 100%. That output of light can be so impactful on the quality of our sleep. And then that subsequent impact on our glucose is just fascinating. And I think just something that people do not. necessarily connect. It's just one of those actionable things right away that we can do to make a difference with how we're feeling the subsequent day and the quality of our sleep.

So it's kind of twofold. Amazing. So with that, then our second question is, does your morning sleep routine look like, and we say that meaning that with the argument that how you set up your days can impact your sleep results. So curious what we might see there. So kind of a mirror of what I do at night, so wake up and right off the bat before I do anything else back to meditation.

So another 20 minute meditation. Yeah. Like I mentioned before, that helps me meditate before I have a meal. I'm not sure which book or podcast I got this tip from, but a big tip. Big life changing, uh, change that I made that's really helped is I now will not check my email until after breakfast. Yes. So forcing that in the beginning.

It was very uncomfortable for me. It's like, I got to check the email. Got to check the email. Got to check the email. And when I like.  Stopped doing that and put off that until after breakfast, it allowed me to relax a little bit more in the morning and not kind of like be half sleeping, wanting to go check the email as soon as I woke up.

The 2nd, I woke up. Um, it just it really did help me. Um, in that last part of my sleep. Uh, you know, I, I wake up usually at 5  36.  So, um, that part of my sleep from like four to six is now a lot more restful now that I'm not anticipating what's in my email inbox. Ah, so important. Yeah, that sleep inertia that we're working through when we first wake up.

I think we might underestimate just and underappreciate how much of a transition it is from the brain to go from a totally sleep state to now being awake and kind of coming online. Um, and then. We might want to throw at ourselves tasks and things that we really want to be cognitively alert for or that could have that clear stress response when we're still sort of in this weird stupor.

And I think it's so important that you're putting in those boundaries and it's sometimes easier said than done. So the fact that you're able to like notice that and make that difference is really, really important. Have there certain structures that you put in place to make that happen or more than just a choice.

Maybe just, yeah, it's low power. It was, yeah, it was, yeah, exactly that. Okay. It's willpower. Yeah. Uh, I did this by accident, but the fact that my meditation is the next thing that I do before I, um, go on with my day also, I think was key because part of, uh, my meditation practice is, is making sure I've dropped everything, anything that's bothering me before I go into a meditation session.

So.  I now have this goal of not really letting anything bother me in the morning. So my meditation is okay, which then helps my sleep as well. Yes, so smart. Yeah, I think there's something powerful about kind of like the bookends to our how we start our day and how we end our day. And I love that you're sounds like being mindful on both sides of your day.

Super important. And then the third question would be what might we visually see on your nightstand or if you're traveling or out and about proverbial nightstand sort of apps, ambiance, gadgets, what have you. Yes. So right now, a couple books on my nightstand lamp and I hate to admit this. There's a cell phone charger for a reason, for a reason.

No. Yeah, I know. I'm on a sleep podcast. I'm going to, I'm going to make a confession here. Okay. Yes. But there's a reason to my confession because I'm, I'm always trying to improve things and improve things with data. So I found an app that can help with my snoring. So the only way I, I was for a long time putting my phone all the way in the bathroom, so it was out of reach so that I wouldn't wake up in the middle of the night and go and check something.

I mean,  it's amazing, like 2 in the morning, what goes through my head is like, Oh, what was the score in the game? I'm going to check.  Then leads to something. Oh, I saw just a notification pop. Oh, there's a message. Well, let me check my inbox. So I was putting the phone far away from the bed. Yeah. But now to measure my snoring, I've got it there.

And I'm just again, practicing willpower to not check the phone at all. Sure. And  it's been a huge help because I'm trying all sorts of different things like mouth taping. Yeah, like my latest thing, which has been, uh, amazing actually has really helped the quality of my sleep. It's helped snoring a little bit.

I can't believe I'm talking about snoring.  No, it's important. It's a big deal. I know. I know. I did not optimize sleep. If that's You know, just a big part of the night. Totally. Yeah. Yes. But you know, it's the, the things like I, so this, this app allows me to test different things and it does in the background, like a causal analysis.

So it says, okay, so taking the allergy medicine didn't help, but the mouth taping definitely did help. So, um,  yeah, I've got that by my bed, but that's, that's it in terms of electronics. And it's, I have a very bare night.  I like that. I like that one book. So funny. The last guest I was just talking to before this one, we were talking about the, how the power of minimalism in our space and how that can be helpful to actually not have a lot of those things.

And I just wanted to check the app that you're using. Is it like SnoreLab or sleep? SnoreLab. Yes. SnoreLab. Okay. Yay. And you're liking it. Great. Yeah. I've been using it forever. Oh, amazing. I've dramatically reduced snoring using that app. Okay, and you found the mouth tape in particular to really make a difference?

Yeah, I've tried so many different things. You know, I tried the nose strips and I tried the nasal dilators and all sorts of different things. I've also been doing a lot of breath work.  Oxygen Advantage. I don't know if you've had Patrick on the show. Yeah. You should if you haven't. I haven't had Patrick actually which we have had a number of practitioners and other proponents of it.

But yeah, we do need to actually get him on. He's fantastic. Yeah. So, he's the one that got me into mouth taping. So, uh, it was very hard in the beginning like the first week, 2 weeks, I was waking up constantly and ripping it off because it just.  Didn't seem right. But then I noticed my my and all my measurement devices.

So I've got my um, My my different measurables my aura ring whoop strap  all this data coming in I'm noticing that my deep sleep improves my REM sleep is improving with the mouth taping as well as the snoring so That that's been a another big game changer for me Amazing. Okay. I have another thing that you might like to try.

Have you heard of excite osa?  I feel like you'll love this. So they're approved for snoring and mild sleep apnea as a daytime treatment. So it is a, you have to have a prescription for it, but with it, you, it's basically, it looks pretty funky, but you hold almost what's like a tens unit on your tongue for 20 minutes.

So you can be like, you know, I know.  So you're, you do look weird, but you can be  on your phone. You can be, um, you know, playing video games. You can be on your laptop. People actually, um, well, I shocked my tongue while you're shocked your tongue in LA traffic. You can, uh, be shocking your tongue. This is so LA.

This is so LA. Totally. 100%. And it's profound. It's wild. I've seen a number of people make a big, big difference in certainly not only just snoring, True apneas and they are also in clinical trials right now for moderate to severe sleep apnea with rumbles that it looks promising, but you know, so we'll see what happens with that, but certainly approved for mild sleep apnea and that snoring piece.

So yeah, I feel like for someone like you, that's likes to test and experiment and tinker well for everyone, but also particularly someone like yourself, I think might. Enjoy that. So awesome. I'm gonna look into that. Cool. And I love that you're practicing all those things to make a difference with the readouts for that.

So people that will use things like SnoreLab will find, Oh my gosh, if I eat late, wow, the impact that that can make on the amount of snoring, the alcohol, the amount that that can make an impact. I mean, just so many tangible things, sleep position, et cetera, et cetera. So it's really important to be in the game of these things and this thing that we're doing a third of our lives on average 26 years for the average person is spent sleeping.

So we might want to spend a little bit of time optimizing  this area. Really, really great. And then the last question would be, out of your whole experience in managing that sleep, you know, third of our life piece, what would you say has made the biggest change to your sleep game or said another way, what would you say has been the biggest aha moment in managing your sleep for yourself?

I would have to say the taping is up there. Yeah, it's pretty high up there, but  there's something else. Actually learn this.  I'm going to listen to more of your episodes because I learned this from one of your episodes.  I mentioned actually on our recording on our podcast is mindset. The mindset. Yeah.

Yeah. I am. So another confession, I got so wrapped up in all the sleep data. I think I became like a sleep neurotic. One specific measurable just kept on reminding me what my sleep debt was. And I was falling deeper and deeper into debt. And I was like, huh? And I would go to sleep. Like I got to get more sleep.

I got to get more sleep. I got to get more sleep. And that was just like going through my head. Yeah. Uh, and then I, yeah, I read this book, Mindset, Carol Dowiecki's book. Great book. Great, great book.  I had done this before when I was, I was doing HIIT training, high intensity interval training, and I hate, I hate the treadmill.

And so I'd get on the treadmill and I'd look at the treadmill and I'd look at the distance I had to go and I'm running as fast as I can. I'm like, I don't know if I can make it. I don't know if I can make it. And after reading, The wiki's book, I started to set little goals for myself and ask the question instead of I don't or the other statement.

I don't think I can make it ask the question.  I wonder if I could blank. I wonder if I could run this lap faster than last. I wonder if I could do a mile under eight. I wonder if I could. And so then I started to apply that to sleep. Yes. So as I, um,  was reading, I can't remember the name of the author. He wrote a book called dream yoga.

Yeah. It's all about lucid sleep. Andrew, I read that one actually. Okay, great, great book. But yeah, I started to read about dreams and lucid dreaming. I'm like, I wonder if I could do this. I wonder if I could remember my dreams. That's what it started with. So I started a dream journal  and  it became fascinating to me.

What I discovered in just dream journaling was how proximal My dreams were the things that happened right before I went to sleep. Yeah, like, um, before we started doing the dim lights and the activating content, my wife and I like crime shows and it was amazing in my dreams. Some of those crimes  coming out, I was like, how fascinating is this?

And I actually started looking forward to going to sleep. I was like, okay, I wonder what the dream is going to be tonight because I want to journal it and what am I going to learn from it? And I changed my mindset, and that really helped me break through this sleep neurosis I built through all my measurables.

Oh, that's fantastic. I mean, that speaks to just the power of our thoughts, the power of psychology, the power of that reframing to really impact our behaviors and our results. Certainly, I think, you know, to tie it all nicely, it's so true both with sleep and it's true with things like our day to day management of our choices, like what your company is really striving to do to help inform, you know, our actions and really help yield positive results on the other side of that.

And it's just so impactful how well these things play together, the sleep, the continuous glucose monitors, the awareness piece. And then I think one of the things I'm fascinated about all this is just not just for data for data's sake, but to what you're speaking to, how it can really improve the quality of your life, empower your choices and your results in a really, really important way.

So Just so, so important.  And I wanted to check in. Did we leave anything out that you felt is important to share about this whole world of continuous glucose monitors, sleep, anything we missed? You know, you and I could talk for hours. I know, it's so clear. So yeah, I mean, we could have another episode. I know.

I think we covered some of the highlights really well. Okay, beautiful. So what I want to say is I'm sure that people listening want to know how can they follow you? How can they test out signals themselves and experience the difference? You know, certainly there's a big difference between just getting a prescription, you know, CGM and getting something that is built intentionally to shift your behavior and inform you.

Because that's one of the things I've seen being unfortunate Transcribed situation for people is they might get just a plain prescription. It's nothing knocking in plain prescriptions, certainly better than nothing, but they might get this plain prescription for continuous glucose monitor. And then they say, well, I don't know what to do about this and then feel disempowered and then toss it.

Oh, I've seen this a lot and people just kind of put their head in the sand about it because they don't know what to do about it. Whereas one of the things I'm left with with CYGNOS is that part of the commitment is to get in there and experiment and shift until we really find something workable. So what would be the best ways for people to do that?

Definitely come to CYGNOS. com and there you can find out everything about what we offer. And just in a nutshell, if you join, you fill out a medical questionnaire that's sent to a physician who then writes a prescription for you. We take care of all of that. What we get. The CGM, the materials you need, the alcohol, alcohol swabs, even, and the patches to wear all in a nice little box that we send to you.

So we make that part seamless and the instructions are very easy to get this going on your iPhone or Android device. So signos. com, S I G N O S. com is where you go for that. Uh, you can also follow us on social at Signos Health. And definitely come check out the body signals podcast. So body signals on iTunes or any of the, um, the platforms you use to consume podcasts.

Amazing. Yes. Well, I'm sure we'll need to have another podcast in the future because like you said, we could talk about some of these things for hours if we're both equally fascinated at what can happen when we get more information and data instead of just being at the effect of, oh, why do I feel like crap?

Why do I feel tired? Why is this?  It doesn't have to be like that in our modern society anymore and we can use technology to our advantage to really make that difference. So love the work you're doing. Thank you so much and thank you for taking the time. It really, really made a difference. And thank you for, for having me and also thank you for all the wonderful work you're doing and your great podcast because it's been a great resource for me.

Oh, that makes me so happy. Will you rock, keep experimenting, and then we'll keep comparing notes because I know we're both really into this topic and it's just so, so important. I hope we can inspire other people to do the same. Absolutely.  You've been listening to the Sleep as a Skill podcast, the top podcast for people who want to take their sleep.

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