What's on Your Mind?

‍Ram Ahluwalia [00:00:02] Hey, Justin. 

Justin Guilder [00:00:04] Hey, Ram. How are you? Friday, October 3rd to Friday the 13th.

Ram Ahluwalia [00:00:08] Oh, it is the 13th, isn't it?

Justin Guilder [00:00:10] It is.

Ram Ahluwalia [00:00:11] Are you superstitious?

Justin Guilder [00:00:13] Not in the least. Or at least I tell myself that.

Ram Ahluwalia [00:00:17] Yeah, I don't think I am either. I look at the seasonality around Friday the 13th. If there's any data to support it, then I'll be superstitious. I don't think there's any data to support it.

Justin Guilder [00:00:27] No I'm not. I'm not superstitious about that. Not. Certainly not in this regard. Maybe with things like, sports or something like that. I'll. I'll do silly things and I'll say I'm not superstitious, but also superstitious things.

Ram Ahluwalia [00:00:43] Right. If there's no cost to action. You're wearing your favourite hat. Let's say. Why not take the hat? You know. So I don't want to talk about a few things today. Uh. What I want to talk about.

Justin Guilder [00:00:59] Yeah. Well, um, you know, one of the things that we were talking about this morning that I thought would be interesting is sleep. I think you might have had a bad night's sleep. You have. You have young children. Maybe you should set the stage for everybody. You got three.

Ram Ahluwalia [00:01:15] Kids, two boys and a girl. Four-year-old boy, two-year-old boy. And a one-year-old girl. And two of them woke up last night. It's a double team. And, uh. Yeah. So I have that sweep headache and. Yeah, I've been on a winning streak this week. So last night, Betty, you know they looked at the statistics and I said, look, we got to get dad tonight. So.

Justin Guilder [00:01:43] Yeah well that's right.

Ram Ahluwalia [00:01:45] What are some of your suggestions or tips or um.

Justin Guilder [00:01:48] Sleep well. So there's sleep and then there's sleep with kids, right? different things I would say first. We trained our kids. Um, that was something that I had never heard of before. I had kids. I have two boys. They're 11 and eight going on nine and 12 in the coming months. It worked. So we got them going, you know, 7 to 7, 12 hours of sleep. And it was amazing. Like life-changing difference. You're outside of the window. So, like, if you didn't, sorry. If you did, good for you. Um, if you're listening and you have young kids or you plan to have young kids do it, it does work.

Ram Ahluwalia [00:02:38] And so the issue is you get off the wagon when there's travel or something.

Justin Guilder [00:02:42] Yeah, travel.

Ram Ahluwalia [00:02:43] Is tough. But if you have a holiday or the routines get kicked out the window, you have to reset them. Uh.

Justin Guilder [00:02:49] Routines, a good word. I think sleep is all about routine, right? Like there's the teaching your child how to sleep. The aspect of sleep training. And then there's that creating the routine. I think for me at least, and I've done some research on this because I kind of geeked out on some of these things. Establishing a routine is important. So like as a parent, you impose a bedtime on your child, and often people don't impose a bedtime on themselves. Oh yeah. And it's like, oh, I'm just going to, you know, go to sleep when I'm tired. Well, yes, I did it for years. Pulled all-nighters. You know, whether it was in the middle of studying or whether it was a trial when I was a lawyer or whether it was kind of like before I had to put together a presentation for a board, and I was like, I'm not done, and I need to get it out tomorrow. But I've gotten to the place today where I try to be much more disciplined about it because I'm I like to wake up early and I realize that I could. Make myself wake up early. Most days of the week. But then I would be. Dying over the weekend from the lack of sleep. If I didn't consistently go to bed. And I used to think, oh, I'll sleep when I die, it's like, not a problem. I used to say that all the time, and then I saw some statistics that, like, I believe a bad night of sleep takes several weeks to recover from. In terms of getting your sleep habits back and catching up, but mostly there's no like quote unquote catching up, like, right.

Ram Ahluwalia [00:04:26] There's no.

Justin Guilder [00:04:27] Use in.

Ram Ahluwalia [00:04:28] Up that that's all mythology. And yes, driving performance. It drives a mindset. It drives recovery. It's foundational. I agree, I mean, I do my thinking in the evenings. It's quiet when the kids are in bed. That's actually when I would start to read. It's frustrating because I feel like I need to go to bed now, but I'd rather just keep reading this because I'm in the zone.

Justin Guilder [00:04:56] That's why I've reversed that a little. I was not a morning person. Historically, if anybody, knew me, they would be shocked that I woke up early. But now I wake up early and the solitude of the morning is kind of interesting.

Ram Ahluwalia [00:05:14] So. Yeah. That's that's a great point. I've been there before with the early, um, wake-ups, and I'm more of a night owl, but I have seen that with habit and routine and managing your circadian rhythms of sunlight and all the rest. And exercise, you can wake up early like this. You can be a morning person. There are chronotypes in the genetics and so forth. But yeah, at least for me, I found that I can. I like that solitude is exactly the right word in the morning when you have that, if you have 1.5 hours of that solitude. Oh, yeah.

Justin Guilder [00:05:48] Sure. I was woken up by one of my dogs last night, actually at four.

Ram Ahluwalia [00:05:53] Uh, she.

Justin Guilder [00:05:54] Was crying too. I don't know, go out or something. And it was close enough to my normal wake-up time. And I said, all right, well, I guess I'm just up at four.

Ram Ahluwalia [00:06:04] That's a good rule. That's a good many other cities I've seen that if you like, the snooze alarm is the enemy of good sleep, right? If you try to sleep, it hits the news for ten minutes. Then for the next few hours, you're just not at your best. You never even got quality sleep anyway, but you sent the message to your brain to start a new sleep cycle, so you're just worse off. And going to the gym is a great idea. Even if you had bad sleep, which I did not apply this morning, unfortunately, I woke up. I was like, I got to go for that extra hour. Probably should have gone to the gym instead.

Justin Guilder [00:06:34] Never hit snooze. Never. Don't do it, fight it and just get up. I mean, easier said than done. But like the habit creates routines and then routines create outcomes. And so if you get into the habit of hitting snooze, that's what happens if you get in the habit of just like rolling out of bed and accepting that you don't want to get out of bed, but you're going to just do it anyway, then you do it. And so some of the things I think about, just like wrapping up sleep for a bit, I try to cut off caffeine at like 11 a.m. Um, it's hard. I love coffee and I actually have a cup of coffee sitting at my desk that I realized I didn't drink in time, and so therefore I will not finish it because it'll just throw me off. I just won't be able to go to sleep the same way. I try to kind of wind down, the lights a little bit, like, dim them when it gets later. And I know that if I need to turn up the lights to stay up like I wish I had done last night when I was watching, playoff baseball. Instead, I ended up falling asleep on the couch because I had dimmed the lights and I was tired. Right. And, um, you know, I take a supplement usually theanine that I think it's written.

Ram Ahluwalia [00:07:52] It's not a formula, Tony, which is great.

Justin Guilder [00:07:56] Yeah. I don't take melatonin. I don't like that kind of supplement in a way, but I do like other ones. I think there's a lot of writing out there. I feel like Huberman talks about some of these things, and I experimented with a few that he recommended. Theanine worked well for me. It gives you wild dreams usually. So if his warning is accurate, if you have bad dreams and some people suffer from, like, more nightmares than not, don't take that one I don't get. Or I very infrequently get nightmares, but I do now have much more vivid dreams. Um, the.

Ram Ahluwalia [00:08:38] First I do chief awareness in those dreams. Are they just merely vivid and good recall?

Justin Guilder [00:08:44] Have had oh, um, lucid dreams several times where I can control the dream a bit. It doesn't happen all the time, but it has happened. They're very vivid, and I have great recall of my dreams. Not always.

Ram Ahluwalia [00:09:00] Uh, okay. We'll have to talk about lucid dreams at some point. in the future, I could do a whole show or interview with a guest on that. Only now, because I achieved that awareness twice, maybe three times. But it is extraordinary the experience of having a lucid dream when you can create your reality field and fly. I flew around, I went to like the moon hung.

Justin Guilder [00:09:21] Out in Paris.

Ram Ahluwalia [00:09:22] I was doing a keto diet. What a nice sugary chocolate croissant doughnut. It was awesome. So an island of really interesting sub-topics and areas and then let's move past sleep. There's a lot we can say on sleep to have the type on my sleep apnea experiment in a few weeks, I going to get the equipment with, more to come on that.

Justin Guilder [00:09:45] Okay. Oh, last thing on sleep. Sleep mask as dark as possible. I got to go to sleep. Mask.

Ram Ahluwalia [00:09:53] Right on, right on. I love your caffeine tip, too. I don't drink caffeine after two, but your rule is better than mine. Yeah, I have a slow caffeine metabolism, but. So weight loss drugs. Um, you know this. There's this research coming out from Bank of America Merrill Lynch and Jefferies. I'll share one on the screen now. And they're talking about how airlines can make or save money by having less weight or thinner passengers. You want to. Do you want to talk more about that?

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