#146 Sleep Temperature and Circadian Rhythms with Tara Youngblood

Tara Youngblood (0:00)

We're definitely not respecting those biological clocks. And they are, they're really grounded in temperature and light. So we can shift them because of our technological advances by creating constant temperature environments and constant light.

But at the end of the day, we still wanna know and follow what the Earth is doing. So as we move through that seasonality, as we look at what the Earth is doing, if we wander too far from that, that's where the disorders really start to pop out.

SPEAKER_2 (0:32)

Do you want to know what it is?

Siim Land (0:35)

Body, Mind Empowerment.

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Siim Land (0:43)

Everything the body needs.

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Siim Land (0:49)

Welcome to the Body, Mind Empowerment Podcast. I'm your host Siim Land, and our guest today is Tara Youngblood. Tara is a co-founder and chief scientist at Chili Sleep Systems. She helps people get the coolest sleep ever with the use of technology and biohacking.

Tara, welcome to the show.

Tara Youngblood (1:04)

Hi, thanks for having me.

Siim Land (1:07)

Yeah, it's great to talk with you over the internet. And we just briefly, before we went online, we talked about like the different time zones, et cetera. So I'm calling in from Estonia, and where are you calling in from?

Tara Youngblood (1:21)

North Carolina, the USA.

Siim Land (1:24)

Nice, and how is the weather this time of the year?

Tara Youngblood (1:28)

You know, we just finally got fall. It was very delayed this year. So actually today is kind of rainy and dreary, but it's still pretty warm here. So today's high is actually going to be about 24 degrees Celsius.

Siim Land (1:41)

Oh, that's pretty damn high.

Tara Youngblood (1:44)

So it's still pretty warm. Can't complain.

Siim Land (1:47)

Yeah. So the Chili Technologies, it's a company that sells the chili pad, which is basically like a cooling mattress.

And before we get into like how it works, can you tell us like how did you end up founding a company that sells these kinds of mattresses?

Tara Youngblood (2:05)

So the background story is my husband and I actually met the first day of college and sort of started our entrepreneurial ventures about 20 years ago.

His uncle invented the water bed. So we kind of got the bug to invent and come up with product ideas. So we've actually brought over 100 different products to market and lots of different categories for different people. And then we stumbled upon this idea basically because people were adjusting pressure for sleep like a slight comfort. They're talking about pressure. And I like the idea of being able to adjust temperature. Todd sleeps really hot always and I was always cold. And so there was the famous thermostat wars of what temperature to keep your house when you both want different temperatures. So it seemed like a good market evolution.

The super fun part about it is that once people started using it, we found that there was more to it than just comfort of being able to adjust that. It did some magical stuff in the middle of the night and we get into the science of how that works. So that's where I took my physics and background and really applied it to figuring out what was going on in people's sleep when they affect it with temperature. And so that's sort of what has led us to where we are today, where we're really focused not only on just that comfort factor, but being able to really change the quality of sleep.

Siim Land (3:30)

Yeah, it's a pretty noble cause in the sense that sleep is a pretty big problem for most people, especially getting like rejuvenative sleep and actual quality sleep. So I don't know about the exact statistics, but I've heard like at least like the majority of people have some sort of a sleep disorder, whether that be sleep apnea, just insomnia, or just chronic fatigue syndrome, etc. So trying to optimize your sleep in any shape or form is something that most people would want to do.

But unfortunately, they don't really do it. It's one of those things that people shrug off and tend to ignore until it's too late.

Tara Youngblood (4:11)

Yeah, I'm hoping that there are signs. I definitely see there are signs of people treating sleep more in that category of diet and exercise or fitness. I think that it's as important as those two, maybe even more important because it emphasizes those. I feel like if there's an equation to describe it, it's diet and exercise, but you multiply whatever you do times sleep. So if you don't get great sleep, you're going to basically be multiplying it by a negative number and that doesn't give a good result.