Sleep Doctor: If You Wake Up at 3AM, Do Not Make This Mistake (What Actually Works) | Dr. Michael Breus

**Jesse Chappus** (0:00)
Coming up on today's show.

**Michael Breus** (0:02)
What do I do when I wake up at 3 o'clock in the morning, and I can't go back to bed? By the way, it's kind of the number one problem that people ask me about. This is exactly the protocol that I use with my patients. So every human on earth, dude, on earth wakes up at this period of time. However, most people, they burp, they fart, they roll over and they go back to sleep. However, there is a group of people who do not have that situation where they're up, and their brain is going, going, going, and they've got what we call monkey mind. Our brains click to the negative as soon as it's dark out, when we get woken up, because we're like, what happened? Why did we get woken up? We're leaning in the negative direction here, and it's very easy to stay negative. This is one of my favorite things to talk about, and I think I have a really good protocol for it. So step number one, and you're going to think this is crazy, there's three different things that people need to understand that you need in order to enter into a state of unconsciousness. One is you need a heart rate of 60 or below. Two, you need a core body temperature that is reducing, not increasing. And three, when all of those are low, very easy to fall back asleep.

**Jesse Chappus** (1:07)
What's the biggest sleep myth you see ruining people's health right now?

**Michael Breus** (1:12)
You know, it's a great question.
I think there's a few of them, if I'm gonna be honest with you. I think historically one of the big things that people think is, I gotta get eight hours, I gotta get eight hours. I think that is probably the big one. And the truth of the matter is, first of all, it's a range, right? So when you look at the data, what we really think is somewhere between seven and nine hours is where people can usually fall and still be well within the norms for amount of sleep. But I wanna be fair, sleep is not just a quantity game, it's a quality game as well. So quite frankly, I'd rather you get six and a half hours of really high quality sleep than eight hours of really crappy sleep. And I can help define that for your listeners as well. But at the end of the day, you shouldn't focus so much on the time, but rather how do you feel when you wake up? If you feel refreshed and ready to go and meet the day within 30 to 60 seconds of waking up, you probably got the right both amount and quality of sleep.

**Jesse Chappus** (2:14)
Okay, well, let's go into quality and talk about what that looks like.

**Michael Breus** (2:18)
So when we look at quality of sleep, there's a lot of different ways you can kind of think about it. I wanna be clear. I think you are your own best doctor. When you wake up in the morning, how you feel is exactly how you slept. Dude, I can't count the number of people who come up to me and they're like, Dr. Bruce, my sleep score on my phone said I got a 34, and I thought I slept great, and then my day turned into a 34, right? And so it's like, so I think a lot of people out there, they rely on trackers, whether that's a ring or a watch or a strap.
And I want to be thoughtful here, right? So to be clear, there is no great tracker out there. I mean, I would argue the best of them all right now is probably an Aura ring, and I'll explain why. Aura is a sleep company that happens to measure activity.
Whoop, as an example, is an activity company that happens to measure sleep. The ethos is very different inside of the companies. Do I think Whoop does a great job? Yeah, they do a great job of tracking activity. But here's the thing, when you look at sleep and depth of sleep is all measured by brainwaves, it's really hard to get brainwaves from your finger or from your wrist. So you have to really be suspect of the accuracy of many of these trackers. Now, don't worry, you can still use them and you can still get value from them. But what you want to do is follow these simple rules. Number one, don't track every day. Don't look at your data every day. You're going to drive yourself nuts. Believe it or not, there's now a disorder called orthosomnia, where people get so anxiety ridden by their tracker data that they can't sleep. So we don't want you to go there. So look at your data once a week. I suggest usually on Sundays because that can help you plan out for the week what's going on with you. And what you're looking for is you're looking for the delta or the difference.