The Recipe For Great Sleep - How To Get Your Best Rest | Dr. Aric Prather

Aric Prather (0:00)

You don't get to choose when you fall asleep, right? Like sleep isn't something that you make happen.

Sleep is something that happens to you.

Michael Gervais (0:15)

Okay, welcome back or welcome to the Finding Mastery podcast. I'm your host, Dr. Michael Gervais, by training and training a high-performance psychologist. And I'm stoked to welcome Dr. Aric Prather to the podcast for this week's conversation.

Sleep is fundamental, fundamental to our survival. It's kind of like oxygen, yet most of us don't view these essential functions through the same lens in order to perform at our best, to live long and healthy lives, to explore our potential. We have to put the same value on sleeping that we do on breathing. Lucky for us, our guest today does exactly that. Dr. Prather is all about sharing the research, driven techniques and solutions that make restorative sleep a reality. As a renowned sleep scientist, a clinical psychologist, and head of one of the world's most successful sleep clinics at UCSF, Aric is changing the game for so many people, and I hope after listening to his insights, you'll understand why. In this conversation, you'll hear about why sleep starts the moment you wake up, how sex plays a role in the quality of your sleep, the psychology of building habits around sleep, the ideal length for a nap, and so much more.

With that, let's dive right into this week's conversation with Dr. Aric Prather. Aric, how are you?

Aric Prather (1:36)

Great, great. I'm so happy to be here.

Michael Gervais (1:40)

Sleep is really important for me personally, and obviously for our community. So we're really excited to have you here. But before we jump in, how did you sleep last night?

Aric Prather (1:49)

You know, I actually slept pretty well.

It was a typical night. I live in San Francisco, so slept with our sliding glass door open to get some of that cool fog air. But there's something about the foghorn that goes on during the night. That I find so soothing. So for me, it was pretty good.

Michael Gervais (2:09)

All right. So the sleep prescription.

It's a nice little compact, small read that has all the essentials in sleep in there. And so sleep is obviously foundational for living a good life. And why did you want to write this book now?

Aric Prather (2:26)

You know, my job, I do most of it is research on how sleep affects health and kind of what impacts our sleep. But I also, you know, help run a clinic at the University of California, San Francisco, where we treat people with insomnia. And our wait list is just really, really long.

There are not enough providers.

And unlike a lot of things in the behavioral space, in the psychological space, we've worked out, you know, fairly consistently, like how sleep works. I mean, there's so much to be discovered for sure. But like how to improve sleep behaviorally without medicines. You know, there's a lot of strong empirical research to support what we do, which is cognitive behavioral therapy for insomnia. And so the goal of this book was to really try to scale that, to kind of distill it for the public, kind of the principles that we know regulate sleep, so that more people can get the sleep that they need.

Michael Gervais (3:23)

Okay, awesome. So sleep is, like I said, a game changer when you get it right.

And when you don't have it right, the compromises for health, well-being, performance, overall just kind of zest for life is real. I'll start with a framework for me. It's like I compete within myself to my best abilities to organize my day to get my sleep right. And so sleep is really important for me and my family. And so that's why I'm excited to have this conversation with you. And I would also say that I struggle a bit with sleep.

And so hopefully, like, we can have a little bit of personal coaching in here as well. So, but let me go up one more level. Why now? Like, what is happening now that sleep has a waiting list in your laboratory?

Aric Prather (4:16)

Yeah, you know, I think so. So we know from kind of the population level data that there's a lot of people just struggling to get to sleep and to stay asleep. There was a huge uptick in this during the pandemic. I think, though, I would argue that over the last decade that I've been doing this and people around the country have been doing this kind of work.

There's become this thirst for understanding sleep. People are beginning to kind of take notice, kind of wake up to the importance of sleep. And so that's really exciting. But, you know, there's still a lot of need. I mean, I think the stressors of daily life, the way in which we manage our time, oftentimes sleep takes a backseat to that. Right. There's a cost to kind of some of the things that we do in our life and trying to squeeze every moment out of it, which, of course, you know, as people that like to compete, like kind of want to kind of be as successful as possible, that takes time. But oftentimes, I think people don't recognize that the investment that you put in sleep actually puts you in a better position the following day and puts you in a better position to kind of do all the things that you really want to accomplish.