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Show Notes

0:00 Intro
1:30 Ancestral Health & Hunter-Gatherer Sleep
9:30 Bimodal sleep
14:42 Delayed sleep phase syndrome
16:55 Phenotypes: Owls and Larks
21:17 Polyphasic Sleep
29:12 Genetically needing less sleep
39:25 Increased sleep and stress
48:42 Hormesis
51:14 Athletics & physical activity
1:10:05 Heuristics to live by
1:12:57 Empowered Responsibility
1:15:33 Human optimization as an identity
1:27:47 In-Tune Training and HumanOS

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Daniel: Welcome to the Neurohacker Collective podcast. This is part two in our series with Dan Pardi on sleep optimization. I’m not even going to introduce Dan or do a catch up because this session [00:00:30] is really just a continuation of the last session. If you haven’t seen the last session, part one on foundations of sleep, we’ll have a link below. Go watch it first because we’re not even going to recap. We’re just going to dive in deeper. This is such a deep and critical and rich topic that we wanted to continue beyond what we could fit into one reasonable podcast, and so we’re going to just dive on in to where we left off at the end of that last session. Dan, thank you for being back with us so we can go further.






What was that timing? About 5.7 to 6 and a half hours per night. Sounds was pretty low, but we hear we should be getting 7 to 9 hours of sleep per night. That’s according to the national sleep foundation. A really important distinction here is how people report their sleep and how sleep studies analyze sleep, so if I were to ask you Daniel, “What was your sleep last night,” people might say, “Well, I went to bed at midnight and I woke up at 8 and therefore, I slept 8 hours.” You do not say, [00:04:00] “I went to bed at midnight I woke up at 8. I had 85% sleep efficiency and therefore I slept 6 hours and 42 minutes, and I had this amount of wake time after sleep onset.”





A lot of this stuff doesn’t happen now unless you have the knowledge and you’re working to implement that into your life. This is what I do, so whether you put on glasses or you use certain types of filters on your electronic devices so they admit less blue light. The point being here is that it’s an exciting time and technologies perhaps could save us from ourselves because it’s interfered a lot. What else to go back to the hunter-gatherer sleep? [00:07:30] Now, when you go into those sorts of environments, it’s difficult to bring an entire sleep lab. So what you lose in resolution, you gain in observing really more naturalistic behaviors.




Dan Pardi: Yeah, so a researcher by the name of [inaudible 00:09:38], he’s at Virginia Tech, made a lot of noise a couple years ago. It was published all over BBC, USA Today, etc. about his work, where he was … He’s a historian, but he was looking into historical texts and identifying that it was common in those texts for the author [00:10:00] to describe a period of first and second sleep, as he called it. So people would go to bed early. They’d have an awake period in the middle of the night. During that time they would sit around a fire, have sex, work on things, and then they would fall back asleep for a second sleep period.


Insomnia is really more of an anxiety disorder. It has multiple different types, [00:11:00] but if you worry about your sleep, that is almost the surest way to then have your sleep be disrupted and be impaired. The good that can come from that is that if you realize, “Hey, I have this weird pattern that doesn’t match what is commonly described,” then you can still be okay. You just need to make sure that you’re getting adequate sleep.



Dan Pardi: That’s right.

Daniel: It was already different because you have to wake up at a certain time to deal with the livestock, and so you have to … It was the beginning of changing evolutionary environment, [00:12:30] so it indicates some previous things but not necessarily evolutionary things.

Dan Pardi: Yeah. That’s right. Yeah, previous anthropological patterns that we’ve been able to identify through historical texts. Now, is there enough time between some of those early texts to have some evolutionary adaptation? Possibly, but again that’s very … It’s not a lot of time in terms of evolutionary scope, but yes, it still does matter. The amount of, the sophistication of the technology that we invent [00:13:00] can be a good thing but it also has a chance of disrupting our patterns, our natural patterns, with more strength and so when you move from a hunter-gatherer existence into more of an agrarian, even horticulturalists to domestication animals, plants, industrialization, you’re going to have, if you have a candlelight and time pressure to get up and farm the fields versus wake up whenever and then go and hunter-gather, that’s one shift. It’s a bigger shift when you have high-definition, high-definition [00:13:30] television screens, and  work that’s coming in at all times of the day. If you’re an executive, then you’re dealing with some time zone that’s far away and you’re taking a call at midnight just to be up with your team, that’s common but that’s new.

Daniel: So for the most part what we call recorded history has not been long enough to affect our evolutionary biology via natural selection all that much, maybe some epigenetics, but [inaudible 00:13:53] hunter-gathers interesting, this ancestral health is interesting. I think one of the main things we find is there is some common patterns, [00:14:00] but there’s also a lot of differences because we’re a very adaptive species. Inuits probably had some different sleep dynamics than people in Polynesia because duh, that’s a fairly different adaptive environment. So I’m curious about a couple of other things from this. I actually don’t know the research on this, but I have heard things about, that obviously in an evolutionary environment, you didn’t want to have everyone asleep at once.

Dan Pardi: Yes.


Dan Pardi: Yeah. The sentinel behavior. Some of the early thoughts and hypotheses around this is that one of the reasons why teenagers have what’s called delayed sleep phase syndrome, which means if they … It’s very common if you have a teenager that you’re yelling at them to go to bed. [00:15:00] It’s 1 o’clock and they’re up on their phone and you’re telling them, “Go to bed, stop playing with whatever. You’ve got school in the morning,” there’s a reason why teenagers tend to stay up late. It’s because that age group, it’s common for them to have what’s considered delayed sleep phase syndrome, which means that they just don’t get sleepy until later.


Daniel: Not a good idea.



Dan Pardi: Yes, there’s been some good papers on this recently. We know this to be true. There are owls [00:17:00] and larks is how we describe these different types of phenotypic expression of when you feel like being up, when you’re most alert, when you perform at your best, and when you feel like sleeping, and so it’s very … The nice thing about it is knowing in the future as we become more aware about these genetic tendencies, then we can create work environments that enable people to not have to try to fit everybody into one [00:17:30] sort of square, that you get to take part in your work, particularly with the freelance economy.

You’ve got to do your work when you feel best. If you’re groggy in the morning, you can take a lot of time to get up and get going, but then you might be working well into the night and that feels good to you. If you maintain consistency with that pattern, that can be very healthy. What’s not healthy is when we have alternating, rapidly alternating, changes in our circadian timing. The body doesn’t work as efficiently, [00:18:00] and people who do that oftentimes can feel very … I wouldn’t say dysfunctional, but far from optimal, sometimes dysfunctional. So it’s hard to remember, it’s hard to think, you’re not as alert, your body’s not working as well. You could gain [fat 00:18:14]. Pretty much the system, the body systems, are not working well.

Going back to this, yes, we do have tendencies. Again, hopefully in the future we’ll have really good clarity about what those tendencies are from a genetic perspective, and then you’ll have [00:18:30] a societal structure that allows for people to, again, participate in a work culture but not try to force everybody to do … “Hey, we’ve got a meeting at 7 AM Monday morning. Be there.” That can be really painful for people and it can ruin their productivity for the rest of the week.

Daniel: So this is an issue with the way we do statistics in science in a new area before we’ve learned how to do, say, phenotypic understanding. If you’re putting everything on a Bell curve and you have a predominant phenotype, then of course you’re going to average to the predominant phenotype [00:19:00] in a way that might be totally inappropriate. I’m curious to hear your thoughts on, there’s so much in the literature about the timing of sleep is important, not just the regularity but the hours of sleep one gets before midnight are more meaningful. You have more HGH, etc. than after midnight. I would imagine that that is probably based on primary phenotypic expression, and true for most people but not true for everyone, but that degree of insight wasn’t actually clear in the studies.


Dan Pardi: Yeah, 15 to 25% on both sides that have more extreme tendencies. You’re right, you cannot use population averages too proscriptively so because this whole group of people’s averaged 8 hours of sleep or went to bed at this time performed well. Therefore, you need that. It’s a good starting place, but the individual [00:20:30] is different than the group average. So for example, just using sleep time as an example, if you were to say, “Yeah, the average of this group was 8 hours of sleep. That’s what they needed,” and I said, “You should get this and this is what you actually need,” then I could be prescribing you too much sleep or I could be prescribing you not enough.

If you tend to be one of those people that needs more, then I’m prescribing a sleep debt, and if you tend to be one of those people that needs less, you [00:21:00] actually might develop insomnia because then you’re getting to bed, you’re laying there, you’re worrying about your sleep and it creates a situation that’s right for producing insomnia.


Dan Pardi: That’s perfect. Perfect example.


Dan Pardi: Yeah. This is some work that gained popularity [00:21:30] a few years back. I don’t hear much about it these days. I’m not surprised. It was originally devised by the military as a strategy to help people perform better after multiple days of inadequate sleep. So let’s say you’re on a mission and there is not a good place to sleep. You’re up for a hundred hours. If you sleep in small increments along the way, if the opportunity allows, will you perform better at hour 95 to 100 than you would’ve if you didn’t get [00:22:00] 10 minutes here, 10 minutes there? The answer seems to be yes.

That literature was then interpreted as, “Well, we only need …” You can actually absolve yourself of needing to get 8 hours of sleep or 7 hours of sleep by sleeping in these 20 minute chunks. There was a lot of problems with that sort of analysis. One of them was that they were prioritizing certain sleep phases, like REM sleep, as most important and the only thing that was actually really necessary. What happens is when [00:22:30] you don’t get enough sleep, there is … You’ll actually get deep sleep and REM sleep more robustly and sooner, but it’s actually because the expression of a buildup of pressure for those. It means you’re not getting enough.

What you really want is to have regular, the really most important part about circadian timing is a regular period for you. Your period could be later, where you wake up late and go to bed late, but you want to try to maintain that pattern. Your body will work best [00:23:00] if it’s consistent in that you’re going to bed at three in you’re waking up at let’s say 10 or 11. If that’s your pattern, great. Try to keep it consistent. If that’s shifting though regularly, then that could be a problem. The people that, I would say that people that do have that pattern naturally are a bit disadvantaged because a lot of modern life, it’s easy to stay up later but it’s not always easy to not get up earlier.



Dan Pardi: Yes.



That is a period, a 24 hour period, where to have the circadian dip, which is in our alertness drive, so all the sudden there’s a mismatch between the amount of sleep pressure we’ve built up and how much that sleep pressure is being counteracted by our awake system. When there’s a dip there, that causes you to be a little sleepy so it’s hard, even if you’re very sleepy during the day it’s hard to actually sleep unless you’re in [00:26:30] that zone. Most naps take place then. Most countries that have a siesta, that’s when the siesta is. There are reasons for that, but if you are in a culture where you’re usually getting a nap during that time and your body trains to that pattern but today you actually have to drive from San Francisco to San Jose at that time, then you’ve trained your body to be really sleepy at that time, and that can be dangerous if you’re driving.

If you’re just having a meeting with somebody, you can certainly [00:27:00] not perform very well, so it can be a bit risky when you don’t have full autonomy of your schedule, but that’s again where there is the art of health promotion and health education. Then there’s also the art of personal health practice, which is you making decisions in your life about what’s going to work, oftentimes by trying to understand what the literature tells us as best as possible and also by then understanding the realities of your world and what’s going to work. There’s no hard and fast rules, I’d say. There can be [00:27:30] on some things but a lot of what we’re discussing are not, but even then, I will oftentimes if I’m a bit sleepy, I will avoid taking a nap and just try to go to bed earlier.




Dan Pardi: Even less than that.

Daniel: I have seen some at the 5-

Dan Pardi: Right. 4 or 5. Yeah.


Dan Pardi: Yeah. There’s compensation. All of us might have a … If you were to be put into an environment that was fully permissive for you getting what we’ll call complete sleep, the exact amount of sleep that your body would want, there [00:31:00] is a buffer that we all have to get a bit less and not have major side effects. Particularly, you have consistency. So let’s say just to make the numbers easy, you need 8 hours of sleep and you’re always going to bed at the same time, midnight and waking up at 8. You could probably do pretty well if you only were getting 7 hours of time in bed, but you are maintaining a really consistency phase, the timing, and you would see some efficiency.


Daniel: We can talk about the need for less sleep from a genetic perspective, and I think that’s a partial understanding. We can also talk about inducible increased or decreased sleep needs so when you talk about increased efficiency [00:33:00] of repair. We could also talk about decreased damage happening during the day because of actually a more efficient physiology. If we know that during sleep the body is addressing inflammation, it’s addressing oxidative stress and radical damage, if someone had less oxidative damage happening while they were awake, if they had less inflammation, it’s a reasonable line of thought to say they might actually need less total sleep because there’s less repair to have [00:33:30] happen.

So it’s possible that people who need less sleep might just have more efficient physiologies genetically, but the claim has … I’ve seen the claim so many times and I’m just kind of curious, speculating here, that somebody goes to [inaudible 00:33:46], they go to some meditation retreat where they’re actually in a profoundly low amount of psychological stress, and maybe physiologic stress, and they’re like, “I don’t feel like I need hardly any sleep. I feel very well rested,” and maybe not enduringly [00:34:00] but for a period on very little sleep, or when people are juice fasting and [inaudible 00:34:05] restriction. You think, “All right. Well, how much work does it take to digest a lot of food? Is it possible that when you decrease the total amount, you are decreasing what the body has to process, that it might actually have less sleep need?”


Dan Pardi: Yeah. One of the … There’s some truths there, and that’s why we don’t have a specific sleep number that is [infungible 00:34:51], like I get 8 hours exactly every night, but our body is always processing stress, whether it’s psychological or physiological, and sometimes [00:35:00] we need more and less, even depending on where we are in that moment. If you think about, what we tend to think of very, very healthy people, so young athletes, particularly like work with Stanford athlete … Sherry [inaudible 00:35:16] did some work with them, and you see that those people don’t need less sleep. They need more.


People that are getting a lot of physical activity, they actually perform much better, whether it’s shooting accuracy, whether it’s sprint speed, reaction time, whether it’s their mood. When they are told to spend 9 hours in bed versus getting let’s say 8, said, so they feel like, “I’m getting a great amount of sleep,” and they’re told to get more, [00:36:30] and they perform better. That’s the trend of the data right now.

Daniel: I think the most obvious example there is bodybuilders. If someone’s in hypertrophy, there’s just a huge amount of actual physiologic repair because they’re beating the issue up and there’s a lot of anabolic process that has to happen and so 9 or 10 hours sleep might be important, whereas if they weren’t bodybuilding they might be fine on 8. Then they have to decide to invest in it. This is interesting, defining what we mean by health, because it’s not one [00:37:00] thing. [inaudible 00:37:00] medicine coming from the yoga tradition said people shouldn’t exercise beyond 60% of their peak capacity because they were not focused on athletics. They were focused on longevity, and they were looking at longevity in relationship to not having peak stress occur.



It’s not a lot of sleep, but it’s quite refreshing where you have improved [00:38:30] cognitive performance for 6 to 10 hours after the nap, and so there’s … Yes, those things can happen, but are you … Let’s say you can manipulate one aspect of cognition or something that you’re basing, “How do I feel,” off of, “Do I feel very sleepy right now,” you also might not be giving your body enough time for full recovery of your kidneys, or for purging of beta-amyloid that’s accumulating in the brain, and so that’s why in the future [00:39:00] as we develop more powerful interventions that can intervene in sleep and can potentially cause efficiency, we’ve got to be vigilant to whether or not it’s fully restoring the body in every way you want it to, or is it manipulating aspects that you care about but it’s also putting you in a risky situation. That’s a possibility too. It’ll take time to figure all that out.






Daniel: [inaudible 00:42:04]




Daniel: If we come back [00:42:30] to sleep, when we say increased amount of sleep, beyond people who are sleeping 9, 10, 11 hours, it’s bad for you, that really seems like nonsense to me. The thing is that if you have stuff that’s bad for you going on, you’re probably going to be sleeping more and we can see correlation, but we shouldn’t be trying to tell these people, “Force yourself to sleep less when you’re fucking exhausted.” We should say, “Let’s actually look at inflammation and chronic infection, stress and what’s going on for you.”

Dan Pardi: That’s absolutely right. It is a great opportunity to say, “Hey, take a deeper look.” You don’t want [00:43:00] to end there. If somebody is now needing 9 to 10 hours of sleep where before, 5, 10 years ago, they were getting 8 hours, well it’s good to know that history. Now they’re needing more than they used to. That’s abnormal. Something is probably going on, but have you always slept that long? Also, what age are you? Sometimes if you’re younger, things can change more unpredictably depending if you’re going through a growth spurt or if you’re dealing with other sorts of stressors going on in your body, and so [00:43:30] you have to look at the time, the history of the person.

Then what I would say is, if you are getting 9 to 10 hours of sleep per night and you are also waking up and you don’t feel refreshed, that’s really key as well. This is idiopathic hypersomnia, which means it’s unexplained why this person remains sleepy despite the great amount of sleep that they’re getting. That is a miserable situation. It’s treated very similar to how narcolepsy is treated with stimulants, but with narcolepsy, they’re missing a protein [00:44:00] that is orchestrating arousal and with idiopathic hypersomnia, yes give them stimulants and that can help, but again we don’t exactly know what’s happening to generate that response.

Daniel: That’s what the word idiopathic means, right?

Dan Pardi: Yeah, exactly.

Daniel: Anytime we have a disease that we label idiopathic, it just means, “Here’s an effect that we don’t understand.” A deeper understanding is important. Here’s where I actually think the functional medicine world understands a shit-ton more than the traditional approach in sleep sciences here [00:44:30] is if we see someone who used to sleep 8 hours and is fine, now they’re sleeping 10 hours and they’re still tired, obviously we see that when someone has a flu, we also see it when someone lupus, we also see it when they have other forms of rheumatism or things like of course, if the inflammatory load is high, we might see that the quality of their deep sleep is going to be less from the information, from the pain, and just the total amount of repair needed is more. Fibromyalgia, [00:45:00] those cases, or on the psychological side, depression.




Dan Pardi: Yeah, or being sick.

Daniel: Right, but then chronic sleep, meaning you’ve probably got pain signals happening all … Chronic information, you’ve got pain signals all night long and/or you have total physiologic stress and damage happening because tissues are actually affected. [00:47:00] Now, that becomes, this is a chronic versus acute scenario.

Dan Pardi: Yes. Yeah. So you’re right. Going back to exercise, when you … I gave a presentation at [inaudible 00:47:14] a few years ago, and I was talking about the inflammatory response. The presentation was all on why we get fat, and one of the things that I was discussing was the inflammatory response to weight training. What you see is that there is the cytokine interleukin [00:47:30] six is triggered in response to muscle breakdown. That then leads to an inflammatory … Even though that is an inflammatory marker, it leads to the production of an anti-inflammatory marker that affects the brain and has a propitious effect on the functioning of our circuitry.

Additionally, that same sort of thing can happen in promoting sleep. We talked a little bit about this last time, if I remember correctly. Let’s say, getting a little bit of exercise, or getting exercise can be very good for you [00:48:00] as long as that exercise is not a lot more than what you have been doing. That is a moving target as well. If you’re not exercising a lot, then you just need a little bit to then generate that positive effect on sleep, but let’s say you haven’t … Let’s say that you tend to work out but you haven’t worked out for a month, if you go back to doing the amount of exercise that you did before that period off, that alone can be disruptive to your sleep.

It’s just hard to know what’s going to happen, but that’s why we always want to be metering our own efforts to [00:48:30] be healthy, like with exercise or sun exposure, based off of a moment of pause and think, “How much have I been getting recently?” A lot of people don’t do that, that ability to do that is actually a really important healthy [meter 00:48:42], too.



Dan Pardi: Yeah, set yourself back.





They can tolerate running 100 miles in altitude, but that doesn’t necessarily mean they’re healthier. It might actually mean that they’ve curtailed their individual lifespan, so to tie this back, my perspective about what we really need to be healthy is getting these, like you [00:53:00] said, regular, I would say somewhat mild to moderate, exposures that just keep our physiology working well. With that perspective, the it’s actually a lot easier to do it because you’re looking for more of a balanced approach versus trying to have a silver bullet, “Just exercise but I don’t care about my sleep or my physical activity, or my food,” excuse me, but rather that we get a bit of benefit from all these different areas and that that’s our opportunity to do a lot of things well, but each one of them is not that difficult.

Getting out and getting 10 [00:53:30] to 20 minutes of sun exposure every day is doable. It’s got its own challenges but we can do it. What you don’t want to do is go in and then say, “Well, I haven’t gotten exposure to the sun for a month. I’m going to go sit out for four hours.” That’s an analogy.

Daniel: I think a very simple example of athletics is, I don’t think anyone thinks that being a professional NFL athlete is really good for the quality of your life as an older person. When you look at most competitive sports, even Olympics, most gymnasts are going to damage [00:54:00] their joints in the process of doing what they’re doing. Most ballet dancers are going to, and so you recognize that you’re taking a very generalist physiology and hyperspecializing it and that’s going to … You’re going to actually push past the zero-sum capacity at a certain point and start optimizing at the expense of other things.


So chronic [00:55:00] infection that is not coming from an acute, “I’m exercising” or an acute exposure to some infection that my body is going to clear, but I live in a house that has mold and I’m being exposed all the time, or I’m drinking from water bottles that have plastic xenoestrogens and then continuously, or I live in a world where just the VOCs in my paint are continuously creating toxins. Not only is this continuous rather than [temperate 00:55:27] exposure, it’s also exposure to things that were not [00:55:30] in our evolutionary environment and we don’t even have evolved mechanisms to deal with well. I think environmental toxicity and chronic infection, as well as excessive sugar, as well as excessive psychological stress, as well as excessive blue light, there’s a few of these that are just modern health hazards that are not hormetic at all.


Other than the psychological [00:56:30] part, which is also chronic stress that than acute, we’re dealing with a bear thing, I think chronic physiologic and psychologic stressors are like the foundation of almost all of the sleep issues. They might express as apnea or insomnia or bruxism, but they’re actually all from the same underlying set of chronic stressors that we need to address.



Daniel: Yep. There’s a whole group of people that have multiple chemical sensitivities, where the small of perfume, the smell of gasoline, the smell really bothered them and it didn’t used to, and the idea that they just had more total antigen than they could process [00:58:30] and so their systems are getting more sensitive because it’s not processing them, it’s not clearing them well, they’ve pioneered this, [work 00:58:39] with them has pioneered this field of environmental medicine, looking at environmental toxicity as a tier one source of some health issues. I think the key thing is talking about subclinical stuff because what we’re used to thinking about in medicine is acute stuff, meaning acute toxicity.


Dan Pardi: It’s really scary because our world is continuously being populated with these potential intermediaries, [01:00:00] intermediate things that are affecting your health but in a way that is going to lead to diabetes downstream. It’s going to lead to advanced aging. It’s going to lead to alterations in metabolism. It’s going to cause brain fog, and it’s affecting you day by day, but like you said, it’s subclinical. You don’t have a diagnosis to work from. Even then, if you were diagnosed diabetes as a result of these environmental exposures, you’d be [01:00:30] given something that is just trying to address the diabetes itself and not the cause. So it’s difficult.

We think about Wi-Fi, we think about toxins and things that are in our environment, and I think the fact of the matter is there are signals that a lot of stuff does matter, and yet there’s also, there’s hypotheses that we don’t know if it’s going to actually affect us or not. I don’t [01:01:00] know. I’m curious to ask you, Daniel, because you’ve thought a lot about this. What is your strategy in this world where a lot of these things are … How do you address it when you’re not sure what the problem is?

Daniel: Yes. For resources for people who are interested here, and this is obviously, affect sleep. It affects lots of other things. We’re going beyond just the scope of sleep here. When we’re looking at what are the chronic subclinical, [01:01:30] subacute stresses that are non-hormetic, stresses on physiology, that can lead to decreased homeodynamic capacity of the system and chronic illness, when we look at autoimmune disease, there’s not a clear cause. When we look at neurodegenerative disease, when we look at most cancers, there’s not a clear cause. That’s why we don’t have good solutions for them so we say their idiopathic and it’s because they don’t have one cause. They have multiple causes, usually. Each of the causes have [01:02:00] multiple steps in the transform.



I think if people want resources, studying the building biology movement is good [01:03:30] for understanding what makes the actual buildings that you live in/work in healthy for people or not healthy. This is things like you’ve smell that new carpet smell that’s kind of funky or paints or glues or whatever. Well, that kind of funky smell if you’re living in it and sleeping in it isn’t just funky. It’s those, the formaldehyde, the other [inaudible 01:03:51] organic compounds are either neurotoxins, carcinogens or endocrine disruptors. We’ll look at the breast milk of mothers and see [01:04:00] 100 or 200 petrochemicals in nontrivial amounts. That’s a big deal.

So the building biology movement I think is very valuable if I think about our local environment. If I think about the larger environment, there are some places that are just not the best places for people to live. If you are living and working in an industrial and more polluted areas, this is just going to be suboptimal and if you can modulate some parts [01:04:30] of it, which is if we’re spraying chemicals on food that are designed to kill insects that are the most robust fucking creatures that can make it through nuclear holocausts and we’re putting that on our food and then we’re eating it, and whether it’s an herbicide like glyphosate or pesticides, fungicides, those are not things we want to spray on our food. Those are pretty real effects.



When we’re looking … We look at the [metabolomics 01:06:38] to look at metabolic byproducts that indicate what’s happening to the cell, to the cells, and trying them for a toxicity, we can look for toxins directly via a number of different assay methods and in different fluids and in different issues. The field is advancing, but I would say the very best of functional medicine is meaningfully [01:07:00] further ahead than where traditional medicine is in this case. The best where functional medicine is is very different than the best of where [Wu 01:07:11] medicine is, and it’s important to make the distinction. You’ve got like one camp that calls itself evidence-based medicine, but it’s still is pretty much, “There are the pharmaceuticals that work on double-blend placebo-controlled, large multi-location [mice 01:07:25] crossover trials,” but work means yes, the statin lowers low-density lipoprotein. [01:07:30] That’s true.

It might also, though, cause a [hepatotoxicity 01:07:33] in neurotoxins, and whatever else, and it’s not actually addressing why you have high LDL and now you can’t ever get off it because your ability to regulate cholesterol yourself is bad. We call that evidence-based medicine. I would say that that whole field is just so bad at understanding complex systems that it’s like if you have acute illness, go there. Otherwise, that’s really all it does. It’s acute illness. Then you’ve got people who will pay lip service to whole [01:08:00] systems but don’t understand it well, and they’ll just pretty much muscle test you, or kind of intuit what you should do and recommend naturally sounding things, which is probably not going to do very well or cut it either.


Dan Pardi: Yeah. Here’s what I have to offer to this. So for an individual trying to make good decisions in the world to be healthy, if you have something going on that you don’t know the cause of or you don’t but you still are trying to be healthy and not find yourself [01:09:30] in an undesirable situation later, think of heuristics that can guide you through life because they’re very powerful. There’s something called the Commander’s Intent, which you don’t want to hand a military operation a 87-page field guide and say, “All right, do this.” You want them to study that, understand it, but then if you give them win hearts and minds, it is an idea that will [01:10:00] then guide in the diversity of real-life.




Dan Pardi: Yeah. What I like about functional medicine [01:11:30] is that they are more apt to test. It’s not, “Well, we can’t offer you this diagnostic because that doesn’t fit into our sort of cost payment structure,” but rather, “Let’s look at your blood work. Let’s look at your microbiome. Let’s look at a bunch of different things, and let’s do the best that can with the information that we have today.” The problem with that is that you’re right, the best of functional medicine are light years ahead of what sort of care and service you can get elsewhere but within the community, you also might have people that are less skilled. The level of quality … Like any discipline that’s [01:12:00] big. There’s a big quality difference, and then again, at the same time while we do want excellent healthcare providers, we also need to remember that nobody will have more influence over your health across a lifespan than you will by the decisions you make, the knowledge that you know, how you implement that into your life.



There’s a place for you to say, “Oh, this is my body. I need to understand this well enough that I can really take responsibility to even find what kind of doctor to know to ask the right questions, to know if I think they’re good or not.” Of course, you use them as tools but you have to use them as tools [01:14:00] where you take responsibility. You sure at shit cannot expect to do a medical intervention and not address the foundational causes of health and wellness, and have it really work. Empowered responsibility is that you have to learn more and it’s also that you have to apply it, or you have to just be okay with suboptimal life. So there’s a … On one end of the bell curve of medicine is really understanding the causes of complex illness, and we get into now here the deep systems biology functional medicine of [01:14:30] how much is, what kinds of toxins, what kind of infections, within what genetics, within what microbiomics, within what brain scan patterns.



Whether you know that they are now or not, can you get on top of it before an issue happens? How do you then stay engaged? There’s also people that will feel like, “Yeah, I know these things, therefore I’ve got it,” versus, “Well, what has your pattern actually been over the last two years?” [01:17:00] A good example is when I started to work on Dan’s Plan, a very early version, I was commonly speaking about sleep and I would talk about how I was getting 8 hours of sleep per night. When I started to measure my sleep, I realized I was getting like 6 hours and 45 minutes per night. I measured three months and I thought, “Wow. I’m getting less sleep than I claim that I am,” but it’s not that I was lying to the people that I was speaking to when I said I got 8.


Daniel: [inaudible 01:17:45]

Dan Pardi: Yeah. Yeah, exactly.





Dan Pardi: Yes.


Dan Pardi: Yeah.


Dan Pardi: Yeah, so the work looking at whether or not quantification and self-tracking, if it’s helpful, is varied but generally, [01:20:30] since I follow this space closely, we tend to see that these sorts of behavior of tracking can have a favorable effect on long-term outcomes, which are at least long-term by the definition of what that study looked. So you see people walk more, you can see people get more regular sleep, or at least in terms of their sleep timing, and then … Yeah, so those are … We already have indications that engaging with these types [01:21:00] of health behaviors, which I’ll call using a tracker, can actually lead to the behaviors that then get you the results.


What I try to do is aim for complete sleep, which I tend to get about 7 to 7 and a half hours of sleep per night, but I try to be in bed 7 and half to 8 hours per night so that if it tends to be one of those nights where I sleep longer, then I’ve enabled my [01:22:00] body to get that sleep. I also try to go to bed pretty consistently around the same time, and that’s hard. Knowing even what I do it, it’s still, you’re oftentimes making a decision about doing something else that’s fun and missing out in that versus cutting it off and saying, “Hey. There will be more time for that tomorrow.” That is the reality of the challenge once you believe sleep is important and want to attend your own sleep goals.



We [01:23:30] know that the research absolutely supports that. My friend Matt [inaudible 01:23:33], who is a co-author on one of the papers that I published, has done work specifically in that area. What is the influence of physical activity on sleep itself and what is the influence of getting good sleep on your desire or likelihood that you will get physical activity the next day? So there is absolutely this sort of virtuous cycle here where the better you sleep, the more likely you feel like getting physical activity and eating well and then the more likely you’re eating well … The more that you’re eating well and getting physical activity, the better your sleep quality will be. We look at these [01:24:00] things in isolation but we have to then pan out and say, “Okay, they’re all affecting the other.” Yeah. We can talk a little bit about specifics of food on sleep quality too if you’d like.


You’re not creating sugar as much and then you’re feeling more better, and now you’re getting positive feedback on weight loss, muscle tone, increased [01:25:00] capacity. So we obviously want to drive that. One of the things you’re saying is that this exercise help with sleep is profound enough. The behavioral hack that you gave is lower the barrier of entry to exercise so we don’t procrastinate it because if I’ve go to do an hour of training and I’ve got to drive to the gym and etc., then I can put it off. If it’s just, do fucking 5 push-ups, there’s a good chance that I might do 10 while I’m down there. Even if all I did was 5 or 10 push-ups, [01:25:30] I will still sleep better and do better than if I did none because I made it too big a deal.

Dan Pardi: Yeah. I actually feel that In-Tune Training is a skill that people should add to their health practice. It doesn’t mean that you can’t do other forms of exercise that you love that are your hobbies that feel like the right way for you to sort of express physicality in your world. That’s very different for different people, but what In-Tune does is it actually [01:26:00] takes a lot of mental pressure off of having to make that work in your life. Now, you can get into good routines where you’re very consistent with it, but what inspired me to create this was two Stanford wrestlers that I know had independently, one week apart from each other, told me, sort of confiding in me like, “Gosh, I haven’t made it to the gym in a month. I’ve been so busy with work,” now me telling them, “Oh no. Exercise is really important and you should do [01:26:30] it,” that might remind them of what they already know, but it’s not that they aren’t doing it because they don’t believe in its value.




Dan Pardi: Yeah, so humanOS has In-Tune training. It’s over a hundred different workouts. [01:28:00] They’re all approximately the same work volume. They’re not, each workout is not that much, but I do them … I try to, I think about doing them every single day, and then there are days that I miss and I don’t do any reps at all, but my goal is to do at least one rep of one of the exercises every day. The way that I designed it is that it’s balanced across upper body, lower body, posterior [chain 01:28:22] core cardio, and then I gave a value for every rep or every second of every exercise. Then you get feedback about whether or not [01:28:30] the volume of work that you’ve actually done is relative to the Department of Health and Human Service’s weekly exercise recommendations. I keep my exercise volume at or above 100 to 150%. I know that I’m getting good adequate volume of physical activity to help me with things like, just to keep my body healthy, if not necessarily advancing my performance.


Dan Pardi: Totally.





[01:31:30] This is the way that any kind of ideal creates a shadow, creates a vicious cycle into the shadow loop, and so whether this is what is good for us to do spiritually, mentally, emotionally, for my work, for my family, it’s very easy to get into a negative loop on the negative. It’s very important to learn how not to do that. Is it true that eating sugar is bad for me? Yes. Is it true that stressing about eating sugar is bad for me independently [01:32:00] of the sugar? Yes. Are there people who just say, “Fuck it. I don’t care about what I eat. I’m just going to not stress,” and now they are healthier because they are not stressed? Yes, but is the food still affecting their body? Yes.

So it is very easy to have an either/or that’s says, “Fuck it. I’m not going to worry about this because I don’t want the worry,” but physics is still physics, or I’m going to pay attention to the physics but then whenever I don’t think I’m getting enough sleep or water is handed to me out of a plastic bottle, I’m stressing myself out. [01:32:30] There has to be a, “How do I do the best that I can at the physics level and biology of it?” Do that from a really neutral place that doesn’t spin on negatives.

Dan Pardi: Yeah. It’s such an important point. Orthorexia, which is an unhealthy obsession with being healthy, is real thing and that doesn’t necessarily … Try to identify if you have acclivity towards stressing out about being healthy or not doing something that you think is healthy. Failure [01:33:00] is a part of being healthy. You’re going to not do the thing you want to do so many times. It’s how you respond to that, and it also is your pattern, your overall pattern, defined by the fact that didn’t do it, or did you just miss a couple days or you just missed a couple days regularly but still, your overall pattern has a sensible healthy dynamic to it.

That is, that helps you go easy on missing a … not get a good night’s [01:33:30] sleep and not beating yourself up. Eating something that tastes great but you know is not good for you and not feeling bad about yourself. Not exercising for a couple days in a row or getting the amount of physical activity that you want and feeling awful. The nice thing is once you have a good healthy relationship with your body, and you also have a good perspective about how to construct your health pattern day by day, it’s also sort of self-regulating. If you’re like, “I don’t feel that great. I didn’t get enough [01:34:00] sleep because I stayed up late,” or “I didn’t get exercise. I don’t feel that good. I’m going to go out for a walk. I’m going to go do something that I know will immediately put me back in a better frame of mind,” and so go gently. Keep educating, know what matters, think about the determinants of good health according to these different domains: sleep, exercise, food.


Daniel: Just on the psychology element of it, because I think it’s so important and it’s not … Health is just one expression, but almost everywhere somebody sets January 1st goals. Health are usually part of them but there’s a bunch of other ones. Then they fail at it, and then they beat themselves up for it, and then the beating themselves up makes them feel bad so they want to do whatever addictive thing makes them feel better in a hurry, and they [01:35:30] just flail out of it. Then after they’ve done that enough times, they stop wanting to try because they’ve imprinted hopelessness. How does one effectively work towards things is a very deep topic, and the best training I ever got on it was actually in meditation training because it was a simple thing.

In meditation training, someone is given an instruction. They’re going to focus on their breath. They focus on a mantra. They focus on a sensation, whatever it happens to be. It’s fucking hard to hold your focus there, so your mind wanders [01:36:00] and the instruction is generally as soon as you notice that your mind wandered, bring it back to the focus on the breath or the mantra, whatever it is. What’ll happen is after someone’s mind has wandered a bunch of times, then they don’t come back to the breath when they notice it. They go, “What the fuck is wrong with me? Why does my mind wander? Am I ever going to get this meditation thing? Maybe this meditation thing isn’t right. Maybe I’m a fuck up,” which is still their mind wandering.

It’s actually still not being focused on their breath or the mantra, but in a just particularly destructive way, it’s almost [01:36:30] as if they’re trying to do this behavioral psych or motivational psych on themselves. They’re just … It’s kind of like someone fell and instead of getting back up, they just start flailing on the ground beating their arms on the ground. It’s like, “No, no, no. Just get back up,” and so in meditation, it’s so clear. No matter how many times your mind goes somewhere else, analyzing why is never the thing to do. Just come back to the mantra. Once you’ve done that enough, you start being good at being able to hold it. It’s just a new training.

Any beating yourself up or wondering why is just another, not doing what [01:37:00] is here to do. The moment you notice, “I haven’t exercised all week,” all it is is, “Oh, I’m going to do 5 push-ups right now,” not beating myself up about it or make a big plan of how I’ll start exercising forever. Be like, “I just come back to whatever my intention was right now, and now I’m back on track.”


Those abilities are fairly unique to humans, at least no other species [01:38:00] on earth has the robust capacity that we do to do that. As a result, we can aim for health outcomes that we want. “I want to feel really young when I’m 80 years old. I want to perform like I’m 40 to 50. I want to lose weight. I want to …” whatever it might be, “solve this health challenge” to “have this performance benefit.” They tend to sort of … Your source of motivation can be grouped into different things. I either want to get, like I want to optimize who I am [01:38:30] or I’m solving a health challenge or I’m doing this good thing for someone else in my family that I care about. There’s all these different sort of motivations that can make us focus on this.




Dan Pardi: Great.



Daniel: Thank you my friend.

Dan Pardi: Take care.