Episode 128: Boost Your Energy with Better Sleep
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Stress and chronic illness can significantly impact your life, but knowing the science behind it can help you improve your health and well-being.
I'm joined by Dr. Jamie Tartar, a neuroscientist who focuses on stress and sleep, and Julius Thomas, a former NFL player and current PhD student in Psychology.
Together, they explore how sleep and stress influence our performance and overall well-being. Dr. Tartar explains how proper sleep impacts physical and emotional health, while Julius shares insights on maintaining a positive mindset and making small, impactful lifestyle changes.
Learn practical strategies to improve your health and boost your performance by understanding the effects of sleep and stress management. Don’t miss this episode!
Tune into the Fast Metabolism Matters Podcast - Boost Your Energy with Better Sleep with Dr. Jaime Tartar and Julius Thomas.
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Dr. Jaime Tartar is the chair of the Department of Psychology and Neuroscience at Nova Southeastern University (NSU). She co-created the university's neuroscience program and has served as its director since 2015. Dr. Tartar holds a B.S. from NSU, an M.A. from Florida Atlantic University, and a Ph.D. in Behavioral Neuroscience from the University of Florida. Her postdoctoral training at Harvard Medical School focused on sleep neurobiology. She is also the president of the Society for NeuroSports, which bridges exercise science and neuroscience.
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/jaime-tartar-1545889/
Julius Thomas is a former NFL player who transitioned to a career in psychology. He is currently a pre-doctoral psychology student focusing on mental health and wellness. Thomas's interest in psychology was sparked by his experiences as a professional athlete, leading him to explore the psychological aspects of athlete performance and mental health. He is involved in research and internships to deepen his understanding of psychological practices. Additionally, Julius is a member of the Association for Applied Sport Psychology (AASP) and is dedicated to raising awareness about mental health issues, particularly within the sports community.
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/julius-thomas-m-s-95aaa9182/
Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/julius_thomas/
Twitter: https://twitter.com/Julius_Thomas
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/JuliusThomas80
Transcript Below:
Haylie Pomroy: I'm Haylie Pomroy, #1 New York Times bestselling author and the Assistant Director of the Integrative Medicine Program at the Institute for Neuro-Immune Medicine. Today, we're going to talk a lot about optimal performance, about sleep, and about the biology of stress. Things that I'm sure are affecting each and every one of you. But in order to do that, I have 2 very special guests. First, I'd like to introduce Jaime Tartar. Dr. Tartar, you are a PhD here at Nova Southeastern University. You're the department chair of psychology and neurosciences. You're a neuroscientist that studies a lot of the biology of stress and sleep. Jamie, thank you so much for being here with me today.
Dr. Jamie Tartar: Thanks for having me. Excited to be here.
Haylie Pomroy: I'm so happy that you're here. It's not just the two of us today. We also have Julius Thomas. Julius, you have a master's in psychology and a doctorate in psychology. I love that I'm talking to you guys like I'm telling you all about yourselves. I'm telling our community how cool all of this is and then I'm just really excited to get to spend this time together. You are a lifelong athlete, a former NFL athlete, and your focus is really on optimal performance of the body.
Julius Thomas: I'm not a doctor yet. I'm working on it. I’ll start my pre-doctoral internship this fall, I'm 6 years into the program, but can't wait to be one day. My focus is really on understanding the connection between the mind and the body and thinking about health and well-being from a prevention and a performance perspective, as opposed to just a clinical one, because I think it gives a lot of insights and it helps people wake up and be able to do more of what they enjoy and with the people they enjoy doing things with.
Haylie Pomroy: That's amazing. You're taking that passion and your goal in your plan is to go into a doctoral program?
Julius Thomas: No, I'm already in one. I got my master's degree in room, that’s what they call it. I'm almost done. I have 2000 clinical hours just to finish and then I get my stamp and I could be Dr. Thomas.
Haylie Pomroy: That's amazing. That's exciting. I'm inspired. As you know I'm in the middle of the PhD program here at the Institute for Neuro-Immune Medicine and it's just such a rewarding process in itself, but especially when it's things that we're super passionate about. Dr. Tartar, I want to start with you for just a moment. I know that you're the department chair, but can you just give me a little bit of background about how you got into this space, and what motivated you into this passion?
Dr. Jamie Tartar: Actually, I'm a little bit weird for a neuroscientist, as you probably know, because I'm a neuroscientist that studies humans as a model for humans, which people may not realize how scientists use rodent models. The good thing about rodents is we're allowed to take out their brains and look at them. And when you try to do that in humans, all kinds of terrible things happen to you. Generally frowned upon.
Haylie Pomroy: A little bit, a little bit.
Dr. Jamie Tartar: I've always been interested in what makes humans behave the way they do, what makes humans tick, and understanding human behavior. But I'm not very creative so I really needed a dissected biological level of what makes humans tick. For me, really understanding the nuances of stress and sleep just makes so much sense. These two things really impact each other. It's what most of us as modern humans are really struggling with. And actually, since I met Julius, it was really around the time that I started getting really interested in human performance, which I think evolves naturally from that stress and sleep space. We actually met coincidentally and it was right around the time where I started talking to another friend of ours about this interest in sports performance, and then we coincidentally met. Sometimes you meet someone, you're like, “Hey! I think I already know you.” And so it was just perfect timing. We started doing some of the sports neuroscience research together and that's been super duper exciting.
Haylie Pomroy: I love that. And it's so weird because someone said the other day to me that sleep is free. It can't be bottled. It can't be really prescribed. Although I think with some of those sleep study tests, there are people that are starting to get the prescription or write down or at least have some idea of what they should strive to for stress. And Dr. Klimas, we're talking about this the other day with the ME/CFS patients, that if we could master sleep or we could at least put the priority on sleep that it deserves, we could probably eradicate 60% of the diseases that people are dealing with. It blew my mind because I thought when they said about the brain detoxes during sleep and all of these things that blood sugar regulates. Talk to me a little bit about, I want to jump into stress, but I want to talk about sleep both in the fatigue or the diseased body, and then I want to talk about sleep from an optimal performance perspective, just to throw that out there.
Julius Thomas: Before we talk and jump on sleep, I really wanted to talk about what you just said, because I think it's an important thing to stress. I've read research that shows, with healthy lifestyle behaviors, we can reduce or prevent up to 80% of chronic illnesses and diseases. When I saw that research, I was like, wait, why am I doing so much clinical stuff if this is going to be so good at helping people to live better lives? And I just really wanted to emphasize that for the listeners, because when you understand the value of healthy lifestyle behaviors, it gives you that extra little incentive to do the behaviors that are going to make a big difference for your health and well-being in the long run.
Haylie Pomroy: What you just said is profound. And you doubled down on the thought and I just want to punctuate that for our listeners here for a second. Also, the practitioner has to endorse that. I had a client the other day that came back and they said, they want me on these medications and they don't want me to eat tomatoes or something. And I said, did they also say to cut out, Kentucky Fried Chicken, McDonald's, diet sodas, and get some rest? No. They just said sometimes people that have some inflammation shouldn't eat tomatoes. I just want to put huge billboards, put it out there, and implore our frontline practitioners to value that, to value it. I'm with you 152,000,000%. And so we're going to jump into sleep. We're going to solo it just a little bit because, lifestyle we could go down all kinds of things stress reduction, food if we just talk about sleep and what happens biologically in the body when we don't have sleep or why do we need sleep. I'm convinced I'm one of those genetic people that only need 5 hours, by the way. 6 and I’m on fire. I try really hard, I force myself to sleep more, but I want to learn more about it.
Dr. Jamie Tartar: Just like there are some people walking around, they're 7 feet tall. The genes that we inherit from our parents mostly determine the sleep duration that we need. But you'd be super lucky it is probably the statistics, like being 7 feet tall. But there are some people that don't need as much sleep as other people. For most of us average human beings, we say 7 to 9 on average, hitting around 8. But if we think about, humans have been on Earth for about 300,000 years. If we look at hunter-gatherer populations as a lens into how much sleep we need, they're sleeping around, 8 hours a night. Think about what our lifestyle has been like for most of human existence. And sleep is pretty dangerous for most organisms on Earth. Sleep is a dangerous time, really vulnerable. You're vulnerable to predation. You're not hunting. You're not mating, you’re not doing all these fun things that you could be doing. We didn't need 8 hours of sleep. This would be the stupidest thing that evolution ever did, would be to put you down and make you vulnerable for one-third of your life.
Haylie Pomroy: It's not a luxury or else we wouldn't do it.
Dr. Jamie Tartar: It's non-negotiable. You can't train yourself to sleep less. You can't practice sleeping five hours a night and get good at it. The amount of sleep you need is it's just really biologically determined. But on the other side of that, sort of recognizing, it's not a waste of time either. We're spending a third of our life doing it. What happens when you sleep? Only good things happen to your body and brain when you sleep. By the brain of the brain or the brain, we were just saying at lunch yesterday, that you wouldn't, if you think about the idea you had mentioned cleaning your brain, sleep is the optimal time to do that. And in order to really clean your brain, you have to shut it down. You don't change the oil in your car when your engine's running. You don't do that more than once. You really need time to shut the brain down. If you look at the brain, the matter of the brain, that changes in such a way that you can really clean out some of those toxic metabolic waste products. Other things happen to you and one of my good friends and I'll steal his turn of phrase. Actually, I think we're friends, he wouldn't think we're friends. But he likes to say that, sleep is a Swiss army knife of health. And I agree with that. There's anything wrong with you, good sleep will make it better. Anything that you want to improve, good sleep will improve it. Certainly, brain cleaning we can look at memory consolidation, happens during sleep. Emotion processing, if you want to be emotionally well you have to sleep. Really that comes in that second part of the night's sleep. The second part really focuses on emotional wellness and emotional processing. For those of us that are in the sports performance world, if you want to release testosterone, you sleep between 6 and 8 hours, you can double the amount of testosterone you release. For your muscle gains, human performance sleep is magical. It's one of the best performance mechanisms on the planet. I'm selling sleep. I don't get any kickback from big sleep.
Haylie Pomroy: I'm completely sponsored by sleep. Sometimes, and I'm guilty of this, I feel like sleep is a waste of time. I've so much that I want to do in life and there's never enough hours in the day. When you tell me that sleep is never a waste of time, my shoulders relax a little bit. You just gave me permission to go hard, do it big. But now you just gave me all the benefits of it. Now I want to be like a world-class sleeper, I really do. I also recognize in what you just said, that a lot of the things that you can achieve during sleep, you cannot achieve during wake, times of being awake. It's not possible. It's not like I could get it when I sleep, but I might as well go ahead and grab it while I'm awake. It's not possible. It's not physiologically possible. A couple of things you just said like creating balance with emotionality. I always loved that time before, the really high I was, I don't know very much about sleep, except for I always thought it was a little bit of a waste of time. My mom she'd have to literally put her fingers over my eyes. I've been that way all my life. As I've aged, I've realized that I had to better care for myself. When I was diagnosed with an autoimmune disorder, it was one thing that my doctor did. My rheumatologist just kept saying, you've got to manage your sleep. You've got to manage your sleep. Life is going to happen whether you're asleep or awake. You've got to manage to sleep. That time, that second half. Why is that so special?
Dr. Jamie Tartar: That's really one of the reasons why we want to focus on sleep continuity because when we're in the first part of the night's sleep, we're getting a lot more deep sleep. And that's where a lot of the memory consolidation, that brain cleaning happens. But as we get closer to morning, we spend more time in REM sleep. This is where we have those vivid, scary, bizarre like you're on a dinosaur, your third-grade teacher’s there, you’re carrying cheese.
Haylie Pomroy: And you forgot your slippers.
Dr. Jamie Tartar: Yeah. Just really bizarre dreams. And they may seem silly, but your brain does something gentle, it scares you, it paralyzes you during this time, but it also decreases adrenaline or epinephrine levels so you don't feel the same fear, and you get to play out emotional processes during sleep. And when we take that REM sleep, that rapid eye movement sleep away from people, we do see daytime emotion dysfunction. If you add all those REM sleepouts together, in most people that adds up to about 90 minutes. Your body's willing to paralyze you and scare you 90 minutes a day just to make sure that you are emotionally well.
Haylie Pomroy: Wow! That's profound. That's big. I'm sure everybody's listening to it going. Julius, when you're looking at optimal performance and you're running or lifting weights or talking about nutrition to individuals, how important is sleep in that prescription?
Dr. Jamie Tartar: He has to say important.
Julius Thomas: I've got this amazing job and role that I have of getting to work with some of the most elite organizations and teams and high performers, and teaching them the intricacies of mental performance and habit building and how to structure your day. But I never forget to tell them that the 3 most important things that you can do for yourself are to exercise, sleep, and have a healthy diet. I mean, if you're able to just nail that, how far you will be down the road of optimal performance or preventative well-being is crazy. Some more stats and data because I love to share these things. It can be alarming. Heartening, though, because there's only 3% of the US population that gets the recommended physical exercise, sleep nutrition, stress management, and healthy substance use. 3% of people are getting the foundational basics right. I always stress the basics. Sleep is so important. Some of the things that I really grabbed onto about sleep, especially when you start to understand the lymphatic system, and I know JT could talk more about that, but once I started to realize that we have these brain flushes that are happening while we’re sleeping, I just started to have this visual of New York City and, and I don't know about you guys would ever go to New York City. I find it strange because I'm from California and, we're environmentally friendly-ish, and they would throw the garbage on the sidewalks.
Haylie Pomroy: Yes, in the bags and sometimes split open.
Julius Thomas: Yeah and then the rats the size of raccoons and they're surviving on garbage bags. But what was very interesting is they collect the trash in the middle of the night in New York, and which is very different for me because here in Florida or in California, they always come pick up the trash in the mornings. But then it started to really click, this is what's happening when you're asleep. They're too busy, there are too many cars on the road to be wasting time sending trash trucks to go pick up all the byproducts from the bazillion people in Manhattan. But your brain's the same way, as we've produced byproducts from whatever we're doing cognitively throughout the day, our brain doesn't have the time to clean it out while we're on the job. When we're sleeping, it's almost like the street sweepers are going through and they're cleaning up our brains and helping sustain the neurons. That's one of the things that I always think about and one of the visuals that I keep in my mind that makes me get in bed and try to get my 7 hours
Haylie Pomroy: I like that you said seven, it makes me feel better. Cheat the system a little bit. I work really do work really hard to do that. I want to jump for a second. We talk about sleep hygiene. We talk about ways to induce sleep, ways to help our bodies because sometimes it's a little easier said than done. You need sleep, some people can't sleep. Here at INIM, would you say 30%? The other day I was flying and I was lucky enough to have, what I call the sleepy seats that go lay down all the way. And the stewardess came over and she said, you lay down as we were going down the runway and you never moved until I came and had to tell you. I could sleep anywhere, which is great. I've always said, I'm very lucky that way. But at the institute, we talk about people that have ME/CFS or chronic inflammatory disorders or Long COVID. If we can get their sleep mastered, every medication or therapy is going to be more effective. And I love your analogy about street sweeping because that is something that visually is going to stick with all of us, I'm sure. When a person can't sleep or they have insomnia, do we just go in a multi-pronged approach? Or do we just go, well, let's work on everything else and hope that somehow manifests itself? Or what are you seeing that can make the biggest impact on insomnia?
Dr. Jamie Tartar: A lot of people suffer from insomnia, and a lot of people have difficulty going to sleep. We see all these things happen when you sleep. You clean your brain, not in a way to scare people. For me, I sleep pretty well. But importantly, I'm getting it right most of the time. I don't get it right every night and that's okay. Getting it right most of the time is sort of good enough for sleep. But when people are getting it wrong, most of the time, they're having difficulty sleeping. A lot of people just sort of live their lives, and we don't really think of sleep as health. I'm a big baby, if my chest started hurting, I'd be at the cardiologist right away. I have chronic migraines. I bet your bottom dollar I'd be at the neurologist. A lot of times we spend years struggling with sleep and we don't think about this as health and we don't think about that’s treatable. Really importantly, many sleep disorders are treatable. Nobody should be walking around with excessive daytime sleepiness that hasn't been evaluated. Nobody should be having chronic insomnia that hasn't been evaluated. And the good news is because, I could say you can't sleep too bad, it's a lifelong problem. But we're not. Insomnia is extremely treatable.
Haylie Pomroy: Take the time to recognize it. Take the time to get an adequate workup. We are philosophies, in the nutrition space, we feed for sleep, we feed for fitness, we feed for energy, we feed for libido, we feed for stress reduction. Every single thing we do is nutrient-dependent. And sleep is actually a very nutrient-dependent event also. It's interesting that we lose all our weight while we sleep. To your point, we boost our testosterone when we sleep, we get our cortisol surge 30 minutes after we wake. There's a lot that's going on in the endocrine system and in systems in general and it's all nutrient-dependent. I'm a big feed for sleep. I'm gonna jump into stress for a second because we can make efforts towards sleep. I really do think it's some of the neurocognitive space, in my opinion, that's pushing to the forefront the importance of sleep. When we're seeing lack of sleep with things like Alzheimer's, with cognitive issues, I think people are afraid of that being their destiny. They're taking sleep a little more seriously. I don't know if you guys are seeing that.
Julius Thomas: Accidents, cognitive performance. All these things are so related to sleep. I had a talk yesterday and I was talking about, pilots. The culture used to be fly hundreds of people around the country as much as you can, work as long as you can. And then I think the FAA wanted to review what leads to plane crashes and they started to see the sleepiness. Now they started to control how many hours…
Haylie Pomroy: Just because you’re willing to not sleep for 4 days doesn't mean you should be driving a plane. In Southern California, have you seen the billboards that say “Sleepy driving is as bad as drunk driving”? I was driving back from Vegas the other day and I saw those all over the road. Valid. Good. I love that.
Julius Thomas: There are a ton of accidents per year caused by sleepy driving.
Haylie Pomroy: Absolutely. When we talk about performance and peak performance, and you're looking or assessing an individual, do you do these quadrants like what's your sleep like? What's your stress like? How's your psyche, your belief system, your value system? Talk to me a little bit about some of that.
Julius Thomas: That's a great question. One of the things that that I think about when I assess someone's performance is I always say the foundation of your performance is your well-being. I used to always think that well-being was an add-on to performance. They had the bad habit of saying performance and well-being. And then I've actually changed it in the work I've been doing with my company. And I say performance plus well-being because I don't want it to be an end. It took me a long time of sitting in clinical classes to have my “Aha!” moment. My “Aha!” moment was when I was a professional athlete and all the professional athletes in the world, they had this lead-up to season. And the lead-up to season is essentially trying to get as healthy as possible, is physically resilient or strong, and well-conditioned as possible, to be able to make it through the rigors of a season. Then I thought, we were really just maximizing our well-being so that we can then perform. If you think about an athlete, what's one of the worst things that can happen is you get injured. If you get injured, you can't play, your performance drops. Now one of my passions is to teach people in other spaces, people that are everyday workers or corporate professionals, that your performance sits on the foundation of your well-being. We have to make sure that you're doing the basics, are you exercising? Are you sleeping? Are you eating well? Are you reducing your stress? Are you managing or having healthy substance use? Okay, you're doing that, now we can start to talk about, what’s your mindset. What are your goal-setting strategies? How are you pursuing the things that are important to you? Do you have the right network and mentors and all the other stuff? The smaller details. But the well-being is truly the foundation of performance.
Haylie Pomroy: What do you do when people say that they can't address their stress?
Julius Thomas: That's a very interesting question because I've never heard a person say they can't address it. Every single time I've spoken of stress, people go, “ Yeah. I just thought that no I haven't been doing it. It's my kid.” And what they have going on or my job, work-related stress is one of the most significant well-being challenges that we experience in especially Western cultures. Most people are so happy that I mentioned stress and then they immediately want to talk about their stressors. And I'm like, yes, they're doing the first deal.
Haylie Pomroy: I love what you just said. That's the first step, is acknowledging it and talking about it. I feel like I do brilliant people in front of me. They're going to help me explain this. I know there's talk therapy, but why does it help to talk about it? Is it a reflection? Does it get reflected back to you in a different way? Is it organized differently when it comes out of your head and through your mouth? Sometimes when people like, when you call your girlfriend or your mom. I call my mom all the time and I talk to her process and I don't feel like I dumped on it she's holding it and carrying it down the street now, but it's like there's such a relief. Why? What happens in the brain?
Julius Thomas: One of the things that I think we overlook often time as people is the value of social support. I'm not exactly sure from an evolutionary psychological perspective, but something about us being mammals and social animals, there is so much value in coping through social support, and it just has a profound effect on reducing a lot of the emotional load that we experience. But I also think there's a component of just processing. One of the things we do in a therapeutic environment is process with the person. Just talk about what it's like. One of the valuable things that if you get really skilled at it, is you start to mentally frame things. Right. For me, mentally framing is just accepting your circumstances as they are and then thinking about it in a way that's not this is going to be the end of me and starting to reduce maybe that catastrophizing, but then you get this opportunity to insert the mindset that you have that helps you be positive and effective. You start from accepting it and then you move into, what's a positive way I can look at this? And I think that that often happens when we have good conversations. Sometimes you can have your bad friend that you call and they double down on it.
Haylie Pomroy: They say they'll post the bail money. No, not those.
Julius Thomas: They'll maybe say things like, just tell me where to hide the body.
Dr. Jamie Tartar: We do know that talking about stress and thinking about it, it's a sort of a double-edged sword. It could be helpful, but it's not always helpful.
Haylie Pomroy: Being here at the institute, our purpose for doing the podcast was to give people, hope when they're struggling and really some tangible things to help them some tools, some labs to run, some doctors to see, some lifestyle modification that they can do. But one really critical thing, when an individual struggling, is to keep a positive mindset. I feel like sometimes again, that's easier said than done. And I would love both of your perspectives on. One, what's the importance of it? You telling me that sleep is never time wasted. What amazing and cool things I can achieve while I sleep that I can never achieve while I'm awake. I want to be a sleeping overachiever now. What about mindset? Why is it important? Besides, like if you're grumpy or I'm grumpy, I might impact my family, my loved ones, my colleagues' lives negatively. How does it reflect on my own personal person?
Dr. Jamie Tartar: I think we may have different things to say here from our different backgrounds. I think one of the things that we want to recognize with sort of this and to your point about your background being grumpy and being on your family is you give yourself a little bit of grace, in that regard that, your brain is not always nice to you. Your brain has only one job, the only thing your brain needs to do is keep you alive. And it doesn't care if you're happy while it's doing that. The job of a brain isn't to make you happy. The job of the brain is to keep you alive sometimes despite your happiness. Our human brains are really hard-wired to pay attention to negative information over all other information because this kept our ancestors alive. If you imagine generations back, your early ancestors walk down a pathway. And the bushes were moving around and they thought, oh my God, it's a cute little bunny. My day is going to be so great and it was a tiger and they died. The army ancestors must have walked down that path and then, oh my goodness, it's probably a tiger. And then whether it was a tiger or a bunny, there's a survival advantage to being ready for bad things to happen.
Haylie Pomroy: At least you're prepared.
Dr. Jamie Tartar: All of our brains are ready, they’re really little prediction machines and they prepare for negative things. And they and we ruminate very easily. And we think about negative thoughts very easily. And that's the bad news. The good news is that there isn't plasticity there available to us. By doing things like what we were talking about before the episode, we know, you know through a lot of really cool new neuroscience research, the neuroscience of gratitude, and the neuroscience of just basically if you spend time with and it sounds sort of hippie-dippy, but there's so much good science behind this, practicing loving kindness moments, they’re so important. And fostering and valuing those meaningful social connections. I was really lucky I got to have lunch with Julius. He’s actually one of my good friends. At the end of that lunch, I just felt so much gratitude for having that friend and for having that moment and knowing that I've got this person I can always talk to, and I trust him, and we've got a great friendship. And what we don't do well is savor that moment. If I'm in my car on the way home, I just want to savor and take a moment to think about that and appreciate that. And we don't do that easily. We don't do it readily. But by practicing these moments, we can change our mindset and slowly change our brain, and change our way of thinking.
Haylie Pomroy: I appreciate you saying that they’re moments and also that we are hardwired and probably for just cause to be aware of potential harm and also to savor that, to let it grow roots sink in and create more from it.
Dr. Jamie Tartar: Savoring the good moments.
Haylie Pomroy: I'm making my own personal list of homework. I really appreciate what you just said about that one, savoring it, and then also just, seizing that moment in and in performance, I love that we saw, I just remember even when I was a kid watching sports psychology. Visualizing it going into the basket, and also like when you see people break barriers, the Boston Marathon was never run at this particular speed, but then once one person does and the belief system that it can happen, you see so many other people do it. I don't think it's just that everybody got faster on the day that one person broke that time record. I think that everybody believed that they could be faster.
Dr. Jamie Tartar: I really believed I could run a 5-minute mile and it didn't happen.
Haylie Pomroy: Maybe you can, we just need to alter the clock. You don't need to be double-time, the time needs to be double time. What do you teach people when they're looking at optimal performance? When they're looking at maximizing their passions in their life experiences about mindset.
Julius Thomas: One of the things I try to help people understand and I try to encourage them on, is that mindset is ultimately a choice. It doesn't mean that the choice is always going to be under easy conditions. There are all sorts of conditions. And especially when we're talking to patients or people with chronic conditions that have created disabilities or a decrease in activities of daily living. These are really hard. And under the hard circumstances, it makes it so much harder to choose positive outlooks, to choose optimism. But the patients that do the best, are the ones that are able to choose optimism and to choose to have a positive outlook. And I'll tell two stories because they're very core and they they taught me so much. Sometimes your patients are the ones that teach you. And people oftentimes ask me about mindset, and they think that athletes have the best mindsets in the world. I'm like, yeah, in some ways. But the greatest mental performance, the mental performers are the ones that I saw in the hospital, sometimes. There's a patient I had who was about late 50s, an older male that had a terminal cancer diagnosis and when I first came to see him in the hospital, he was extremely sad about his cancer diagnosis. And I thought he was sad about his life is going to end within a year time period. But he was really sad that he wasn't going to be able to be there for his children. He had two sons, and that was making him most sad. So we sat down one day and I asked him, if your sons are what's so important to you, how should you live with the time you have left? One of the things he said was if I was living in a way to be there for them, I would go back to doing the things that we really like to do together. I said, what are those things? We love having pizza nights together. We love watching whatever movies they watch. And then I asked him, can you make the choice to do that with them? And to do that with a positive spirit, knowing how much it will mean for them? And he ultimately said, absolutely. And you saw a profound switch happen. And then in that moment, I learned mindset is actually a choice. And it doesn't mean that I can make the conditions less tragic or sad or hard, but what he found was a reason why he could choose his joy, his optimism, and that's what I saw patients do. I mean, another patient I had, she was 20 years old and she was paraplegic. I’ll never forget this, she was sitting in a wheelchair and there's like a ring around because her head could not go too far the other way. I was doing her intake interview and she was smiling throughout the interview. I stopped her. I said I need to know right now, how are you smiling? Because I can tell you, I've seen a lot of patients and to be 20 years old, paraplegic, how are you smiling? And she said I have so much to be grateful for. I have such an amazing family and I have a sister that loves me. And then at that moment, I recognized again, it's not your circumstances that define your mood, it's what you choose. I'm not saying it's easy, but it's a choice. I remember asking her, I said, so why did you check yourself into the hospital? Because she was a person that she didn't have to go to the hospital. She came to the hospital and she said, I will be happy if I can get the goal of transferring myself from my wheelchair to the bed. If I can do that, that would be the most amazing thing. What I recognized in myself is I need to shift my perspective. Look what she's willing to see as happy and worthwhile and fulfilling. What she did was she took something that I would have took it for granted and said, this is my goal, and this would make me feel amazing. But now we all have this opportunity, no matter what our circumstance is. She taught me. I didn't teach her anything. She taught me that you can choose to be happy, and you can choose to be extremely grateful for the smallest things. Those are the lessons that I'll never forget. When I go talk to other high performers, I remind them that this is a choice, I have to find the reasons to enjoy the life we have and we can.
Haylie Pomroy: I love that you that it can be episodic, too. Sometimes I think that people feel like if they can't be happy 24/7, then why put in the effort? We say 10 minutes of gratitude, 10 minutes of attitude, meaning, gratitude listing like she did. I'm so grateful for my family, for my friends, for my children. And then ten minutes of how can I manifest that gratitude in action? And if that's all you can manifest in a day, that's okay. That can shift so much in your life. That's awesome and amazing. One of the reasons why I wanted to have you on is again, my goal is to get people that are providing care to people that are dealing with chronic disease and illness to understand the magnitude of impact that sleep and stress reduction and mindset and lifestyle modification can make in health. And when you said 80%, it's like, could you imagine would be a miracle drug if we could bottle it and put in a pill and take it eight times a day or whatever? A patch or an injection, it doesn't matter. But if we can get that anchored and grounded in our healthcare system, that would be amazing, but all the changes in healthcare come from the patient. They come from the consumer of healthcare. They come from the consumer of wellness. They come from the consumer fitness. The louder and the more impact that they make on changes. How can people engage with you guys? I know that both of you work in the nonprofit space. Are there any organizations that they can support or look into? We will put all the social media handles on here so people can follow you. That would be really cool. We'll make sure that we connect digitally, on all of our platforms. Are there any particular organizations that you're working with that we can look into or support or be involved with?
Dr. Jamie Tartar: I run a nonprofit organization, it's called the Society for Sports Neuroscience. We're going to have a conference here at NSU in early February 2025. I would love for you to come and maybe be a speaker. It's a great space. Julius is on our advisory board.
Julius Thomas: I'm the VP now.
Haylie Pomroy: I just want to be your friend. I know you want to drive away from lunch with you and anchor in the gratitude of being together.
Dr. Jamie Tartar: The people that helped get the organization started. At each conference, we have a lot of talks that are focused on these themes for optimal performance. It's not just about athletes, it's performance for everybody. We're @societyforsportsneuroscience on Instagram.
Haylie Pomroy: I appreciate you saying that. And I was saying earlier, I think before we jumped on, this month names 30 years of clinical practice and I did work and have worked in the high-performance sports athlete, high performance in front of the camera, I learned so much about individuals that expected and there was a monetary gain, quite frankly, with maximizing their ATP production or hormone production that I was able to apply in my own space with an autoimmune disorder or in chronic viral activation or long hauler. Because if you can see a body be maximized and you can see this vast difference that happens when you maximize that body, you know that there's plasticity, there's adaptability in the human body. And so if we're not well we can change and we can change that. And how.
Dr. Jamie Tartar: I think he has an organization that works on that too.
Haylie Pomroy: Share that with me.
Julius Thomas: I started a company called Optimal Performance with the goal of maximizing individual performance and well-being and team performance and well-being and the way that I try to do that is through evidence-based scientific practices. JT knows that this is one of my gripes. And I'm going to say it this way here on this podcast. First, your favorite influencer can kill you. What I'm what I mean by that is, we as practitioners, have to continue to do what you're doing with this podcast, we have to wander off into the social, in the content-producing space so that we can provide high-quality evidence-based information. That is one of the founding principles of Optimal Performance is, I want to be a voice and a trusted source of content that people can consume, that want to perform better mentally. They want to have preventative wellness. They want to have stronger relationships that want to be able to achieve the goals that they set for themselves. Push a little bit harder, find something inside of them that they can connect to that gives them the motivation to take more pain or to take on the challenges of life. That is my big emphasis and focus, and it's really my mission to make sure that I continue to do that because you said that people need hope.
Haylie Pomroy: People need help and people need hope.
Julius Thomas: And I can't help but understand how many people need hope. I know from working with patients in some really rough conditions, how hard it is to have hope, and sometimes hope must be borrowed. Sometimes you cannot manufacture your own hope. But the thing about hope is you can borrow it from somebody, the right person.
Haylie Pomroy: That believes in you.
Julius Thomas: I want to give people hope and I want people to know that they can improve whatever their baseline is, it's always different. A lot of times I work with the best performers in the world and try to push them to improve. But like you said, it's all a spectrum. The same thing was when I had an amputee patient and I had to give them hope that they can do life minus that limb and push them to go to their rehab and improve.
Haylie Pomroy: I shared with you before I was on my way to vet school. I was diagnosed with an immune disorder. I was put on Mepron, immuran, 60-80mg of prednisone a day until I started to lose function in my right kidney. I had to find a different way. I was able to have phenomenal success. I haven't been on medication since my early 20s, which is amazing for me. And I had a client that was working towards her own health and victory. She’s diagnosed with Dermatomyositis. And she said, do you really think I can get better? And I said, why can I and not you? Of course, you can. Of course, I believe that. I'm going, oh my gosh, I hope this works. I was willing to let her borrow that. We do a lot of patient advocacy and when we talk about mind shift set, I always tell the patients that they're the consumer, and I want them to have the mind shift that says, show me what evidence-based protocols we can implement. Teach me, I need to learn more about my body, and I need to be more educated about my body than anybody that spends 7 or even 3 hours with me every day. And then watch me. Let's make sure that there's a protocol for progress and we're going in a forward movement towards wellness. And that shows me, teach me, watch me is evidence-based, and I am the most valuable person in the room, teach me, not you're the smartest person in the room. Dispense your wisdom upon me so that I can invoke it and embrace it within my body and then watch me get well. Mindset in the patient, mindset in the performer. We're all performing every day, even when we sleep. It sounds like, thanks a lot. Now I'm going to be an overachiever sleeper, I appreciate that. I just want to thank you guys so much for coming out here and talking to our community. And please, can I have you back? We could go another 3 hours, but I know the average listen time doesn't go that far, so I'd like to have you back. We can talk about more things if you will. I would really love that. And I know our community's going to have a ton of questions, we'll be able to get together and answer some of those, please.
Julius Thomas: We'll trade you. You're going to come over to the Sports Neuroscience conference. We will ask you to bring in other people that are motivated and more about human optimization, really.
Dr. Jamie Tartar: Because I think we both feel like, as scientists, there's an onus on us to do a better job of bringing information, people stop just looking to each other.
Haylie Pomroy: Some of it sometimes feels selfish and some of it sometimes maybe, like you said, borrowing that hope from other people. Throughout my life, I have to feel like I didn't go what I went through for no reason. And my goal is to shorten the gap for other people. Shorten that gap, limit the struggle, and learn from my massive mistakes and hopefully some of the gems of what I've gained along the way and give them access to people like you, it's really, really important. Thank you so much, I appreciate it. We'll talk again soon.
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Stress and chronic illness can significantly impact your life, but knowing the science behind it can help you improve your health and well-being.
I'm joined by Dr. Jamie Tartar, a neuroscientist who focuses on stress and sleep, and Julius Thomas, a former NFL player and current PhD student in Psychology.
Together, they explore how sleep and stress influence our performance and overall well-being. Dr. Tartar explains how proper sleep impacts physical and emotional health, while Julius shares insights on maintaining a positive mindset and making small, impactful lifestyle changes.
Learn practical strategies to improve your health and boost your performance by understanding the effects of sleep and stress management. Don’t miss this episode!
Tune into the Fast Metabolism Matters Podcast - Boost Your Energy with Better Sleep with Dr. Jaime Tartar and Julius Thomas.
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Dr. Jaime Tartar is the chair of the Department of Psychology and Neuroscience at Nova Southeastern University (NSU). She co-created the university's neuroscience program and has served as its director since 2015. Dr. Tartar holds a B.S. from NSU, an M.A. from Florida Atlantic University, and a Ph.D. in Behavioral Neuroscience from the University of Florida. Her postdoctoral training at Harvard Medical School focused on sleep neurobiology. She is also the president of the Society for NeuroSports, which bridges exercise science and neuroscience.
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/jaime-tartar-1545889/
Julius Thomas is a former NFL player who transitioned to a career in psychology. He is currently a pre-doctoral psychology student focusing on mental health and wellness. Thomas's interest in psychology was sparked by his experiences as a professional athlete, leading him to explore the psychological aspects of athlete performance and mental health. He is involved in research and internships to deepen his understanding of psychological practices. Additionally, Julius is a member of the Association for Applied Sport Psychology (AASP) and is dedicated to raising awareness about mental health issues, particularly within the sports community.
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/julius-thomas-m-s-95aaa9182/
Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/julius_thomas/
Twitter: https://twitter.com/Julius_Thomas
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/JuliusThomas80
Transcript Below:
Haylie Pomroy: I'm Haylie Pomroy, #1 New York Times bestselling author and the Assistant Director of the Integrative Medicine Program at the Institute for Neuro-Immune Medicine. Today, we're going to talk a lot about optimal performance, about sleep, and about the biology of stress. Things that I'm sure are affecting each and every one of you. But in order to do that, I have 2 very special guests. First, I'd like to introduce Jaime Tartar. Dr. Tartar, you are a PhD here at Nova Southeastern University. You're the department chair of psychology and neurosciences. You're a neuroscientist that studies a lot of the biology of stress and sleep. Jamie, thank you so much for being here with me today.
Dr. Jamie Tartar: Thanks for having me. Excited to be here.
Haylie Pomroy: I'm so happy that you're here. It's not just the two of us today. We also have Julius Thomas. Julius, you have a master's in psychology and a doctorate in psychology. I love that I'm talking to you guys like I'm telling you all about yourselves. I'm telling our community how cool all of this is and then I'm just really excited to get to spend this time together. You are a lifelong athlete, a former NFL athlete, and your focus is really on optimal performance of the body.
Julius Thomas: I'm not a doctor yet. I'm working on it. I’ll start my pre-doctoral internship this fall, I'm 6 years into the program, but can't wait to be one day. My focus is really on understanding the connection between the mind and the body and thinking about health and well-being from a prevention and a performance perspective, as opposed to just a clinical one, because I think it gives a lot of insights and it helps people wake up and be able to do more of what they enjoy and with the people they enjoy doing things with.
Haylie Pomroy: That's amazing. You're taking that passion and your goal in your plan is to go into a doctoral program?
Julius Thomas: No, I'm already in one. I got my master's degree in room, that’s what they call it. I'm almost done. I have 2000 clinical hours just to finish and then I get my stamp and I could be Dr. Thomas.
Haylie Pomroy: That's amazing. That's exciting. I'm inspired. As you know I'm in the middle of the PhD program here at the Institute for Neuro-Immune Medicine and it's just such a rewarding process in itself, but especially when it's things that we're super passionate about. Dr. Tartar, I want to start with you for just a moment. I know that you're the department chair, but can you just give me a little bit of background about how you got into this space, and what motivated you into this passion?
Dr. Jamie Tartar: Actually, I'm a little bit weird for a neuroscientist, as you probably know, because I'm a neuroscientist that studies humans as a model for humans, which people may not realize how scientists use rodent models. The good thing about rodents is we're allowed to take out their brains and look at them. And when you try to do that in humans, all kinds of terrible things happen to you. Generally frowned upon.
Haylie Pomroy: A little bit, a little bit.
Dr. Jamie Tartar: I've always been interested in what makes humans behave the way they do, what makes humans tick, and understanding human behavior. But I'm not very creative so I really needed a dissected biological level of what makes humans tick. For me, really understanding the nuances of stress and sleep just makes so much sense. These two things really impact each other. It's what most of us as modern humans are really struggling with. And actually, since I met Julius, it was really around the time that I started getting really interested in human performance, which I think evolves naturally from that stress and sleep space. We actually met coincidentally and it was right around the time where I started talking to another friend of ours about this interest in sports performance, and then we coincidentally met. Sometimes you meet someone, you're like, “Hey! I think I already know you.” And so it was just perfect timing. We started doing some of the sports neuroscience research together and that's been super duper exciting.
Haylie Pomroy: I love that. And it's so weird because someone said the other day to me that sleep is free. It can't be bottled. It can't be really prescribed. Although I think with some of those sleep study tests, there are people that are starting to get the prescription or write down or at least have some idea of what they should strive to for stress. And Dr. Klimas, we're talking about this the other day with the ME/CFS patients, that if we could master sleep or we could at least put the priority on sleep that it deserves, we could probably eradicate 60% of the diseases that people are dealing with. It blew my mind because I thought when they said about the brain detoxes during sleep and all of these things that blood sugar regulates. Talk to me a little bit about, I want to jump into stress, but I want to talk about sleep both in the fatigue or the diseased body, and then I want to talk about sleep from an optimal performance perspective, just to throw that out there.
Julius Thomas: Before we talk and jump on sleep, I really wanted to talk about what you just said, because I think it's an important thing to stress. I've read research that shows, with healthy lifestyle behaviors, we can reduce or prevent up to 80% of chronic illnesses and diseases. When I saw that research, I was like, wait, why am I doing so much clinical stuff if this is going to be so good at helping people to live better lives? And I just really wanted to emphasize that for the listeners, because when you understand the value of healthy lifestyle behaviors, it gives you that extra little incentive to do the behaviors that are going to make a big difference for your health and well-being in the long run.
Haylie Pomroy: What you just said is profound. And you doubled down on the thought and I just want to punctuate that for our listeners here for a second. Also, the practitioner has to endorse that. I had a client the other day that came back and they said, they want me on these medications and they don't want me to eat tomatoes or something. And I said, did they also say to cut out, Kentucky Fried Chicken, McDonald's, diet sodas, and get some rest? No. They just said sometimes people that have some inflammation shouldn't eat tomatoes. I just want to put huge billboards, put it out there, and implore our frontline practitioners to value that, to value it. I'm with you 152,000,000%. And so we're going to jump into sleep. We're going to solo it just a little bit because, lifestyle we could go down all kinds of things stress reduction, food if we just talk about sleep and what happens biologically in the body when we don't have sleep or why do we need sleep. I'm convinced I'm one of those genetic people that only need 5 hours, by the way. 6 and I’m on fire. I try really hard, I force myself to sleep more, but I want to learn more about it.
Dr. Jamie Tartar: Just like there are some people walking around, they're 7 feet tall. The genes that we inherit from our parents mostly determine the sleep duration that we need. But you'd be super lucky it is probably the statistics, like being 7 feet tall. But there are some people that don't need as much sleep as other people. For most of us average human beings, we say 7 to 9 on average, hitting around 8. But if we think about, humans have been on Earth for about 300,000 years. If we look at hunter-gatherer populations as a lens into how much sleep we need, they're sleeping around, 8 hours a night. Think about what our lifestyle has been like for most of human existence. And sleep is pretty dangerous for most organisms on Earth. Sleep is a dangerous time, really vulnerable. You're vulnerable to predation. You're not hunting. You're not mating, you’re not doing all these fun things that you could be doing. We didn't need 8 hours of sleep. This would be the stupidest thing that evolution ever did, would be to put you down and make you vulnerable for one-third of your life.
Haylie Pomroy: It's not a luxury or else we wouldn't do it.
Dr. Jamie Tartar: It's non-negotiable. You can't train yourself to sleep less. You can't practice sleeping five hours a night and get good at it. The amount of sleep you need is it's just really biologically determined. But on the other side of that, sort of recognizing, it's not a waste of time either. We're spending a third of our life doing it. What happens when you sleep? Only good things happen to your body and brain when you sleep. By the brain of the brain or the brain, we were just saying at lunch yesterday, that you wouldn't, if you think about the idea you had mentioned cleaning your brain, sleep is the optimal time to do that. And in order to really clean your brain, you have to shut it down. You don't change the oil in your car when your engine's running. You don't do that more than once. You really need time to shut the brain down. If you look at the brain, the matter of the brain, that changes in such a way that you can really clean out some of those toxic metabolic waste products. Other things happen to you and one of my good friends and I'll steal his turn of phrase. Actually, I think we're friends, he wouldn't think we're friends. But he likes to say that, sleep is a Swiss army knife of health. And I agree with that. There's anything wrong with you, good sleep will make it better. Anything that you want to improve, good sleep will improve it. Certainly, brain cleaning we can look at memory consolidation, happens during sleep. Emotion processing, if you want to be emotionally well you have to sleep. Really that comes in that second part of the night's sleep. The second part really focuses on emotional wellness and emotional processing. For those of us that are in the sports performance world, if you want to release testosterone, you sleep between 6 and 8 hours, you can double the amount of testosterone you release. For your muscle gains, human performance sleep is magical. It's one of the best performance mechanisms on the planet. I'm selling sleep. I don't get any kickback from big sleep.
Haylie Pomroy: I'm completely sponsored by sleep. Sometimes, and I'm guilty of this, I feel like sleep is a waste of time. I've so much that I want to do in life and there's never enough hours in the day. When you tell me that sleep is never a waste of time, my shoulders relax a little bit. You just gave me permission to go hard, do it big. But now you just gave me all the benefits of it. Now I want to be like a world-class sleeper, I really do. I also recognize in what you just said, that a lot of the things that you can achieve during sleep, you cannot achieve during wake, times of being awake. It's not possible. It's not like I could get it when I sleep, but I might as well go ahead and grab it while I'm awake. It's not possible. It's not physiologically possible. A couple of things you just said like creating balance with emotionality. I always loved that time before, the really high I was, I don't know very much about sleep, except for I always thought it was a little bit of a waste of time. My mom she'd have to literally put her fingers over my eyes. I've been that way all my life. As I've aged, I've realized that I had to better care for myself. When I was diagnosed with an autoimmune disorder, it was one thing that my doctor did. My rheumatologist just kept saying, you've got to manage your sleep. You've got to manage your sleep. Life is going to happen whether you're asleep or awake. You've got to manage to sleep. That time, that second half. Why is that so special?
Dr. Jamie Tartar: That's really one of the reasons why we want to focus on sleep continuity because when we're in the first part of the night's sleep, we're getting a lot more deep sleep. And that's where a lot of the memory consolidation, that brain cleaning happens. But as we get closer to morning, we spend more time in REM sleep. This is where we have those vivid, scary, bizarre like you're on a dinosaur, your third-grade teacher’s there, you’re carrying cheese.
Haylie Pomroy: And you forgot your slippers.
Dr. Jamie Tartar: Yeah. Just really bizarre dreams. And they may seem silly, but your brain does something gentle, it scares you, it paralyzes you during this time, but it also decreases adrenaline or epinephrine levels so you don't feel the same fear, and you get to play out emotional processes during sleep. And when we take that REM sleep, that rapid eye movement sleep away from people, we do see daytime emotion dysfunction. If you add all those REM sleepouts together, in most people that adds up to about 90 minutes. Your body's willing to paralyze you and scare you 90 minutes a day just to make sure that you are emotionally well.
Haylie Pomroy: Wow! That's profound. That's big. I'm sure everybody's listening to it going. Julius, when you're looking at optimal performance and you're running or lifting weights or talking about nutrition to individuals, how important is sleep in that prescription?
Dr. Jamie Tartar: He has to say important.
Julius Thomas: I've got this amazing job and role that I have of getting to work with some of the most elite organizations and teams and high performers, and teaching them the intricacies of mental performance and habit building and how to structure your day. But I never forget to tell them that the 3 most important things that you can do for yourself are to exercise, sleep, and have a healthy diet. I mean, if you're able to just nail that, how far you will be down the road of optimal performance or preventative well-being is crazy. Some more stats and data because I love to share these things. It can be alarming. Heartening, though, because there's only 3% of the US population that gets the recommended physical exercise, sleep nutrition, stress management, and healthy substance use. 3% of people are getting the foundational basics right. I always stress the basics. Sleep is so important. Some of the things that I really grabbed onto about sleep, especially when you start to understand the lymphatic system, and I know JT could talk more about that, but once I started to realize that we have these brain flushes that are happening while we’re sleeping, I just started to have this visual of New York City and, and I don't know about you guys would ever go to New York City. I find it strange because I'm from California and, we're environmentally friendly-ish, and they would throw the garbage on the sidewalks.
Haylie Pomroy: Yes, in the bags and sometimes split open.
Julius Thomas: Yeah and then the rats the size of raccoons and they're surviving on garbage bags. But what was very interesting is they collect the trash in the middle of the night in New York, and which is very different for me because here in Florida or in California, they always come pick up the trash in the mornings. But then it started to really click, this is what's happening when you're asleep. They're too busy, there are too many cars on the road to be wasting time sending trash trucks to go pick up all the byproducts from the bazillion people in Manhattan. But your brain's the same way, as we've produced byproducts from whatever we're doing cognitively throughout the day, our brain doesn't have the time to clean it out while we're on the job. When we're sleeping, it's almost like the street sweepers are going through and they're cleaning up our brains and helping sustain the neurons. That's one of the things that I always think about and one of the visuals that I keep in my mind that makes me get in bed and try to get my 7 hours
Haylie Pomroy: I like that you said seven, it makes me feel better. Cheat the system a little bit. I work really do work really hard to do that. I want to jump for a second. We talk about sleep hygiene. We talk about ways to induce sleep, ways to help our bodies because sometimes it's a little easier said than done. You need sleep, some people can't sleep. Here at INIM, would you say 30%? The other day I was flying and I was lucky enough to have, what I call the sleepy seats that go lay down all the way. And the stewardess came over and she said, you lay down as we were going down the runway and you never moved until I came and had to tell you. I could sleep anywhere, which is great. I've always said, I'm very lucky that way. But at the institute, we talk about people that have ME/CFS or chronic inflammatory disorders or Long COVID. If we can get their sleep mastered, every medication or therapy is going to be more effective. And I love your analogy about street sweeping because that is something that visually is going to stick with all of us, I'm sure. When a person can't sleep or they have insomnia, do we just go in a multi-pronged approach? Or do we just go, well, let's work on everything else and hope that somehow manifests itself? Or what are you seeing that can make the biggest impact on insomnia?
Dr. Jamie Tartar: A lot of people suffer from insomnia, and a lot of people have difficulty going to sleep. We see all these things happen when you sleep. You clean your brain, not in a way to scare people. For me, I sleep pretty well. But importantly, I'm getting it right most of the time. I don't get it right every night and that's okay. Getting it right most of the time is sort of good enough for sleep. But when people are getting it wrong, most of the time, they're having difficulty sleeping. A lot of people just sort of live their lives, and we don't really think of sleep as health. I'm a big baby, if my chest started hurting, I'd be at the cardiologist right away. I have chronic migraines. I bet your bottom dollar I'd be at the neurologist. A lot of times we spend years struggling with sleep and we don't think about this as health and we don't think about that’s treatable. Really importantly, many sleep disorders are treatable. Nobody should be walking around with excessive daytime sleepiness that hasn't been evaluated. Nobody should be having chronic insomnia that hasn't been evaluated. And the good news is because, I could say you can't sleep too bad, it's a lifelong problem. But we're not. Insomnia is extremely treatable.
Haylie Pomroy: Take the time to recognize it. Take the time to get an adequate workup. We are philosophies, in the nutrition space, we feed for sleep, we feed for fitness, we feed for energy, we feed for libido, we feed for stress reduction. Every single thing we do is nutrient-dependent. And sleep is actually a very nutrient-dependent event also. It's interesting that we lose all our weight while we sleep. To your point, we boost our testosterone when we sleep, we get our cortisol surge 30 minutes after we wake. There's a lot that's going on in the endocrine system and in systems in general and it's all nutrient-dependent. I'm a big feed for sleep. I'm gonna jump into stress for a second because we can make efforts towards sleep. I really do think it's some of the neurocognitive space, in my opinion, that's pushing to the forefront the importance of sleep. When we're seeing lack of sleep with things like Alzheimer's, with cognitive issues, I think people are afraid of that being their destiny. They're taking sleep a little more seriously. I don't know if you guys are seeing that.
Julius Thomas: Accidents, cognitive performance. All these things are so related to sleep. I had a talk yesterday and I was talking about, pilots. The culture used to be fly hundreds of people around the country as much as you can, work as long as you can. And then I think the FAA wanted to review what leads to plane crashes and they started to see the sleepiness. Now they started to control how many hours…
Haylie Pomroy: Just because you’re willing to not sleep for 4 days doesn't mean you should be driving a plane. In Southern California, have you seen the billboards that say “Sleepy driving is as bad as drunk driving”? I was driving back from Vegas the other day and I saw those all over the road. Valid. Good. I love that.
Julius Thomas: There are a ton of accidents per year caused by sleepy driving.
Haylie Pomroy: Absolutely. When we talk about performance and peak performance, and you're looking or assessing an individual, do you do these quadrants like what's your sleep like? What's your stress like? How's your psyche, your belief system, your value system? Talk to me a little bit about some of that.
Julius Thomas: That's a great question. One of the things that that I think about when I assess someone's performance is I always say the foundation of your performance is your well-being. I used to always think that well-being was an add-on to performance. They had the bad habit of saying performance and well-being. And then I've actually changed it in the work I've been doing with my company. And I say performance plus well-being because I don't want it to be an end. It took me a long time of sitting in clinical classes to have my “Aha!” moment. My “Aha!” moment was when I was a professional athlete and all the professional athletes in the world, they had this lead-up to season. And the lead-up to season is essentially trying to get as healthy as possible, is physically resilient or strong, and well-conditioned as possible, to be able to make it through the rigors of a season. Then I thought, we were really just maximizing our well-being so that we can then perform. If you think about an athlete, what's one of the worst things that can happen is you get injured. If you get injured, you can't play, your performance drops. Now one of my passions is to teach people in other spaces, people that are everyday workers or corporate professionals, that your performance sits on the foundation of your well-being. We have to make sure that you're doing the basics, are you exercising? Are you sleeping? Are you eating well? Are you reducing your stress? Are you managing or having healthy substance use? Okay, you're doing that, now we can start to talk about, what’s your mindset. What are your goal-setting strategies? How are you pursuing the things that are important to you? Do you have the right network and mentors and all the other stuff? The smaller details. But the well-being is truly the foundation of performance.
Haylie Pomroy: What do you do when people say that they can't address their stress?
Julius Thomas: That's a very interesting question because I've never heard a person say they can't address it. Every single time I've spoken of stress, people go, “ Yeah. I just thought that no I haven't been doing it. It's my kid.” And what they have going on or my job, work-related stress is one of the most significant well-being challenges that we experience in especially Western cultures. Most people are so happy that I mentioned stress and then they immediately want to talk about their stressors. And I'm like, yes, they're doing the first deal.
Haylie Pomroy: I love what you just said. That's the first step, is acknowledging it and talking about it. I feel like I do brilliant people in front of me. They're going to help me explain this. I know there's talk therapy, but why does it help to talk about it? Is it a reflection? Does it get reflected back to you in a different way? Is it organized differently when it comes out of your head and through your mouth? Sometimes when people like, when you call your girlfriend or your mom. I call my mom all the time and I talk to her process and I don't feel like I dumped on it she's holding it and carrying it down the street now, but it's like there's such a relief. Why? What happens in the brain?
Julius Thomas: One of the things that I think we overlook often time as people is the value of social support. I'm not exactly sure from an evolutionary psychological perspective, but something about us being mammals and social animals, there is so much value in coping through social support, and it just has a profound effect on reducing a lot of the emotional load that we experience. But I also think there's a component of just processing. One of the things we do in a therapeutic environment is process with the person. Just talk about what it's like. One of the valuable things that if you get really skilled at it, is you start to mentally frame things. Right. For me, mentally framing is just accepting your circumstances as they are and then thinking about it in a way that's not this is going to be the end of me and starting to reduce maybe that catastrophizing, but then you get this opportunity to insert the mindset that you have that helps you be positive and effective. You start from accepting it and then you move into, what's a positive way I can look at this? And I think that that often happens when we have good conversations. Sometimes you can have your bad friend that you call and they double down on it.
Haylie Pomroy: They say they'll post the bail money. No, not those.
Julius Thomas: They'll maybe say things like, just tell me where to hide the body.
Dr. Jamie Tartar: We do know that talking about stress and thinking about it, it's a sort of a double-edged sword. It could be helpful, but it's not always helpful.
Haylie Pomroy: Being here at the institute, our purpose for doing the podcast was to give people, hope when they're struggling and really some tangible things to help them some tools, some labs to run, some doctors to see, some lifestyle modification that they can do. But one really critical thing, when an individual struggling, is to keep a positive mindset. I feel like sometimes again, that's easier said than done. And I would love both of your perspectives on. One, what's the importance of it? You telling me that sleep is never time wasted. What amazing and cool things I can achieve while I sleep that I can never achieve while I'm awake. I want to be a sleeping overachiever now. What about mindset? Why is it important? Besides, like if you're grumpy or I'm grumpy, I might impact my family, my loved ones, my colleagues' lives negatively. How does it reflect on my own personal person?
Dr. Jamie Tartar: I think we may have different things to say here from our different backgrounds. I think one of the things that we want to recognize with sort of this and to your point about your background being grumpy and being on your family is you give yourself a little bit of grace, in that regard that, your brain is not always nice to you. Your brain has only one job, the only thing your brain needs to do is keep you alive. And it doesn't care if you're happy while it's doing that. The job of a brain isn't to make you happy. The job of the brain is to keep you alive sometimes despite your happiness. Our human brains are really hard-wired to pay attention to negative information over all other information because this kept our ancestors alive. If you imagine generations back, your early ancestors walk down a pathway. And the bushes were moving around and they thought, oh my God, it's a cute little bunny. My day is going to be so great and it was a tiger and they died. The army ancestors must have walked down that path and then, oh my goodness, it's probably a tiger. And then whether it was a tiger or a bunny, there's a survival advantage to being ready for bad things to happen.
Haylie Pomroy: At least you're prepared.
Dr. Jamie Tartar: All of our brains are ready, they’re really little prediction machines and they prepare for negative things. And they and we ruminate very easily. And we think about negative thoughts very easily. And that's the bad news. The good news is that there isn't plasticity there available to us. By doing things like what we were talking about before the episode, we know, you know through a lot of really cool new neuroscience research, the neuroscience of gratitude, and the neuroscience of just basically if you spend time with and it sounds sort of hippie-dippy, but there's so much good science behind this, practicing loving kindness moments, they’re so important. And fostering and valuing those meaningful social connections. I was really lucky I got to have lunch with Julius. He’s actually one of my good friends. At the end of that lunch, I just felt so much gratitude for having that friend and for having that moment and knowing that I've got this person I can always talk to, and I trust him, and we've got a great friendship. And what we don't do well is savor that moment. If I'm in my car on the way home, I just want to savor and take a moment to think about that and appreciate that. And we don't do that easily. We don't do it readily. But by practicing these moments, we can change our mindset and slowly change our brain, and change our way of thinking.
Haylie Pomroy: I appreciate you saying that they’re moments and also that we are hardwired and probably for just cause to be aware of potential harm and also to savor that, to let it grow roots sink in and create more from it.
Dr. Jamie Tartar: Savoring the good moments.
Haylie Pomroy: I'm making my own personal list of homework. I really appreciate what you just said about that one, savoring it, and then also just, seizing that moment in and in performance, I love that we saw, I just remember even when I was a kid watching sports psychology. Visualizing it going into the basket, and also like when you see people break barriers, the Boston Marathon was never run at this particular speed, but then once one person does and the belief system that it can happen, you see so many other people do it. I don't think it's just that everybody got faster on the day that one person broke that time record. I think that everybody believed that they could be faster.
Dr. Jamie Tartar: I really believed I could run a 5-minute mile and it didn't happen.
Haylie Pomroy: Maybe you can, we just need to alter the clock. You don't need to be double-time, the time needs to be double time. What do you teach people when they're looking at optimal performance? When they're looking at maximizing their passions in their life experiences about mindset.
Julius Thomas: One of the things I try to help people understand and I try to encourage them on, is that mindset is ultimately a choice. It doesn't mean that the choice is always going to be under easy conditions. There are all sorts of conditions. And especially when we're talking to patients or people with chronic conditions that have created disabilities or a decrease in activities of daily living. These are really hard. And under the hard circumstances, it makes it so much harder to choose positive outlooks, to choose optimism. But the patients that do the best, are the ones that are able to choose optimism and to choose to have a positive outlook. And I'll tell two stories because they're very core and they they taught me so much. Sometimes your patients are the ones that teach you. And people oftentimes ask me about mindset, and they think that athletes have the best mindsets in the world. I'm like, yeah, in some ways. But the greatest mental performance, the mental performers are the ones that I saw in the hospital, sometimes. There's a patient I had who was about late 50s, an older male that had a terminal cancer diagnosis and when I first came to see him in the hospital, he was extremely sad about his cancer diagnosis. And I thought he was sad about his life is going to end within a year time period. But he was really sad that he wasn't going to be able to be there for his children. He had two sons, and that was making him most sad. So we sat down one day and I asked him, if your sons are what's so important to you, how should you live with the time you have left? One of the things he said was if I was living in a way to be there for them, I would go back to doing the things that we really like to do together. I said, what are those things? We love having pizza nights together. We love watching whatever movies they watch. And then I asked him, can you make the choice to do that with them? And to do that with a positive spirit, knowing how much it will mean for them? And he ultimately said, absolutely. And you saw a profound switch happen. And then in that moment, I learned mindset is actually a choice. And it doesn't mean that I can make the conditions less tragic or sad or hard, but what he found was a reason why he could choose his joy, his optimism, and that's what I saw patients do. I mean, another patient I had, she was 20 years old and she was paraplegic. I’ll never forget this, she was sitting in a wheelchair and there's like a ring around because her head could not go too far the other way. I was doing her intake interview and she was smiling throughout the interview. I stopped her. I said I need to know right now, how are you smiling? Because I can tell you, I've seen a lot of patients and to be 20 years old, paraplegic, how are you smiling? And she said I have so much to be grateful for. I have such an amazing family and I have a sister that loves me. And then at that moment, I recognized again, it's not your circumstances that define your mood, it's what you choose. I'm not saying it's easy, but it's a choice. I remember asking her, I said, so why did you check yourself into the hospital? Because she was a person that she didn't have to go to the hospital. She came to the hospital and she said, I will be happy if I can get the goal of transferring myself from my wheelchair to the bed. If I can do that, that would be the most amazing thing. What I recognized in myself is I need to shift my perspective. Look what she's willing to see as happy and worthwhile and fulfilling. What she did was she took something that I would have took it for granted and said, this is my goal, and this would make me feel amazing. But now we all have this opportunity, no matter what our circumstance is. She taught me. I didn't teach her anything. She taught me that you can choose to be happy, and you can choose to be extremely grateful for the smallest things. Those are the lessons that I'll never forget. When I go talk to other high performers, I remind them that this is a choice, I have to find the reasons to enjoy the life we have and we can.
Haylie Pomroy: I love that you that it can be episodic, too. Sometimes I think that people feel like if they can't be happy 24/7, then why put in the effort? We say 10 minutes of gratitude, 10 minutes of attitude, meaning, gratitude listing like she did. I'm so grateful for my family, for my friends, for my children. And then ten minutes of how can I manifest that gratitude in action? And if that's all you can manifest in a day, that's okay. That can shift so much in your life. That's awesome and amazing. One of the reasons why I wanted to have you on is again, my goal is to get people that are providing care to people that are dealing with chronic disease and illness to understand the magnitude of impact that sleep and stress reduction and mindset and lifestyle modification can make in health. And when you said 80%, it's like, could you imagine would be a miracle drug if we could bottle it and put in a pill and take it eight times a day or whatever? A patch or an injection, it doesn't matter. But if we can get that anchored and grounded in our healthcare system, that would be amazing, but all the changes in healthcare come from the patient. They come from the consumer of healthcare. They come from the consumer of wellness. They come from the consumer fitness. The louder and the more impact that they make on changes. How can people engage with you guys? I know that both of you work in the nonprofit space. Are there any organizations that they can support or look into? We will put all the social media handles on here so people can follow you. That would be really cool. We'll make sure that we connect digitally, on all of our platforms. Are there any particular organizations that you're working with that we can look into or support or be involved with?
Dr. Jamie Tartar: I run a nonprofit organization, it's called the Society for Sports Neuroscience. We're going to have a conference here at NSU in early February 2025. I would love for you to come and maybe be a speaker. It's a great space. Julius is on our advisory board.
Julius Thomas: I'm the VP now.
Haylie Pomroy: I just want to be your friend. I know you want to drive away from lunch with you and anchor in the gratitude of being together.
Dr. Jamie Tartar: The people that helped get the organization started. At each conference, we have a lot of talks that are focused on these themes for optimal performance. It's not just about athletes, it's performance for everybody. We're @societyforsportsneuroscience on Instagram.
Haylie Pomroy: I appreciate you saying that. And I was saying earlier, I think before we jumped on, this month names 30 years of clinical practice and I did work and have worked in the high-performance sports athlete, high performance in front of the camera, I learned so much about individuals that expected and there was a monetary gain, quite frankly, with maximizing their ATP production or hormone production that I was able to apply in my own space with an autoimmune disorder or in chronic viral activation or long hauler. Because if you can see a body be maximized and you can see this vast difference that happens when you maximize that body, you know that there's plasticity, there's adaptability in the human body. And so if we're not well we can change and we can change that. And how.
Dr. Jamie Tartar: I think he has an organization that works on that too.
Haylie Pomroy: Share that with me.
Julius Thomas: I started a company called Optimal Performance with the goal of maximizing individual performance and well-being and team performance and well-being and the way that I try to do that is through evidence-based scientific practices. JT knows that this is one of my gripes. And I'm going to say it this way here on this podcast. First, your favorite influencer can kill you. What I'm what I mean by that is, we as practitioners, have to continue to do what you're doing with this podcast, we have to wander off into the social, in the content-producing space so that we can provide high-quality evidence-based information. That is one of the founding principles of Optimal Performance is, I want to be a voice and a trusted source of content that people can consume, that want to perform better mentally. They want to have preventative wellness. They want to have stronger relationships that want to be able to achieve the goals that they set for themselves. Push a little bit harder, find something inside of them that they can connect to that gives them the motivation to take more pain or to take on the challenges of life. That is my big emphasis and focus, and it's really my mission to make sure that I continue to do that because you said that people need hope.
Haylie Pomroy: People need help and people need hope.
Julius Thomas: And I can't help but understand how many people need hope. I know from working with patients in some really rough conditions, how hard it is to have hope, and sometimes hope must be borrowed. Sometimes you cannot manufacture your own hope. But the thing about hope is you can borrow it from somebody, the right person.
Haylie Pomroy: That believes in you.
Julius Thomas: I want to give people hope and I want people to know that they can improve whatever their baseline is, it's always different. A lot of times I work with the best performers in the world and try to push them to improve. But like you said, it's all a spectrum. The same thing was when I had an amputee patient and I had to give them hope that they can do life minus that limb and push them to go to their rehab and improve.
Haylie Pomroy: I shared with you before I was on my way to vet school. I was diagnosed with an immune disorder. I was put on Mepron, immuran, 60-80mg of prednisone a day until I started to lose function in my right kidney. I had to find a different way. I was able to have phenomenal success. I haven't been on medication since my early 20s, which is amazing for me. And I had a client that was working towards her own health and victory. She’s diagnosed with Dermatomyositis. And she said, do you really think I can get better? And I said, why can I and not you? Of course, you can. Of course, I believe that. I'm going, oh my gosh, I hope this works. I was willing to let her borrow that. We do a lot of patient advocacy and when we talk about mind shift set, I always tell the patients that they're the consumer, and I want them to have the mind shift that says, show me what evidence-based protocols we can implement. Teach me, I need to learn more about my body, and I need to be more educated about my body than anybody that spends 7 or even 3 hours with me every day. And then watch me. Let's make sure that there's a protocol for progress and we're going in a forward movement towards wellness. And that shows me, teach me, watch me is evidence-based, and I am the most valuable person in the room, teach me, not you're the smartest person in the room. Dispense your wisdom upon me so that I can invoke it and embrace it within my body and then watch me get well. Mindset in the patient, mindset in the performer. We're all performing every day, even when we sleep. It sounds like, thanks a lot. Now I'm going to be an overachiever sleeper, I appreciate that. I just want to thank you guys so much for coming out here and talking to our community. And please, can I have you back? We could go another 3 hours, but I know the average listen time doesn't go that far, so I'd like to have you back. We can talk about more things if you will. I would really love that. And I know our community's going to have a ton of questions, we'll be able to get together and answer some of those, please.
Julius Thomas: We'll trade you. You're going to come over to the Sports Neuroscience conference. We will ask you to bring in other people that are motivated and more about human optimization, really.
Dr. Jamie Tartar: Because I think we both feel like, as scientists, there's an onus on us to do a better job of bringing information, people stop just looking to each other.
Haylie Pomroy: Some of it sometimes feels selfish and some of it sometimes maybe, like you said, borrowing that hope from other people. Throughout my life, I have to feel like I didn't go what I went through for no reason. And my goal is to shorten the gap for other people. Shorten that gap, limit the struggle, and learn from my massive mistakes and hopefully some of the gems of what I've gained along the way and give them access to people like you, it's really, really important. Thank you so much, I appreciate it. We'll talk again soon.
