Exploring The Science of Sleep with Dr. Olivia Walch
In this episode of 'Science of Slink,' host Rosy is joined by Dr. Olivia Walch, CEO of Arcascope and author of 'Sleep Groove,' to discuss the importance of circadian rhythms and sleep hygiene. Olivia shares her journey from being a 'sleep gremlin' in college to becoming a researcher focused on sleep regularity. They explore how light exposure affects circadian rhythms, the role of sleep in motor learning and recovery, and practical tips for improving sleep patterns. Olivia also dispels myths about chronotypes and emphasizes the significance of maintaining a consistent light-dark schedule for overall well-being and better athletic performance.
Get Olivia’s book: https://www.simonandschuster.com/books/Sleep-Groove/Olivia-Walch/9781524892951
Chapters:
00:00 Introduction to the Science of Strength Podcast
00:16 Meet Olivia Walch: Sleep and Circadian Rhythm Expert
01:24 The Importance of Sleep Regularity
02:21 Understanding Circadian Rhythms
04:15 Light Exposure and Its Impact on Sleep
06:16 Circadian Rhythms and Physical Performance
12:39 Debunking Chronotype Myths
19:06 Practical Tips for Better Sleep
31:27 Conclusion and Further Resources
Transcript :
Welcome to Science of Strength, the Evidence-based pole podcast. An episode very, very excited for. Those of you all who have taken classes with me, I've, I've probably talked to you about this already, but sometimes I'll mention like circadian rhythm stuff. And my friend who studies circadian rhythm, and this is that friend.
It's Olivia Olivia Walch CEO of Arcascope. And particularly relevant. Author of Sleep Groove her book that just came out, which is all about sleeping and circadian rhythm and light exposure and all that good stuff. And very excited Olivia can come on the podcast and talk to us.
'cause I know, listen, we're all nerds here. We're all into science and bodies and shit. And that's the, that's the topic du jour. So Olivia, do you wanna give like a little brief introduction to yourself and then just top level highlights? I think people have probably heard a little bit, listen, I've told you all the sleep, you know, you gotta rest to recover, especially if you're training.
Olivia: Yeah, for sure. Okay, so Rosy, we met in college.
Yes. And during, during my college days, [00:01:00] I, was like a sleep gremlin. I just wasn't doing it. I was like, I need to experience everything. But most of it was like, not the fun stuff of college. It was like I need to do this problem set and so on your digital account. So like all this stuff that I was just trying to pack into my schedule and I did a lot of stuff, but I don't really remember it 'cause I just wasn't sleeping and like sleep plays this important role in, in memory.
And so I got to grad school and I was like, I gotta sleep more. And I did. I slept a lot more, but I, I didn't actually feel, wow, this is so much better. Until I was a participant in a research study. I got like paid 35 bucks for it. And what I had to do is keep the same bedtime every single night for.
Basically four months. And that is, that is the point in my life when I switched from, yeah, I'm fine, I'm fine to like, oh, I actually feel really, really good when I'm doing this and kind of devoted my career as a, a researcher. I did my PhD at Michigan, university of, and [00:02:00] like later postdoc. And then I founded a company all about understanding why I felt so good when I was going to bed at the exact same time every night.
I was wearing at a watch where the researchers could spy on me and didn't see if I didn't listen. So I was like, oh, I got to, I have to and then I. I felt so much better that I was like, well, okay, I'm going to keep doing this now for the rest of my life. And the answer is circadian rhythms.
Like the answer is sleep regularity or being in a sleep groove is really your, your circadian clock making itself known. In disguise. A downside to to that statement is people have heard the word circadian rhythm, but if you're like, define it, like most people are like sleep. And so there's this.
Like UI or like UX problem with it. Like people don't have good ways of talking about circadian rhythms. And so when I was like, Hey, let me, lemme get the word out about this my number one goal was to try and build up an intuition for what a circadian rhythm even is. [00:03:00]
Rosy: Yeah. Yeah. And something that I think about a lot is how little of human time.
If we think about all the stuff that led up to like us being homo sapiens, how little of the time. That we have been around as a species have, we had things like screens and electric lights, like even, you know, we're coming up on what, a hundred years of mass electrification at least in the United States, which is like three, maybe four, maybe five generations.
And it's been a huge change in human
Olivia: a hundred percent. Yeah. This is a. This is one of my favorite things because people sometimes say like, ugh, you know, modern life is really hurting our sleep. I bet it in, like in pre-industrial societies, we just slept all the time. We totally didn't. Or at least it doesn't appear to be the case.
Like you look at people now in, in sort of like groups without electric lighting. They're sleeping like five to seven hours a night, which is pretty much what we [00:04:00] do for duration in, in modern life. But you ask them like, Hey, do you have a sleep problem? And a vanishingly small percentage say oh, I've got a problem with sleep. Despite having durations where a lot of us nowadays would be like, oh, I can't function on this. This is impossible.
So what's different? What's different is their light environment. And so even if they're awake. They're in the dark, kind of against their will as the sun goes down and it stays dark and it's super dark.
And their days are also in general, a lot brighter than, than ours are. If you're like in a windowless office, you're not getting light. And, and you might say like, okay, who cares? Like light is just your environment, but it functions in your body like a drug. And I, I had. Guy once I, I described this too, and he was like really nodding his head, being like, yeah, like light is a drug.
And I, I was like, he's listening. He's really getting it. This is great. And then he was like, yeah, and I don't think humans need to eat food. I think we can just, we can just absorb light. And so like, I, I think, sometimes people hear you [00:05:00] say stuff like light is a drug, and then they jump like five steps ahead to actually, you're a bulbasaur.
You don't need, you don't need to eat. Like, it's like, no, no, no. Like, like I'm, I'm not, I'm not saying that. I'm saying that literally there's cells in your eyes that are gonna send an electric signal to your brain, which is gonna release chemicals in response to light exposure. And when you get bright nights and dark days, which is sort of the standard where you get irregular days and nights, long days, short days, you have stuff to do.
So you keep the lights on, you keep working. It's gonna really affect your body's clock 'cause it was not set up to handle that kind of input, that kind of super irregular input. It's, it's real hard science. That light has this effect on your body and I think people are starting to, to wake up to it now.
Rosy: I, I think some things that people might have heard about are like melatonin production, which while that that's a steroid that you could just buy in the us I don't know if this is the, the way everywhere, but it's just like over the counter.
You could just pick it up at the grocery store. Not, it's not true
Olivia: everywhere. It's, you just can't do that in like the UK and I think [00:06:00] Australia and it's like, eh, no, you gotta get a prescription
Rosy: for this. You absolutely can in the us. So, but I think people might have like heard about like light exposure, melatonin and feeling sleepy, but it's a lot more than that.
It affects like a lot of processes in the body. Do you wanna talk about that a little bit? Yeah, for sure.
Olivia: So, I sometimes describe circadian rhythms, like like an audio clip that's been super, super slowed down. Like if I recorded myself saying this sentence and then I played it for you at 0.1 speed, it would be like like you wouldn't be able to parse it as, as words.
And so simply by making it faster, our brains are like, yeah, I can understand that, but slower like. We've got other stuff going on, we're not gonna notice it. And so I think circadian rhythms being such slow rhythms compared to like breathing or your heartbeat we just don't track that they are rhythmic, but like your immune response is rhythmic.
So people have different responses to vaccines at different times of [00:07:00] the day. People have different responses to immunotherapy for cancer at different times of the day. The, strength of your hands is different. So you're like, you're stronger at sometimes versus others. You can run faster and, and leap higher at sometimes versus others.
Your metabolism absolutely changes. One of the biggest things that, like I personally had ex like notice when I was doing my really regular sleep experiment is I, I stopped eating at night. And it was not like a willpower thing at all. I just didn't feel cravings for food late in the day ever. And so that was like an interesting, I.
Thing to observe about myself because before, like, especially in my chaos days in college, I'd be like 3:00 AM like microwaving, a s'more in my dorm room. I, I became sort of actively put off by the thought of doing that. And it's because your metabolism is a circadian rhythm. But if you, if you have irregular days, if you have irregular sleep and you don't get enough light in the day and you don't get really dark, dark at [00:08:00] night, rhythms that sort of go up and down really profoundly start to get muddled kind of.
Like the difference of a bunch of people jumping in sync on a trampoline versus like everyone doing their own thing on the trampoline, where like nobody's actually getting that much like height 'cause they're all canceling each other out. Like you, you get muddled rhythms versus really clear rhythms and muddled rhythms.
Make it so, oh, maybe you're, if you're me hungry around the clock, but clear rhythms make it so you're like, no, I'm, I'm in day mode, I'm in night mode. So yeah, basically anybody. Function has this rhythm and it's happening all the time. We're not clocking it 'cause they're sort of so slow that you're not noticing a difference from one minute to the next.
But an implication of this is that like drugs, treatments, like surgeries, all these things could be time optimized. And, and what I work on, I sort of left academia to, to work on this, is trying to, to bring this to people in, in the real world saying, Hey, like how can we make it so that this drug [00:09:00] works?
As effectively as possible for you, how can we make it so that you recover from surgery as quickly as possible simply by factoring in time.
Rosy: And I'm gonna ask, 'cause I know that every pole dancer listening, like ears perked up like a little, little puppy. So you mentioned that grip strength is greater at certain times of day.
Can we get like a, like a clock segment on that?
Olivia: For all physical fitness things, generally it's gonna be like when your, your core body temperature is at its highest point. And if you've ever had like sort of like you feel alert in the morning and then you have this like maybe middle of day dip and then you, then you feel alert again later.
That's something called the weak maintenance zone. And I think of it as your body being like. All right. Get your act together. You, you need to, to get your act together before the sun gets down goes down and it's dark. So you have this sort of second surge of energy that lines up pretty well with when you're good at athletic things [00:10:00] like good at strength.
And you can see evidence in of this, in, in sort of like sports team performance where sort of there. Like sort of evening, like maybe 6:00 PM or something for the average person is when they're winning more than they should accounting for, for everything else. But it, it's highly individual specific, so.
Let's say like your extreme early type. Okay, well then it could be happening closer to 1:00 PM If you're an extreme night owl, it could be more like 10:00 PM. And, and none of these things are fixed, so like you're not like doomed to be the exact same form of night owl forever. Like, like I could.
Change your chronotype by changing your, your light exposure simply by like sending you to Europe for a week and then bringing you back and you're, you're still on Europe time when you, when you first land, and that would move your best at sports time. But the short answer is like circadian science would predict you'd be, you'd be best at poll for a later in the day class.
And I'm curious, does that [00:11:00] like at all align with your experience or have you like noticed it all?
Rosy: Personally. Yes. And that's also actually why I've scheduled my classes when I've scheduled. So I teach the same class Tuesday, Wednesday the same like format of class. And the Tuesday one is at 1:00 PM my time, and the Wednesday one is at 7:30 PM my time.
And the Tuesday one I have at much lower intensity. So it's. More like a recovery class. And then the Wednesday one, which again, same class much later. I've bumped the intensity quite a bit and of course, you know, I got students all over, so European friends, sorry, you're getting low intensity class at at your sort of like more, more active time.
But yeah, that's definitely been, been my experience. Also, I don't know that this is related so much to circadian rhythm as it is to just like moving bodies. But I have noticed that my flexibility, and for most people, flexibility tends to be a little bit better later in the day. And that just could be, 'cause you, you're farther from being still for, for a long time.
And you know, you've just got, you know, synovial fluid moving around and you know, lymph [00:12:00] blood, et cetera. But sort of general observation. Yeah.
Olivia: And it also jives with the sort of like your core body temperature being higher around then. So, yeah.
Rosy: Makes total sense. Yeah. Which, I mean, to be fair, we're also manipulating intentionally with a warmup, right?
Like that's part of the reason that we warm up is to raise the core body temperature to increase heart rate in addition to like joint weight.
So one thing that you brought up I am sure that other people have also seen like. I'm gonna call it sort of pseudoscience around the idea of chronotypes and like, you know, if you just take the right supplement from me, beefy McJaw, man at noon, you too can get your perfect workout in at 3:00 AM and look like me. So what is actually the, the current consensus and understanding based on the research around that and what's just like, I'm trying to think of a word other than malarkey, but we're just gonna go to malarkey. We're just gonna, just gonna go with that and forward malarkey and spirit.
Olivia: Yeah. Yeah. So I'm gonna tell you a story, which is in like the early 2010s. These researchers at the University of [00:13:00] Colorado Boulder did something incredibly on brand for Colorado, which is, they went camping they're like, we're doing science. And everyone was like, yeah, yeah, yeah, you're, you're camp, you just wanna go camp.
And then they came back with this like incredibly influential result which is. They looked at people's melatonin rhythms, living as they were in a sort of normal life. And this was kind of their, their standin for chronotype. 'cause some people had their melatonin rhythms kicking in really late.
Your body naturally produces melatonin. There were some people in that study, they weren't producing melatonin until I think, like 2:00 AM that's insanely late. That's like, that's crazy Late, like really late. And then you had a lot of normies who were doing it around 8:00 PM. And like a few people early, but it was, it was sort of a long tail.
There were like a lot of late people that extended really late. It wasn't a symmetric bell curve. Took 'em camping. What was going on when they were camping. They were getting a ton of light during the day and just night at night. They, they didn't have phones on. They just sat by the fire brought 'em back into the lab [00:14:00] afterward.
Looked at their melatonin rhythms again, and all the extreme late types. Gone. They, they just vanished. It was a symmetric curve now where like, nobody who was an extreme stayed that extreme. Yeah. They were still a little later, but they weren't super, super late. And so, so I think the, the way we talk about chronotype in the field and, and how people should think about it is okay.
Like there's probably something. Inherent to you that's gonna affect how your body, body processes the signals you give it. So for instance you might be somebody who's really light sensitive, which is an explanation for those extreme late types who vanished in the study, who, who started looking like normies at the end of it.
If you're really light sensitive and you're in sort of normal indoor light like, like your living room at 10:00 PM your brain might be like, ah. Light, the sun is still up. I can't go to sleep. I gotta delay my rhythms. I gotta be awake. And and [00:15:00] therefore you, you say like, oh, I'm, I'm this late chronotype, but the same person who just has like me as their roommate and I come in and I'm like, turn off these lights.
Like they would be having their start, their melatonin rhythms start much earlier. They'd be waking up earlier. So it's this like. You're a machine with, with certain configuration built in. But that's, that's like half maybe of your, your expressed chronotype and the other half is your environment, like what you do like, like what your environment is like, the light you get in the day, like you get at night.
And something I really passionately believe about circadian rhythms. It is like any hack that's like, oh, do this one thing. Is fragile because your body is always paying attention to the environment. Like there's kind of no getting around the having to think about the full 24 hour day for 24 hour rhythms.
And I think this is true [00:16:00] including in the middle of the day, sometimes you see people who are like, in the middle of the day, light doesn't do anything to your body's clock. But I, I really think the, the thing it's doing is it's reinforcing that daytime is happening right now. In the same way that if you, if you get light, like I kicked down your door at 3:00 AM and I shine a big light in your face, that's going to massively confuse your circadian clock.
It's gonna be like, what? I was so convinced this was, this was nighttime and now there's a, a flashlight. On my head. And so it's not just that light in the very early morning and like the evening matter, it's it's light around the full 24 hour day. And, and if you're trying to get away with like a, like 15 minute thing and then you'll fix everything, it's, it's going to be vulnerable because what you do the, the 23.75 hours before and after that 15 minute thing.
Have a way bigger effect than that 15 minute thing. And it doesn't mean you can't like say like, Hey, I'm gonna get a surge of light when I can, or I'm gonna do [00:17:00] simple things like make my environment dim. But yeah, you kind of can't escape the, the circadian clock is always listening to what you're doing and using that to determine your chronotype.
Rosy: Yeah. Yeah. It's something we talk about a fair amount, people who've been in class will know this is. Any slice of time you still have to consider the rest of your life going on, right? So if you go to pole class, and let's say you've got a young child at home and you are not sleeping well and you're eating at irregular hours and you're just very stressed even if you know everything else lines up the way it was, you just, you're not gonna have as much in your bucket all stress contributes to the same bucket. And that includes the fun stress from working out and learning new tricks. And that includes traffic. Right. And I think it's very similar, right? You have this very complex system. We all have finite resources and amounts of control as humans.
And if we wanna make changes, we kind of gotta think about everything. We kind of gotta, gotta touch all the dials because biology is squishy and [00:18:00] complex especially when it comes to like behavior. There's so many variables, blah, blah, blah. It would be great if things were very separable and discreet and there were no interactions and no latent variables.
But unfortunately that's not how organic organism works a hundred percent. Yeah. Also what I'm hearing is that people who are firmly opposed to the big lights, like the overhead light during the evening are factually correct. Yeah. And actually they're more beautiful and
Olivia: charming than people who are like, no, let's keep these on.
And they've got yeah, like just better personalities in every way. That's no winning smiles. Yeah. Yeah. That's sciences. Mm-hmm.
Rosy: Absolutely. Yeah. Oh, also just a sidebar for folks who are not super familiar with us geography Colorado's in the west, it's not super densely populated.
It gets real dark there at night. Particularly sort of like out in the, I don't know not city lands. 'cause I think calling the US Land [00:19:00] wilderness is like a little bit, a little bit loaded.
So all this, you know, big system, kind of gotta think about everything. We do want good sleep, right? Like we feel better. Also, again, you know, just thinking about better pole, right? We want to recover. Listen, everyone's always telling you, you gotta rest, you gotta recover, you got to get good sleep, you gotta feel your body, you and all that.
But also it helps with motor learning. And a lot of what we do in pole is learning how to do weird shit with our bodies.
And we were talking about this interview class on Monday. One of the reasons that I come back and I review things is because just having slept in between skill learning sessions, even if you do nothing else, even if you don't think about it, even if you don't condition, it gives your brain time to process and update and make changes.
And if you don't do that or if that process is interrupted, or if the fall to your sleep is not as good your motor learning processes are also not as good. And to. I mean, obviously I'm reading more deeply in the motor learning literature these days than, than other types of learning, but my, my understanding is that that's just true.
It's kind of across the board.
Olivia: Oh, [00:20:00] yeah. Yeah. And, and like, like it's true of both just like nightly sleep, but also you give people very short naps and they, they do better like, and 10 minute naps even, or enough to see sort of better learning and, and better performance. And so what I often say, like, like four, like I think the number one thing people.
Aren't internalizing right now about their sleep is have this really macroscopic multi-day view of like, get into a rhythm with your sleep. Do it as regularly as possible, and if you can't sleep, get this really consistent light dark schedule. But then also like, but. If the nap is not gonna break your groove, like it's just like a middle of the day nap, not like one at 7:00 PM and you're gonna wake up in two hours and not be able to sleep, then like absolutely go for it.
Right? Like, because there's all these benefits for, for learning and how you feel and performance like, like let yourself sleep. It's worth it. [00:21:00]
Rosy: Yes, yes. And I'm sure as someone with, with a little one, you can particularly appreciate the benefits at the moment. So hopefully we convinced you. Gotta sleep.
Gotta sleep. I regularly. So thinking about limiting light exposure, how much does spectrum matter? How much does cool light versus warm light matter and does wind matter for those? Is that actually important?
Olivia: When definitely matters.
'cause the, the light you get at different times, it's gonna do different things to your body. And I, I use the analogy of being on a swing to describe this sometimes. 'cause if you imagine your rhythms as like you literally being on a swing at a playground, going back and forward and you think of light as somebody pushing you outward.
Like if they push you outward, right? Where you're at the very back, furthest back part of the swing, generally speaking, that's good, right? It's like they're about to push me forward. I'm gonna get this nice big swing. But if you get the same exact input, which is a push [00:22:00] outward while you're swinging backwards, it, it's not good.
Like you're swinging backwards and somebody's pushing you the opposite direction. It throws off your groove rather than enhancing it. It like. It's not fun. Like literally on the playground, it would probably hurt to have somebody do that. But for your rhythms, it's sort of jolting them. They're like, I wasn't expecting this light here.
And so that's, that's sort of analogous to light sorry. During the day, reinforcing your rhythms, light at night, throwing your rhythms off, being like, ah, know, they're like now disrupted because this same exact signal came in. Spectrum. AKA color is like annoyingly complicated in the following sense, which is that a spectrum of light is hugely like high dimensional, right?
Like there's basically, like when we talk about spectrum, we we're like, okay, we're just gonna characterize light by how much of every wavelength there is, and we're gonna sort of go wavelength by wavelength, and we're gonna be like, how much? 451 nanometer. Expression is there, and then we're like, oh, there's a lot of it.
And we're like, how [00:23:00] much? 4 52 expression. And they're probably still a good amount of it. And so you get this really high dimensional thing of like, there's, there's a lot of nanometers of flight and you're sort of saying, okay, how much of there, like each of these types is there, but we only have. Like four things in our eyeball that can respond to this hugely high dimensional thing.
So you've got this vastly complicated thing that has to pass through the bottleneck of our eyeballs, which are kinda like, mm, I don't know. And so you can, you can get things that look really blue to your, sort of your rods and cones, which are these cells in your eyes. And. If you look at the spectrum, there's a lot of representation and sort of classical blue part of the spectrum where we're like, yeah, like four or 500.
Like, you're like, okay, that, that checks out. You can also get things that look blue to your rods and cones. But they don't actually have that much [00:24:00] representation sort of right in the places where you'd expect like the sort of bluest part. And it's because basically like. Like whenever you've got this, like lots of information getting wheeled down to like little bits of information, you can bamboozle the system.
And so, so if you like look online, you might see things being like blue light, extra bad, and then you met other things being like blue light debunked. It's not actually bad. And, and like often what those are doing is they're saying, Hey, like we're gonna, we're gonna make two spectra and they're gonna look like different colors to your visual.
Like system, like the, the sort of conscious visual system where you're like, I am seeing this color, but they're gonna look like the same amount of brightness to your circadian clock. It everyone who's listening to this who's like, what is going on? You're basically getting like three years of graduate school and like one long paragraph.
The point is like. There's a chunk of the spectrum around 480 nanometers that usually looks blue to people, but not always that [00:25:00] your circadian clock will super respond to. It's like, okay, I see it. That's, that is the signal to be to receive wakefulness inputs or like, this is a, the sun is up, light is happening.
And you don't tend to see that for other parts of the spectrum, like maybe like longer wavelengths, for instance. So that it's pretty incontrovertible that the, the, the chunk that normally looks blue has the biggest effect on your circadian clock. Biology's squishy and annoying.
And so there's like all these things connected. And even if you cut out that chunk of the spectrum, you could still have signals going to your circadian clock through rods and cones, talking to it kind of like. Sort of through the cells that normally handle the communication because they're all touching each other.
What does this, what does this mean in actual practical life? Like I would say, like think about does your environment feel bright to you [00:26:00] in the evening and make it. Darker. Don't care so much about the color because your eyes are unreliable narrators when it comes to exactly what you're seeing, generally think of like warmth as better than cool light.
'cause cool light is probably gonna have more of the, the blues. You wanna try and avoid the 480 nanometer And then in terms of literally like, okay, is my house, is my house dark enough right now? Don't stress so much about side lamps, even your phone. If it's on like a low brightness setting, worry more about overhead lighting that feels white because like, that is what's actually going to, for a lot of people, be conveying day signals.
And doesn't matter if it like looks blue or looks green, like just, does it feel bright and is it above you and is it, is it lighting the space? That's what you wanna try and avoid as the day goes on. [00:27:00]
Rosy: Yeah. No big lights on the day.
Olivia: Yeah, yeah, no big lights.
Rosy: Indeed, indeed. Summarize, overall light exposure, very important. Sleep hygiene, very important. Trying to keep a regular schedule as much as possible. Reducing light exposure, especially in the evening. And is you know, would you cue these things to, let's say, sunset in your, in your local environment? Or is it more just sort of like before you want to go to bed? I would say
Olivia: before you want to go to bed, like, like if people are really happy on like a later schedule.
I think that's generally fine. If it's super late, like it's after 1:00 AM Oh, okay. You might wanna move it a little earlier. People after 1:00 AM tend to do worse if that's their bedtime, but that's probably because they're just not getting enough light during the day 'cause they're sleeping through the the time when super bright light is available for free and you want it. So they're, they're sort of limiting the, the [00:28:00] maximum amount of day night difference they can have. Yeah, and I, I would just say like, start to think of your sleep as a rhythm, the same way you think about your breathing as a rhythm and your heartbeat as a rhythm.
And walking like, right, like walking is a rhythm. And I'm sure also there's like moves and pull that, that like you're in a rhythm and you're just like, you're just doing it. And like, like a groove is a rhythm that's effortless. It's got momentum. You don't have to think about it. And when you, when you look at these like, like sort of.
People in pre-industrial societies who are like, yeah, we don't have a sleep problem, even though they're sleeping five to seven hours a night. Like, I think what they have is like a light dark groove. They, they don't have any other choice. They're just getting it from the sun and it's setting themselves, it's setting them up for, for success.
So really try to, to make it so your light dark pattern is sort of as, consistent and, and like free from like, like you needing to, to think about it [00:29:00] the same way, like your steps are when you're walking, where you're just like, yeah, I have this natural gait. I'm doing it because you know what it feels like to be in a groove when you're walking versus like left foot, right foot, left foot, you're like stepping over like shattered glass on the, the ground.
And then I think the, the last thing I'll sort of say there is like. So much focus has been on sleep duration, right? So much focus has been on. You need to get x number of hours per night. And, and it's funny, like you can absolutely see performance differences when people sleep less. You can also see those performances differences kind of go away when you, you lie to them about how much sleep they got and you're like, yeah, you, you slept great or you didn't sleep great.
Like there's, there's like a lot of psychology going on with sleep duration. I think, I think sleep regularity, if your duration is at some, you know, non upsettingly, low value is, is more important. And I think that's kind of the story coming out of the, the sleep field today. So I usually don't think, Hey, did I sleep well last night?
In terms of duration at all. I'm like, Hey, did I, [00:30:00] did I have a good dark, I'm like, did I, did I have a good dark the whole time versus a good night's sleep? And if I did, I feel pretty good.
Rosy: Yeah. And I think that's, I don't know, kind of comforting. 'cause that's something you can have generally a lot more control over than like, let's say stress that might be impacting your ability to sleep well.
Olivia: A hundred percent. Like, like nothing makes it harder to go to sleep than like the panicked certainty that you're killing yourself by not sleeping. Whereas you just turn off a light, you put on an audio book, you stay in the dark, you pretend light at night isn't an option for you. Like the, you're camping, the light switches aren't there.
And you give yourself credit for doing something good for your body. Like staying in the dark at night is good for your body. Don't, don't make it so dark that you like trip and fall. If, if somebody like, is like, I need to stay in the dark and they break their leg, I'll feel really bad. But like, like the, the act of reinforcing nighttime for your body is like getting it into the groove.
It's like it's helping you [00:31:00] tomorrow. Because all minutes of the day add up, right? And like those minutes at night when you're awake, but you're in the dark, that's adding up as a positive relative to being up and reading a book in the light and like, like just sort of doing daytime things during the nighttime.
Rosy: Yeah. So some nice actionable steps that everyone can take. Speaking of actionable steps, if folks wanted to say, learn more about sleep groups where could they do that? My
Olivia: book, Sleep Goove available where books are sold online. It's a lot of what I said here. It, it really tries to, to make people think about sleep, like they think about.
Seeing a ball bounce or a kid on a trampoline or a swing, just like an intuition for it versus this like mysterious unknown and unfathomable abyss. And it also has some charming illustrations and there's a great [00:32:00] audiobook. It is really wonderful woman recorded an audiobook for me. So check out Sleep group where, where you find books.
Rosy: And I'll have a, I'll have a link in the, the down there. And, you know also a good place to look for more citations and information if you're like, I love to do this. Really wanna get, get knowledgeable about sleep. Well, hey
Olivia: Rosy, thank you so much for having me. This was a blast,
Rosy: of course. Always, always a joy to catch up.
And I think super relevant for us as pole dancers, right? And, you know, just people with bodies who. Want to feel good in them and not bad in them. And I think that establishing like good sleep hygiene and, and light hygiene and getting a good dark, as you say is a great step that we can take pretty straightforward to, to help with that.
