094: Dr. Molly Maloof, Entrepreneur & Author: How Mitochondrial Health Is Your Ticket To Great Sleep! [The Spark Factor]

Welcome to the Sleep is a Skill podcast. My name is Mollie McGlocklin, and I own a company that optimizes sleep through technology, accountability and behavioral change. Each week I'll be interviewing world class experts, ranging from doctors, innovators, and thought leaders to give actionable tips and strategies that you can implement to become a more skillful sleeper.

Let's jump into your dose of practical sleep training.

Welcome to the Sleep is a Skilled podcast. My guest today is Dr. Molly Maloof, and I'm grateful to say she has become a friend, and I was first actually introduced to her a few years back during the height of the Covid Pandemic. When we were all kind of stuck inside and I happened to see a presentation that she was giving, a virtual presentation that she was giving on the powers of continuous glucose monitors and being able to impact your health as a whole, but certainly its effects on sleep.

So she kind of got on my radar back then and since then she. Just really made a big splash in the world of health. She's been doing this for quite some time, but I became aware of her, uh, her work around that time and ongoingly, and I think you're gonna be really interested in some of the things that she has to say in regards to health and longevity and how all of this can impact your sleep results.

So let me read her bio to give you a little sense of the work that she's up to. Dr. Molly Maloof is passionate about extending health span through her medical practice, personal brand, and entrepreneurial and educational endeavors. She's passionate about optimizing health through food technology and psychedelics.

She provides personalized medicine to world-class entrepreneurs, investors, and executives. Since 2012, she has worked as an advisor or consultant to over 50 companies in the digital health, consumer health and biotechnology industries. She has been an educator since medical school and pioneered a course on healthspan for three years at Stanford.

Univers. She's publishing a book in 2023 this year on Biohacking for Women with Harper Wave Books. She's also the founder of a company that aims to reveal how the science of love can unlock the capacity for healing, connection, and creation within everyone. She's taking a platform approach by creating a variety of products and services that increase and enhance love within and between individual.

So clearly Dr. Molly Maloof has far-reaching education and expertise, and we are going to dive into that deeply on today's conversation. Just a quick aside, as far as technology had a little technical issue and my mic was not fully working, we were gonna do a live podcast and we switched over to virtual and.

In that switch, something happens. So apologies that on my side, the audio is not the best. We are committed to having great quality podcast experience. So do know the Future podcast, and most of our podcasts do have a bit of higher expectations for the audio. But just bear with us on this conversation.

And without further ado, let's jump into the podcast. So I get a lot of questions around sleep supplements, and I'm very hesitant to just throw out a whole laundry list of possibilities. One, I don't think it's the most responsible thing to do. I really do believe in testing to see what types of supplements make sense for you.

And two, because I really truly believe that most of the things that you can do to improve your sleep are behavioral, psychological, environmental in nature, and often don't cost a. However, there is one supplement that I personally take every day and that I do feel quite comfortable with suggesting for most individuals to experiment with because of a couple of reasons.

It's high safety profile and high rates of deficiencies in our modern society. Some put the numbers as somewhere around 80% of the population being deficient in this one area, and that is magnesium. So magnesium has been called the calming mineral, and some report that magnesium can increase gaba, which encourages relaxation on a cellular level, which is critical for sleep.

Magnesium also plays a key role in regulating our body's stress response system. Those with magnesium deficiency usually have higher anxiety and stress levels, which negatively impacts sleep As. Now before you go out and buy a magnesium supplement, it's important to understand that most magnesium products out there are either synthetic or they only have one to two forms of magnesium.

When in reality, your body needs all seven forms of this essential sleep mineral. So that's why I recommend a product from my friends over at Bio Optimizers. They have created something called the Magnesium Breakthrough, and taking this magnesium before bed helps you relax and wake up, refresh and energize.

And while we don't recommend that you go two nuts on looking at all the sleep stage classifications on all your wearables. I will share anecdotally that many clients have reported improvements in their deep sleep trend numbers. Again, I don't want you going nuts on the sleep stage classification numbers on your wearables, but I do wanna let you know about that because I know that many of you do reach out on questions of how to improve your deep sleep.

So I also love that bio optimizers offers free shipping on select orders, and they offer a 365 day money back guarantee on all their products. Plus they have a customer satisfaction rating of 99.3%. Very impressive, and you can get 10% off magnesium breakthrough. Again, this is the same magnesium that I use every single.

And finally you can get 10% off magnesium breakthrough. Again, that's the magnesium supplement that I use every single night by going to www dot mag m a g. So mag breakthrough.com/sleep as a skill, and be sure to use the code sleep as a skill for 10%. And welcome to the Sleep at the Skilled Podcast. Oh my goodness.

I'm excited for my guest today, Dr. Molly Maloof. Thank you so much for taking the time to be here. Oh my God. Thank you for having me. It's such an honor. Yeah. Hi. It's amazing. Two Mollys in the house. This is just, I know. Great conversation. This is the rare moment, you know. Okay. Dr. Molly, you are really someone that I admired for a very long time.

The work that you're doing, I is just so profound in many areas of health and wellbeing. So really the struggle for me is how to fine tune. What we can share on this podcast, cuz they're soap bar reaching in many different areas that you are touching on. I love the work that you're doing in psychedelics, mitochondrial health, biohacking, just, you know, really out of the box thinking and drawing conclusions in a really unique and cool way.

So one just how did you find yourselves in the position that you are as it relates to health and you know, really. Putting out this work that you are reading right now, which is this upcoming book that I think many of us are excited to have and to read and to explore, how did this all come to be that you found to have this interest in this area of health and wellbeing?

Whoa. It's a big question. I've been, I've been answering this a lot lately. Yeah. Cuz I've been on a lot of podcasts for this book. But basically, My entire life I've been obsessed with health because I was not a healthy child and I had to overcome a lot of illnesses. I had chronic infections as a baby cuz I was born to a C-section because of a core prolapse.

So I kind of just like grew up in hospitals and like very early memories being hospitalized from pneumonia, having strt throat, having my tonsils out. Just like always being at the doctor and then, you know, waking up to human suffering and just deciding, you know, what I really wanna help be. I just really wanna help other people.

and that was me in fifth grade. And I just really made a very clear decision in my life that I wanted to be a doctor. And then from there I went and basically, you know, became a doctor. And in the process of. Growing up, I mean my, I was such a driven child that I just like felt very much like I have to perform well, I need to do well in school.

And I always, I always thought I have a chest strap on right now, actually I'm taking it off. Hello? Chest strap. Uh, I'm like, come on. I get . You know, I use this app called Hanu Health and it measured my stress bubble. Yeah, but I'm wearing it all day long and I'm just like, I want this thing off right now. I went to high school and I remember learning about Monell and I was like, oh my God, it be so great if I didn't have to sleep.

I could just do so much more work. And I just, I had the mindset that sleep was optional, and then I got to medical school and I really started realizing that I just wasn't taking great care of myself. . So I started really optimizing my lifestyle and I, one of the things I was doing to optimize my lifestyle was like, I was like, I'm gonna stop pulling Allnighters.

Yeah. And that actually helped me do better in school. But then I got to residency. And residency is just all about sleep deprivation. And it really affected my mental health. It really affected my happiness. I was super miserable in residency and.  when I decided to commit my life to really optimizing health instead of just fixing sickness.

Yeah, that was when I, the first thing I did to, you know, optimize my health and start biohacking was my sleep. It was literally the first thing. I was like, wow, this is the thing. And interestingly, in medical school, I actually worked with a sleep doctor. I learned a lot about sleep that summer cuz I was basically doing an internship and I was studying sleep and I was reading books on, in textbooks on sleep and I was actually helping her to research a book for sleep.

So I got a ton of experience learning about things like drowsy driving and what sleep fabrication does to the body. And so once I got into my career and I realized that like, I mean I was basically self-employed at the time. I could decide my schedule. That's when I started really being like, oh my god, sleep matters.

Like I need to care about.  and so I started working on, first and foremost circadian rhythms. I lived in a really dim apartment and I, so I didn't have good light and circadian rhythms were the thing that I was like, I actually got a, like a light monitor from a company. . Yes. And it actually showed me that my circadian rhythms were off.

And so I would go on the roof of my building daily just to get sunlight. I was like, this is something I need to do. And eventually I moved to a place that had very, very bright lighting, which is the opposite of my other place. And it was crazy how much it completely like changed my experience with with sleep.

I actually even got better sleep because I had more connection to light dark cycle. . Um, so circadian rhythms were really important. When I learned how to hack jet lag, that was a really big moment in my life, but really discipline around realizing the power of sleep to heal and realizing that it made me smarter to get more sleep.

That was like a big life change for me cuz most of my life had been about, you know, like not sleeping to get ahead. And then I was like, with something flipped in my brain, it was like, no, I need to sleep more to do. , that's when a lot of things changed for me. I actually think it made a, played a major role in my, in my healing journey, and I evaluate sleep on every single client.

And I've been really surprised at how I've seen so many healthy young people have problems with sleep. And so it's like I still meet people every day that are ambitious and hardworking and tell me they don't need a lot of sleep, and I'm just like, Nope. I don't believe that almost anybody needs three to four hours of sleep.

It's such a tiny fraction of the population that can actually survive on that little of. I'm convinced that everybody needs to get largely seven to eight hours a night, and, and you're doing yourself a massive disservice if you don't get that. I couldn't agree more. Uh, thank you so much for sharing kind of the journey that you've been on and the personal relationship and connection and seeing how both things can look, what life can look without that proper sleep.

And then the EC flip side, which unfortunately many people, I think, are not even experiencing the flip side much throughout the course of their life, sadly. So I'm glad that you can, one, be a stamp for that, and two, help ensure that you're prioritizing that with your.  and I'm curious, how have you seen that interconnect with the work that you're doing with your book and the focus on mitochondrial health?

Wondering if you can help bridge that gap for us. Sure. So really, if you wanna understand mitochondrial health, you need to understand the role of sleep in sort of this stress paradigm, right? Correct. So I want people to conceptualize mitochondria like batteries, even though they are also what are known as capacitors, which means that they make charge and they store charge and they deploy charge.

So you got these batteries in your body that literally create life, like without energy flow. You'd be.  and we charge our batteries with the food that we eat, right? We eat food, goes into our cells, gets turned into substrate, gets, goes into our, um, digestion, gets broken down into substrates which go into ourselves and become fuel to power the mitochondria.

But we often break the MIT mitochondria with a diet that isn't properly designed, right? So people eating the wrong foods, wrong times, wrong amounts, certainly can really damage mitochondrial function, specifically old processed. , but then you need to move your body to create the signal to create more energy because your cells will literally down-regulate mitochondrial production and mitochondrial function.

If they're not set at the signal that they need more energy, one of the biggest signals is movement, but then the biggest drain of our batteries is our stress. That's either psychosocial, stress, stress from our relationships working at home, or environmental stress or financial stress, or you know, you name it, life is stressful.

There's a lot going on in. , but sleep is so important for recharging the batteries. So we have light and dark cycles. We have sort of sleep and wake cycles. We have stress and recovery cycles. We have movement in recovery cycles. We have fasting and feasting cycles, right? We have heat and cold cycles, and we have hypoxia, hypoxia cycles.

And these are, all of these toggling switches actually send signals to a mitochondria to adapt. And so if you do not sleep, you are literally. Stressing your body and increasing stress hormones. So cortisol goes up at night if you do not sleep. And so sleep deprivation actually increases the amount of stress we feel, so it actually drains the batteries, and so you're not recharging them and you're draining the batteries at the same time.

This is why it's kind of important that we get on a proper circadian rhythm because it's intimately tied to our survival. It's intimately tied to our health and to our energy production. Anybody knows that if you go a night without sleep, you feel like shit, you, you feel tired. So we know that we need sleep for restoration.

We know we need sleep for, um, the lymphatic system activation for cleaning out the garbage of our brains and for rest and recovery repair. I mean, mo there's so much epigenetic signaling happening in the middle of the night when you're not awake. So sleep is productive. And I try to teach people that you can't just look at sleep as this thing you that's optional.

It's like there's a bunch of housekeeping that needs to be done when your eyes are closed. And I personally look at sleep as like a tool for problem solving. Like I, I love sleeping because I use my dreams as a, as a window in my subconscious. So it's just like sleep can become this really beautiful special place where you can come up with new ideas.

It's a great creative place where you can, you know, like when I go to bed, I think about what I wanna dream about and then oftentimes I dream about it. So, like, you know, James Cameron, when he created, um, avatar, it came to him in a dream. So there's so much that we can look at sleep to do for us. Not as this thing we have to do, but this thing that we get to do.

Oh, I love that reframe. That's fantastic. And it, that really fits for me. I'm reading right now why we dream, not why sleep, but why we dream. And I feel like, Ooh, it sounds like something that you would, I've gotta read this. You gotta read this and I think you would really resonate with this. Um, that really brings this full cool, like mystique and intrigue, but also cultural background and kind of some history of how we've related to our dreams, but then also modern research and science around what we so far understand about dreams is still a lot of question marks, but.

Um, really, really fascinating stuff, but I appreciate that. Sounds like you have some real intentionality around your dreams and the kind of setting yourself up powerfully as it relates to just your opportunity to get sufficient sleep, to be able to have sufficient REM cycles, to have these dreams be a part of your kind of day-to-day.

Yeah. So fantastic and. I love that you underscored the importance of optimizing our strategic rhythm. And we talk a ton about that over here in . The skill. And one thing that we really wanna do some more on is looking at understanding our afrian rhythm. And we do have, uh, we've had a number of people Yeah.

That have touched on this and actually been some of, are more popular Yeah. Podcasts so far to date. Um, and certainly I note that you're taking a stand for women's health, women's biohacking, and I'm just curious if you have any call outs as it relates to, Time throughout our cycle and how that could connect with how we're managing our sleep.

Well, what's really interesting that a lot of women don't even think about, I didn't actually put this as a book, but it's kind of an important topic and it's the role progesterone. Yes. So progesterone naturally makes you more tired and it actually makes you a little bit more, it's actually something that women who are going to menopause when they're replacing progesterone, oftentimes their doctors will tell them to apply it at night cuz it actually can improve their.

So a lot of women who are wondering like, why do I feel different four times of the month? Like, why is it that like part of the month I feel really energized and part of the month where I feel really tired? Part of it is these hormonal shifts in our bodies that are changing the way we feel. And so we need to learn to like just honor and respect our bodies and not just assume that we need more coffee.

Personally, a massive coffee lover, but I'm not currently drinking coffee because two months ago, Yeah, I just, I got my cortisol levels backed and they were way too high. Oh my God. We are the twins right now. That was exactly too, and with me. Yeah. My cortisol levels were too high. So I'm bringing down some of the coffee and Yeah.

You know, I'm Bud Water and I'm like, you know, it took me years to realize that like coffee, even though I love it, is actually gonna make me more stressed and potentially more exhausted. Because what it does is it, it covers up tiredness, so you push yourself longer hours. But you actually don't feel how tired you are because it caffeine binds the adenine receptor.

And adenosine is a signal for, for tiredness. And so if you don't feel the tired signal, you just keep working. This was me, most of my youth. It was just drinking literally cups of espresso. Yeah. And it wasn't until I recognized that like when you drink a cup of coffee, it's kind of the equivalent of like a scary movie.

So it really does energize, like it gives you a stimulus of stress. Yeah. We're basically like addicted to stress in our culture. You know, we're addicted to the stress of watching the news, watching scary movies, watching scary tv.  and we're also like, we're using, like a lot of people take synthetic stress hormones in order to focus.

And coffee is a good example of like a way to actually induce natural stress in your body by forcing your body to release stress hormones. So if you are running at the end of this year, like many of us are, Feeling like, uh oh, I'm feeling way too tired, way too stressed, way too wired, way too edgy. If you're tired and wired, you're probably high cortisol and it's a time for you to wean off of coffee and yeah, I'm not technically doing any work with mud water now, but I did design a coffee detox program with them so you can actually go on the websites for free and it teaches you how to wean off coffee without getting headaches, which is pretty cool.

Amazing. Oh, that sounds like a natural partnership too, with the mushroom component and the whole thing. That's fantastic. Good. Okay. Well, I'm happy to hear that and certainly we always appreciate those kind of. Tips and tricks for people that are looking to manage the, you know, sympathetic response, parasympathetic response as it relates to sleep.

So really great stuff. So for women, then, part of your kind of call it then understanding this rhythm that we go through, we talked about our cycles to, uh, touched on loosely a bit of the cycles for our circadian rhythm, but not forgetting or maybe for many people even beginning to learn about the fact that we have this Brady rhythm.

that happens for us around a month every, you know, 28 days Yeah. Or so for each individual and managing that accordingly and how we can, do you have particular ways that you think about that as it relates to your sleep well? It's funny cuz like in my book, I really go through nutrition, fitness, and stress levels a lot.

Sure. Around the different parts of the cycle. Okay. One of the things that a lot of women don't realize is that you naturally get a little bit higher cortisol near the end of the month anyway when you're starting to head towards menstruation. Yeah. So it's natural to feel edgier before you start your period.

you know, you just have to like, give yourself whatever rest you need. And that's really fundamental. Like, I always feel way more energized at the beginning of the month. And then near the end I'm just like, like, man, why is it that this, this is happening again? You know, . So I would just say like, in terms of honoring your cycle is like, recognize that, uh, being a little bit irritable and a little edgy.

Could actually, especially if you're hitting your, your forties, women need to look at their hormones with a doctor and make sure that they're not progesterone deficient. It could be really common for women who are in perimenopause or in their late thirties, early forties, hard driving women who are really stressed.

Very often you can actually have low hormones, and so there's a whole world of innovation happening in this space right now. But what I would say is that like if you are wondering why are you feeling a little bit edgier near the end of the month, and maybe that's potentially affecting your. , it could be due to hormonal dysfunction that you want, you would wanna look into.

Yeah. Quick question on that. We do get a lot of people asking about. You mentioned progesterone and you know, so some people metin, oh, I'm considering progesterone creams or supplementation. Do you have any call outs for that as a possible approach if they are deficient of taking that, yeah. Supplement.

Okay. I mean, it's really common in functional medicine to prescribe progesterone when it's low, especially if you see. , there's an imbalance of estrogen, progesterone. Yeah, so it's, I recommend getting a cycle map just to look at your cycle and overall just find out like, where are you at in both of these, because progesterone deficiency can certainly contribute to estrogen dominance.

If estrogen is high, in progesterone is low, and in that case, replacing with progesterone along with your cycle, specifically the second 14 day, like the, the second half of your cycle, it's typically when you would wanna start it after ov. . But again, this is a conversation you really gotta have with your doctor to make sure that you're a candidate, because there's plenty of reasons why you may not.

But it's funny because if you are gonna star with Testone, you might actually wanna take it at night because it may end up having, um, helping you with your sleep. So, sure. Great. And as we discuss, you know, hormones and different changes that might happen as we age, one thing that comes up a lot is, More, um, an influx of people being possible candidates for being diagnosed with sleep apnea and essentially being missed with that, particularly women.

And I wonder if you can share a little bit about sleep apnea and some of the kind of misnomers of the possible people that might be affected backs. Sure. Well, first off, I'm certainly not an expert in sleep apnea, but I've certainly learned a lot, right, by having multiple clients get sleep apnea. And these were thin men, by the way.

These are certainly not. What you would expect, like o the obese client who has, uh, thick neck like that, that's sort of the traditional concept of sleep apnea. And you see that a lot, but it can happen to people who are lean. And so typically people who are lean, it can relate to airway obstruction as a result of potentially jaw misalignment or P issues or simply your tongue, you know, dropping into your, you know, your tongue sort of causing a little bit of.

If your mouth is open and your tongue is malpositioned, it can also contribute to some airway blockage. So mouth breathing is a problem for both men and women, you know, and it's also contributing to facial problems, like the people's faces are changing because of it. So I actually, interestingly, a family member of mine, I need to like approach them cuz we spent some time together over Thanksgiving.

and I noticed they were snoring and I noticed that they were mouth breathing and I didn't wanna say anything because I was a little bit like, yeah, I typically yelled at if I try to correct my family's health, yes. But it's like pretty clear and obvious that if you do end up putting on a few pounds, you can actually cause some airway obstruction as well from just excess tissue in your throat.

So it's like you really gotta get a proper sleep. Store to find out really where it's coming from, because it can come from up for airway, it can come from neck, it can come from all sorts of different causes. And so it's just key to di get a, get a diagnosis. And so first thing, first, the easy step that you can do is there's apps you can download and get prescribed, like the app called Renia.

And it's like a tool you can just have, have a doctor prescribe you and you can get a, you know, a, a audible sleep. Basically detecting if you're snoring or if you're gasping. And then on top of that, there's other companies that will send you like wearable devices. I can't remember the name of this one company.

But basically they'll send you a wearable device for home use and it'll basically listen and it will detect movement around sleep apnea. And so it can do a decent job at diagnosing it at home. So these are kinda like consumer grade products, but you, what you really wanna do is actually get a clinical grade sleep study and a clinical sleep center.

and that's gonna give you the most accurate assessment. But it does require you to spend, you spend the night at a doctor's office, but getting a C P A P machine can really transform a person's hell, and it's really important that you properly get your C P A P machine to fit you properly. So these masks can be malpositioned.

And one of my clients was using a C P A P.  and he was like, he really felt like it was working and that it wasn't working. I wasn't sure why, and I was like, well, let's look at your model. And then we actually troubleshoot. He hadn't even turned on the app that came with the C. And we discovered that by looking at the app and by looking at the settings on the app, we could actually discover that, oh, in fact, it might have been been masked misalignment that was causing the issue.

So we fixed the mask and it fixed the, the problem. So sometimes you need a doctor just to help you kinda like work through these issues with these devices cuz they can be a little bit confusing. But suffice to say that like, you know, it's becoming a bigger and bigger problem. I've seen it more and more in younger people and sometimes people need to get surgery to fix their jaw.

I've actually seen people get full surgeries to change their jaw. It did change their appearance a little bit, but it was surprising at. It did completely ameliorate their C apnea. So it can be a really long journey for people to actually solve. Absolutely. And, and often the change in appearance, not always, but often has even been pointed to improving our perception of beauty.

So this is a whole conversation. I know you, um, lectured at Stanford. Yeah, I was at Stanford recently for, uh, they kinda had a, a sleep meeting, if you will. And, uh, they had many, many people there speaking on the topic. The latest and greatest in sleep and they were speaking to how we breathe and its connections with beauty and the change in skull shape and what's happening there.

The this malalignment that you're speaking to and some of the effects really deviating from some improvements that could be made if we correct the root cause and the root problem. So I so appreciate you speaking to that. And then some of the kind of both consumer grades, things that approaches that we can.

At-home sleep study tests and some of the being F D A approved and beyond and then checking into, you know, sleep labs to go a little further. Really important call outs because, you know, we can talk about all these things to improve sleep, but if you've got sleep apnea and that's not being handled, then kind of good luck, uh, was really impacting, yeah, your health.

So then beyond this, one of the things that we like to. Floor to even get more clear on how are our guests that are really passionate around these topics of sleep, how are they managing their sleep? So we like to always ask a few questions and learn some more by understanding what you are doing. So I think this might be helpful for our audience.

So one would be what are you doing as it relates to your nightly sleep routine right now? And I'm sure your book launch, your Traveling, all these things, I'm sure it's dynamic, but what might we learn? They're on the road or at. Well, I'd say that like first and foremost, I really do like to maintain a healthy sleep schedule.

It really does make a difference in my health and I, you know, generally before I go to bed, I think it's really important that people have prepper, oral hygiene. Yeah, so it's not just about brushing your teeth, it's also about flossing and tongue scraping and really cleaning your mouth. Like it's so important.

I don't use mouthwash. Most mouthwash is really not good for you. Listerine is actually gonna inhibit. Nitric oxide production. It actually decreased sexual function, which is interesting. So would definitely avoid Listerine as much as you can. And then I've always washed my face before I go to bed. It's always, it's a habit since eighth grade since I started wearing makeup.

And so washing my face and you know, playing, you know, whatever cream I'm using regularly, which is typically I use this sleeping mask. This company, young Goose. It's great product. Yeah. Okay. And then I, well often, I mean like, it really depends on if I'm taking a bath or not. So some, most nights I'll take a bath, and then in the bath I'm like just totally trying to wind down and relax.

Sometimes, you know, reading a book, sometimes watching something on my phone, sometimes, you know, reading, reading a magazine or something. But like, I like to spend time sometimes just meditating and just sitting in a bathtub. During the full moon and the New Moon, I like to ma create intentions and oftentimes I, I do that in the bathtub.

So bath bathing is very important to me. It's a good way to just like raise your body temperature before you go to bed. And then like, I love my bed so much. I have this like amazing bed and I have a, it's memory foam with a mattress topper was really great bedding from the company store that my mom got me.

And it's like such an incredibly wonderful, comfortable bed that I just like love getting into it every.  and typically before bed I will read, or I do have to say I, I try not to watch tv, but I have been watching the the White Lotus, cuz it's exceptional television. I heard amazing things, but I watched the season, but I haven't seen the second season.

It's really good. It's really, really good. So I don't like to use a lot of blue light before I go to bed. I do have blue lockers that I rarely remember to use. Yeah. But I also try not to use my phone very regularly before I go to sleep. I have a whole room, like a whole living room of biohacking. So it really depends on the night and how I'm feeling.

Yeah. Like whether it's the morning or the evening, I like to use some one of the biohacking tools. Sometimes I'll lay on a BioMAT and just like finalize the things I'm doing or read. Sometimes I'll lay on the P E M F mat. Sometimes I'll use it there again, but like I, I do like to, it's, it literally took me so many months of not getting proper recovery this year to actually get into the habit of using my recovery tools.

Like I did not, actually, they were, I hadn't even pulled them out of the boxes and stuff. They were, I'd moved into my place in June and I had all these recovery tools, but I wasn't using them and I was getting really stressed out and I was. Molly, you have literally every tool you can think of. Why are you not using these?

Well you said So I had to say, you know, I just say, now you gotta take your own medicine. You gotta do it. Yeah. So that's my evening routine. It's like, it's typically like winding down in bed and I like to spend a good 15 minutes before I go to sleep setting intentions and. Praying and visualizing. Think ju just thinking through the world, like the, the life that I wanna live.

Yeah. And just trying to spend that time really just relaxing, praying, going into sleep. But like, I love that space between sleep and wake, that beautiful liminal space where you can really just get into that, like data waves and just, you know, really think about your life. And so I just, I think it's a powerful tool.

Very powerful. Oh, amazing. I love that. I love your point around how sometimes when it can be swimming and all these kind of biohacking tools and gadgets and what have you, then sometimes we don't remember to utilize them and the difference that can be made when we actually start stacking those and applying those, so it's fantastic.

Yeah, and I love your callout too, around mouthwash. You know, you've been the only person I. Besides Cor Bki mentioned that Forwar and then another expert on nitric oxide. So I appreciate you bringing that full circle. Cause not enough people are speaking about that, so it's great. Yeah. And then your morning routine, we're making the argument that that can impact our sleep and I love that you pointed to that.

You had literally even tracked quantifiably, your light output actually downstairs just got delivered. This. Button that tracks the amount of light that you're getting throughout the course of the day. It's l y s is the name of the company. They the largest database of light information on the planet. So really excited to kind of explore more of that.

And I love that you've been playing with that. So what would you say, um, makes up your morning sleep routine, if you will? Well, I would say that first thing in the morning. He's very similar to the thing, the nighttime, that that 15 minutes right when you're about to wake up is such powerful. It's such a powerful space for manifest.

So if there's one thing that anyone gets outta this podcast today, it's like you've got 15 minutes in the morning and 15 minutes in the evening when you're about to fall asleep. Or you're just waking up where your brain is primed for programming. So program your brain the way you wanna live your life, the way, what do you wanna, whatever you wanna manifest, whatever you wanna do or be, that space is powerful and so harness it.

And so I like to spend that 15 minutes just like thinking about my day. How do I want my day to go? What do I wanna be? What do I wanna do? Do I wanna go to the gym? Do I wanna go ride my bike this morning? I was like, well, I'm gonna ride my bike in the evening, so maybe I'll do higher dose. Just sent me a sauna blanket.

Sure. And I'm like, maybe I'll just do a sauna this morning. And I was like in the sauna blanket, checking my email for like, I don't know how long it was in there for a while.  because I was just thinking to myself, wow, I'm really behind on email. I know I need to go exercise, but it like today is the day where I actually need to do, I need to actually, like, I really need to be checking my email right now.

So yes, welcome in the morning. First thing I do is not check my email. The first thing I do is like try to like program my day for optimal success, but thinking about how do I want my morning to go? And so like before I go to bed every night, I'll check my schedule for the next day. Same like what day, what time am I starting in the morning?

and then what time am I ending in that night? So I like to like just know, okay, what does my morning look like so that I can prepare for my day. I really hate being rushed into the day. It does happen, but it's like my ideal mornings are like actually fairly open for me to design. And so typically it's like usually gonna be a workout sometime in the morning and or if I'm not working out doing something restorative like, like sauna a blanket or sitting in front with a red light for a little while.

But I do like to get some meditation in most days, even if it's 15 minutes. I'm trying to amplify that to be a bit longer. But breath work or meditation is really powerful in the morning just cuz it sets your entire tone of your day. You know, it really changes the whole tone of your day. Today. I actually, instead of meditating, I got this thing called the, the Sonic slider from this woman who gave me a facial and she put this thing on my skin and I was like, wow.

All the things that you did today, the guha tool, this sonic slider tuning fork, and these, like, she's frozen sort of orbs that you put under your eyes. I, I got all these little tools for my skin and I was, I had to say that this tuning fork. I was really fascinated, so I was like, I'm gonna go buy one of those.

It's like a tuning fork that has like a smooth end where you can rub it over your skin. You can buy like a 21 day program through this woman's website. And basically like I was like listening to. Some of her short video is all about really getting in tune with your body and really getting in tune with self-love and in this, in this concept of clearing guilt.

And I really just felt like it was a really fun way to start my it. Sometimes it's fun to change up your routine. Sure. Try new. So I've been playing with that tool in mornings. It really is kind of a wonderful way to just kinda like rub it all over your body. It's really interest. Even if it's just a placebo, I still think that it's great and sometimes I do things just cuz they feel good.

I used to do a lot more fasting when I was more insulin resistant. So years ago I used to be pretty insulin resistant and I didn't even know it. It was like many years ago that I was actually like wearing a blood sugar monitor. It was like 2014. My fasting blood sugar was like in the upper nineties and my postprandial blood sugar was like definitely hitting above one 40 regular.

So I was basically insulin resistant and didn't know it until I started measuring it with my blood sugar monitor. So fasting became a tool for me to heal my insulin resistance. But since I fixed it and I'm pretty insulin sensitive, my hemoglobin A1C is like 4.7. My fasting insulin's like three. My fasting glucose is like 80.

and my postal glucose rarely goes above one 20. On a good day when I was really stressed out, I was hitting higher than that. So fasting is something that I used to do a lot more of and I'm just explaining how like it's really important if you are insulin resistant, if you do have problems with blood sugar metabolism.

To think about how to get stronger in that way. And I would say that time restricted feeding can be really helpful for enhancing sleep. Specifically, meaning like not eating in the middle of the night can actually really enhance your ability to get into that proper deeper sleep. So one of the biggest mistakes people make is they eat too late at night, and that can actually affect their heart rate variability and their sleep.

So highly recommend that. Try to stop eating earlier in the night and then in the morning, you know, like I do, if I'm gonna work out in the morning, I'm going to eat breakfast before I work out. I got that from Stacy Sims, who is an expert on women's athleticism. So I do think that breakfast is one of those things where I do consume it now, but years ago when I was in insulin resistant, I would do more like 16 eight fasting.

Now I do more like 12 to 14 hours fasting maximum. So yeah, like, yep. Typically I'll eat something in the morning, I'll have some mud water. Typically before, I'll go exercise and then shower and makeup, hair, get ready for the. I love that. Okay. That's a fantastic kind of, um, walkthrough of different ways that people could bring some of these modalities into their life.

Still have a variety in spontaneity and yeah, I really appreciate too how you prioritize that time when, you know, people often get frustrated with sleep inertia and that time when after you wake up and few minutes into your day, depending on the person, it might take longer for, for different people, but that time I like.

Speak to the, the magic of that time. You're kind of the Yeah. Clean state and really taking that opportunity to design and plan and be intentional around your day and how it's gonna look and really envision that, visualize that. I think that's really important. I, I don't think we've had enough people really point to that, so it's fantastic.

Well, so much of our lives is like, oh my God, we need to get to the next thing. Yeah. And what life really could look like if we were decided we were all collectively gonna change Yeah. Would be more ease. I was waking up with, So much stress for so many months this year, and I was like, something has to change.

Yeah. Like this isn't working for me. And so what had to change was my routine. I had to create the conditions where I told my assistants like, please don't book me before 10:00 AM. Like, I need my mornings. Like I gotta start, I have to like lower this cortisol and my jumping straight into meetings at 8:00 AM.

My corsol levels were just like crazy high. Yeah. So I still work a lot and I'm in non-stop calls all day long. . I do need a few hours in the morning just to get started before the day begins. And oftentimes like around 9:00 AM I'm like getting started on my day in front of the computer. And so it's kind of key for me to have that time beforehand.

Typically between 6:00 AM and you know, 9:00 AM where I can just like slowly ease into my day. Now, that's gonna change eventually if I have children, obviously. Yeah. But I do appreciate how it feels right now. I mean, it's funny they say that single women are really happiest women. Like there are the happiest people in.

It's probably cause we don't have to do anything in the morning, but like I do anticipate, I mean I grew up in a family where we were very regimented in the morning. Like you got up, you made your lunch, you got ready, you've got into the car, you drove to school through your dad and then you came home and it was like my mornings and my family were always very regimented.

And I think that morning routines are really healthy for children. And for adults. And a lot of people lose their routines when they become adults and they actually miss out on that. You know, sort of like planning and programming your day for success. And that was just how I was raised. And I think it did play a role in my, my evolution.

And I think when I started getting back into my, or my morning routine and my evening routine, like what I first started doing honestly, was I was printing out these notebooks and I actually would create a whole notebook and it. Everything I wanted do in the morning and everything I would wanna do in the evening, and then all of the things during the day that I could do.

And I would just check off the stuff that I did that day. And it was like a notepad, right? And it was like a to-do. I actually might make another one of these because Yeah. These were so, I, I should just publish this thing. It was such a cool, please. You heard in here first . It was just one of those things where it was like I would go to FedEx and I would have these things made and I'm like, I should just publish this.

This is like a thing to make and sell. Yeah. Yes. You know. Do it. Can we take a test please? Yeah. Fantastic. That's, Okay. So lots of kind of, um, insights and, and practical applications there for people to kind of test with. And then also from the physical perspective, what might we see, uh, in your sleep environment on your nightstand or maybe proverbial nightstand as you're traveling or what have you.

Hello, sleep thing there. . Okay. So on my nightstand right now, it's really interesting. I have earplugs, I have mouth tape, I have eye masks, and I'm not actually using my mouth tape right now or the earplugs right now. Sure. But I am using my eye mask and a whole stack of books, and that's on one nightstand.

On the other nightstand, there's like an essential oil diffuse.  and what else is over there? Few different essential oils, but yeah, I'd say like my nightstand is like typically books and then like that, that tuning fork is on there. Yeah. And then I have this like random device called a spectroscope. Oh.

That set me, and it's like a wearable on your face. It like stimulates the mitochondria in your skin. And I do think that my, my friends have commented, they're like, your face looks lifted. And I'm like, I think it's cuz I'm using the spectroscope like every day I am admiring your skin. On half of this podcast, we're gonna have to make sure we show a clip of its glow.

And you think that this is, uh, this product. Thank you. I mean, I just sit in front of a window and it's getting kind of dim. But yeah, I mean the people do, the thing people always ask me about is my skin, but I, I swear to God I don't use that many products. Really good skin comes from within and I wore a little bit of makeup today.

But yeah, the key is, is like proper nutrition, proper exercise, and a few good products is really helpful too. Sure. Wow. Really interesting. I love that. Okay, so then the last question would be, what would you say has made the biggest change to your sleep game or maybe the biggest aha moment moment in managing your.

I think I've kind of mentioned this a little bit, but like the biggest aha. Well, I mean, one of the biggest ahas was when I was in medical school and I realized that like when you are tired, you're drunk. Yeah. You're basically the equivalent of being drunk and that's dangerous. And so like you should never drive a car if you're tired or if you're under the influence of alcohol.

But like people drive tired all the time and we don't arrest them like we do DUIs. Yes, but I'm not saying we should arrest people for not sleeping, but like we kind of need to emphasize how dangerous it is to drive where you're, while you're tired. And there were times when I was driving home from working at the hospital.

and I was like, I am not safe. Like I should not be doing this. This is not safe. I just think it's so important that we wake up to the reality of the power of sleep and how not sleeping is really detrimental to hell. Like it's a carcinogen. Like shift work is a carcinogen. So like I just think it's really key to be able to realize like some of my biggest breakthroughs were like just realizing, whoa.

DRA driving is like drunk driving and shift work is like a carcinogen and also like just your sleep can be a profound place where you can get work done. You don't have to sacrifice. Sleep for work, you can get work done and problem solve in your sleep, which is really cool. I love that approach. That's fantastic.

Such an important reframe for people to really have in their repertoire as they are beginning to embark on this prioritization of their sleep. To have that so it's not like you're trading one thing for another, that you actually are augmenting your results. Fantastic. Well, I'm sure people listening are gonna wanna learn more about you and the book, so what are the best ways for them to do.

Definitely go to my website www.drmolly.co because that will be where you'll find my book and all sorts of additions to the book are gonna go on the website as well. You know, you can search for me an Apple Podcasts. I'm on a lot of podcasts these days. I'm on instagram@drmolly.co. I'm on Twitter and LinkedIn at Molly Maloof m.

And yeah, those are the best ways to mind me. Fantastic. And I definitely recommend following Dr. Molly on all those platforms. I officially love following her on Instagram. Your stories are great, like really, really some just fun and stuff that you share routinely. So get on there, make sure you follow her and get that book.

I'm excited and I believe I'm getting a copy sent very quickly, very shortly, so I'm very excited. So having said all that, I really appreciate you not only taking the time, but really underscoring the importance of sleep and the difference that that can make on your journey for help. It's. You know, really a bit of still a radical thing in a lot of ways.

It's still the newer place to stand for people to really, really emphasize this area. So thanks for always being a pioneer in many areas of health, and certainly in this one, it makes a big difference. So again, thank you for your time and the work that you're doing. Thank you so much, Molly. Aw, amazing.

You've been listening to The Sleep Is A Skill Podcast, the number one podcast for people who wanna take their sleep skills to the next level. Every Monday, I send out something that I call Molly's Monday Obsessions containing everything that I'm obsessing over in the world of sleep. Head on over to sleep as a skill.com to sign up.