THE NIGHT SHIFT MOST GUYS CUT SHORT

The Night Shift, Part 1 of 4

Under the Hood is a weekly look at what's really driving your health, fixed 1% at a time.

Today: What's actually happening while you're asleep, why the two halves of your night do different jobs, and what your watch can and can't tell you.

Life looks a lot different as a coach with three kids now than it did with none.

I never really know how a night's going to go. One son could wake up at 2am and need me. My daughter could be sick and can't settle down. Somebody pees the bed and I'm changing sheets in the dark.

My kids keep me and my wife on our toes. That's parenthood. 😆

My days are long on both ends. And I'll be honest with you, my own sleep isn't where I want it right now. It's something I'm always working on.

What I've learned is to give myself grace when I don't get it right and just try again the next day. That's the skill. Not perfection, progress. Being able to bounce back when life doesn't go your way.

Because here's the thing. Social media is full of sleep advice right now. And a lot of those guys don't have kids. It's easy to have a perfect wind-down routine when nobody's crying down the hall.

So I'll tell you what I tell my clients. Do the best you can with what you have, in the season you're in.

Sleep is the single most important thing you can prioritize.

Look at professional sports. These guys have every resource on earth and sleep keeps landing near the top of the list.

Victor Wembanyama is 22. Just the other day I was reading that he puts his phone on airplane mode at 9pm and always reads before bed. His teammate De'Aaron Fox said that when games end close to midnight, Wemby walks into the locker room wearing blue light blocking glasses.

LeBron is 41, in his 23rd season. The average NBA career is four or five years. He's in bed by 9pm, and he told Steve Nash on his podcast that he does it even when his wife's telling him to stay up. Eight to ten hours a night. Electronics off 30 to 45 minutes before bed. Naps before games.

His trainer says sleep is the best recovery tool they've got. Not the cryotherapy, not the hyperbaric chamber, not the million and a half a year he spends on his body. Sleep.

Twenty years apart and they're doing the same thing. That tells you something.

But the principle carries whether you're getting paid to play or just trying to keep up with your kids. The difference is they get to build their whole day around it and you have to fit it into yours.

That's the game for guys like us. Not copying what a pro does. Figuring out what actually works inside your real life.

That's what the next few weeks are about.

THE DEEP DIVE

Sleep isn't one thing.

There are two kinds and they do completely different jobs.

Deep sleep. This is where your body repairs itself. Tissue, immune system, hormones. You trained hard today? This is where you get paid for it.

REM sleep. This is where you dream. Your brain is sorting through your day. Memory, emotions, anything you learned or practiced.

You need both. One doesn't cover for the other.

What your body's doing while you're out.

Most of your growth hormone gets released during deep sleep. Not at the gym. In your bed, in the first part of the night.

That's the stuff that repairs tissue and helps you hold onto muscle. If you're training hard and sleeping five hours, you're doing the work and skipping the payment.

Testosterone is the same story. Your body releases most of it while you're asleep, and when researchers pull together all the studies on this, short sleep keeps showing up alongside lower testosterone. Cortisol goes the other way, up in the afternoon.

Now I'm not going to oversell this. The evidence is stronger on what you lose than on what you gain. Sleeping nine hours instead of eight isn't going to make you a different man.

So here's how I'd put it to a client. You're not adding anything by sleeping well. You're stopping a leak. And the leak is free to fix.

How the night actually works.

Your brain runs through both about every 90 minutes. That's one cycle.

8 hours is about 5 cycles.
6 hours is about 4.
5 hours is about 3.

The part nobody tells you.

Those cycles aren't the same all night long.

Deep sleep happens mostly in the first half of the night.
REM happens mostly in the second half.

So when you cut your sleep short, you don't lose a little of both. You lose one of them.

Stay up till 1am instead of 10? You just cut into your deep sleep. That's your recovery.

Alarm goes off at 5 when your body wanted 7? You just cut into your REM. That's your brain.

Here's what that means. Sleep 6 hours instead of 8 and you didn't lose 25%. You lost way more REM than that, because you chopped off the end of the night where most of it lives.

This is why catching up on the weekend doesn't really work. You can't bank the second half of the night.

About your watch.

I wear an Apple Watch and a Whoop. They tell me different things about the same night.

That's normal. Every wearable does it a little differently, and none of them are reading your brain. They're guessing based on your heart rate, your movement, your breathing. Some guess better than others.

So don't stare at last night's number.

Look at the trend. Over a few weeks, is it getting better or is it getting worse? That's what matters. One night isn't enough information.

Most wearables give you four:

Awake — time you were up, including wake-ups you don't remember
Light — the on-ramp
Deep — the repair work
REM — the dreaming

Use it for direction. Don't use it to grade yourself.

If you want to go deeper on any of this, Matthew Walker's Why We Sleep is the book I have every client read.

QUICK HITS

FUEL — The 10-3-2-1 rule. 10 hours before bed, no caffeine. 3 hours, no food. 2 hours, no liquids. 1 hour, no screens. Is it perfect? No. Is it simple enough to remember? Yes. And if the screen one is hard because you work late, blue light glasses are the workaround. More on that below.

TRAINING — More isn't always better. More of what matters is. I see guys training five days a week, eating clean, playing ball on the weekend, and sleeping five hours. You can't add your way out of that. The adaptation you're chasing happens at night, not in the session.

FAMILY — Kids learn by what you do, not what you say. If they watch you brag about running on five hours, that's what they think being a grown man looks like. If they watch you go to bed on purpose, they learn that instead.

MIND — Your brain can't tell how tired it is. That's the cruel part. Guys running on five hours usually think they're fine, because the thing that would notice is the thing that's impaired.

ON THE WALL

I had a client tell me he never gets deep sleep. Barely any REM either.

So I challenged him on it. We dug into what he was doing at night and went after the low hanging fruit first. The stuff that was easy to change, not the things that would take him six months to rebuild.

Phone out of the room, or at least far from the bed. Warm shower before bed. And blue light blocking glasses, because he was working late most nights and he was going to be on a screen either way. Telling him to stop wasn't going to happen. So we gave him the glasses instead. That turned out to be the biggest piece.

Same thing Wemby does after a midnight game. Different reason, same fix.

The ritual is what guys overthink. It's got to be personal, it's got to be simple, and it's got to work anywhere. If it only works in your own bed, that's not a ritual. That's a bedroom. You travel and it's gone.

So we kept his small enough that he could do it in a hotel room.

And we tracked it. Because if you're not assessing, you're guessing.

It took some time. But he's getting more deep sleep and more REM now than when we started.

As always, if you know a man in your circle who values his health, feel free to share this with him. I appreciate the support.

Your body is worth stewarding.

1% BETTER

— Coach Joshua

Educational content, not medical advice. Partner with your physician, ideally one who believes in proactive care.

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