Ronnie Landis: Greetings and aloha, welcome to another edition of the holistic life mastery podcast. I’m your host, Ronnie Landis. I’m really, really excited to dive into this episode with all of you. This is with my dear friend and colleague, Matt Gallant. This is the second episode that we’ve done, and we did episode number one a number of months back.

We went really deep into brain health, nootropics, brain supplements, and how to become a real life superhero. I’m Matt Gallant. So if you haven’t listened to that episode, definitely recommend that you go back over it, um, sometime after this episode. But this episode was truly, truly one for the ages. We’ve only done a few episodes over the years, specifically on sleep health and sleep recovery.

How to optimize your life through optimizing your sleep routines. And I have to say with all of the different people talking about sleep health, nobody talks about it quite as in depthly and masterfully as Matt Gallant. This episode is single handedly the best sleep optimization podcast, not only that I’ve ever done on this show, but I’ve ever heard on any show.

And we went deep into a number of different rabbit holes. I share my, my kind of up and down experience with getting optimized sleep as someone who also is kind of a budding expert in the field. And I think that I bring a lot to the table in terms of just my base knowledge on sleep optimization, brain neurochemistry, nervous system regulation, um, human optimization as a general, general theme.

And then Matt just takes it to a whole nother level, like his in depth knowledge and detailed research. on the brain, the body, the nervous system, emotional processing, nutritional supplementation, how to design your life in accord with how to get the best sleep, and also the factors on genetics and longevity that sleep play.

And a lot of people will be very surprised to hear the research that he shares. What happens to somebody not over the long term of them getting poor sleep. But what happens to their blood sugar dysregulation when they only get one night or two nights of really poor quality sleep? It’s very revealing to see how important sleep is and also how challenged all of us are when it comes to optimizing sleep quality for a thousand different reasons with the world that we live in.

But I’m really hoping that this. This highly entertaining and educating podcast really, really calls you into greater commitment to optimizing your sleep quality because ultimately the quality of your health. and your mental and emotional processing is really based in foundationalized in the quality of your sleep.

If you take out all other health factors and just focus on sleep alone, that will likely be the most important factor in all of your health journey. And that’s how important this is. So I’m really excited for you to go deep with me and Matt in this episode. And of course, Matt is the, the CEO of one of my favorite companies, bio optimizers is a company that I’ve partnered with and have worked with for many years.

The link for bio optimizers, nutraceutical products is in the show links or the show notes below. So if you’re going to just go into the show details, it’s biooptimizers. com and the coupon code is lifemastery10. Check out all of their products. We get into some of their products in the episode, particularly their magnesium breakthrough and their sleep breakthrough product, which are going to be essential for your sleep optimization journey.

And then they, he also is the CEO of a sister company called Newtopia, which is by far the best brain supplement in nootropic company in the world. It’s not even comparable. It’s not even close to anything else out there. I am complete advocate of this company and also work with them as a collaboration partner.

Um, that’s new topia. com. And the discount code for their products is also life mastery 10. Check out their company, check out the products. And with all that said, let’s dive deep in this conversation with me and my friend and my colleague, Matt Gallant. Enjoy.

Matt Galant, welcome to the show round number two. How are you doing? Good, man. It’s good to be 

Matt Gallant: back. Absolutely. Loved our last conversation and we got sidetracked from the original intent, but it was a great sidetracking. Well worth it. And we’re back to the original mission, which is to talk about sleep.

Ronnie Landis: Yes, 100%. It was a beautiful sidetrack and it really gave the opportunity to go deep into this phenomenon really of, of new topia and neurochemistry optimization. And that’s, that’s a lot of what I want to talk about today in our, our sleep episode. It’s interesting to me, as I was thinking about this, doing an entire podcast or doing a set of podcasts on sleep, because in the human experience, obviously a third, ideally a third of our human experience is sleeping and it’s such an, it’s such an almost obvious aspect of being a human, like, you know, what, why do we need to do a podcast on sleep?

Sleep is just something we do. We go to sleep, we wake up. It’s just part of the experience. However. There are so many nuances around sleep, especially in the modern day of technological reliance and all the booby traps that inhibit sleep and how critically important sleep is not just to the human experience, but to our health, our wellbeing, our success, our relationships, mood, emotional intelligence.

I mean, everything is impacted. By sleep, as you obviously know, is you’re, you’re such an expert in the field. So that’s why I wanted to dive deep with you on sleep optimization. Before we get into all the technical stuff, I’d love to hear from you. Why are you so passionate about sleep? What, what was your clarion call to start focusing on this field?

Matt Gallant: Yeah, I’ve had kind of two. Frashes because of either lack of sleep or poor sleep. The first one was in my twenties was a workaholic was trying to work a hundred hours a week, training twice a day. It was training people 80 hours a week in the gym. I was recording a hard rock album, studying marketing. And I’m like, I need to cut my sleep.

I don’t have time. So made the foolish decision of hiding my sleep by about 15 minutes every few days, thinking that I’m going to adapt. I’ll cut my sleeve down and don’t worry. My body will adapt because you know, it’s what it does. And I felt decent in the five hour zone, but even in the five hour zone, the interesting thing was I had to be hyper hydrated all the time.

If I was like a micro amount of dehydration, I would crash. I had to eat the right food all the time. If I ate the wrong thing, I’d crash. So there was some really interesting kind of phenomenons happening in terms of optimization, but when I got down to the four hours mark, I crashed and burned, read a book called Power Sleep by James Moss.

It’s an OG kind of sleep quality book and decided, you know what, I’m going the other direction. So I started sleeping eight, nine hours a night. Did that for about a decade and then sleep trackers started coming out the Zio, which was before the O ring. It was a headband. We could talk about different sleep trackers and how accurate they are, but I’ll just give you the punchline.

If something is not measuring brainwaves, it is not that accurate. So about 60 to 70 percent accuracy that includes the O ring, Fitbit, whoop, et cetera. And there’s still good devices and I still recommend people use them. So I started tracking my sleep, got the aura ring, the original one, start tracking that.

And I was getting zero to 15 minutes of deep sleep at night. And all around the same time, I got my testosterone tested. It was in the low two hundreds, got my body fat tested on Dexa scan. It was the highest I’d ever recorded. And I was just waking up feeling dehydrated, groggy all the time, despite sleeping eight, nine hours a night.

And it was just one of those Eureka moments, you know, and I know you’ve had some of those in your health journey where you just realize, whoa, the number one thing I can do right now in my life. Is to invest in my sleep. So that started off my journey and I just realized it wasn’t the quantity of sleep that mattered the most.

It was the quality. Of course, quantity does matter, but to be honest, I’d rather get seven high quality hours. Then nine crappy hours in this really what I was getting before. So I spent about 45, 000 on sleep gadgets, mattresses, Faraday cages, nano V’s PMF devices, you know, tried virtually every sleep molecule that’s legally available.

And yeah, put together, um, phenomenal sleep formulas that we’re excited to share with the world and yeah, it’s been a great journey. So. I’m excited to help people get better sleep. And what I would tell people is that obviously there’s, there’s a group of people that are getting poor sleep, but about two thirds of Americans report sleep issues.

So the other third, the third, that’s getting good sleep. My message to you is there’s another level, like as no matter what level you’re at, even if you’re feeling awesome, if you can optimize that a little further, Think about how your health would, will be positive, positively impacted over the next 60 years, if you’re getting great sleep virtually every night.

So the way I think about sleep is it’s one of the few things that will have a massive impact on you. Tomorrow, and I’ll share some shocking stats and it will have a massive impact longterm. So in terms of short term impact, cause a lot of people can’t really, you don’t really care about what’s going to happen 20, 30, 40 years down the line.

So one is it impacts your blood sugar levels. Um, I was talking to a pro athlete recently and he’s using a CGM. He showed me his data from one bad night of sleep and he looked pre diabetic. 

Ronnie Landis: Mmm. Mmm. 

Matt Gallant: And this is a guy that’s eating, you know, flawlessly does endurance training. And one bad night of sleep just wrecked his glucose ghrelin, which is the hunger hormone goes up about 28%.

So if you’re on a diet, very difficult to stick with it. If you’re in a calorie deficit, about half your, your weight loss will be lean muscle mass versus only about 10%, if you’re getting enough sleep. So crazy difference. So if you’re trying to lose a lot of weight, sleep to me is absolutely found foundational DNA damage.

Hippocampus damage. So that’s from one bad night. Like we’re not talking about bad sleep for years and years. And probably one of the most shocking stats is the difference between daylight savings time. When you gain an hour versus when you lose, it’s about a 45 percent difference in heart attack rates the following day.

So meaning that when people lose an hour of sleep, heart attacks go up about 24 percent and then. Uh, during the fall when people gain an hour, it goes down 21%. So that’s a 45 percent difference. So anyways, the point is it’s a massive, uh, difference and, you know, the damage is real. 

Ronnie Landis: 100%. And so I’m just thinking about my own journey with this, you know, in the early days of my nutritional holistic health journey.

I, I came from the David Wolf era, right? And one of the things that he used to talk about a lot is, you know, you’ll sleep when you’re dead. Right. And I, and I really took that to heart. I really took that deep. And, you know, that was the world that was in the era of the super food revolution and the cacao revolution.

We were doing cacao super food nightclub parties, and it was a great era is one of the most amazing times in my life. And I really took that that to heart because I saw him just like crushing it just like public speaking, like the lifestyle that he led lead was like, you know, it was really one of a kind like he was designed for that.

And I tried to adopt that. And it worked for a while but I also have to admit that I was drinking a lot of cacao I was much younger. My hormones were probably a little bit different. Just, there was a lot of different factors and I was also writing my books a lot. So I was, I was going up into the, the late, the late wee hours of the twilight where my creativity was really high and the noise of the world was very low.

And it worked for a while, but I noticed I started to develop bags under my eyes that still manifest themselves when I get. You know, low sleep and, and things of that nature and things that now just being a lot more mature and a little bit older, I recognize, um, are a little different than what I felt like they were before, you know, I felt like sleep, although I knew sleep was critically important, I felt like I could, I could, I could bypass that, or I could shortcut it, or I could, I could try to like biohack it or whatever around it.

And then I’ve just come to realize that. Maybe some people can, but I don’t really think so. I think that it actually is one of the most critical aspects and I’ve realized too, it didn’t really become so apparent to me until I started doing work on addiction and dopamine resetting in particular, when I started to get into the dopamine reset, um, concept and start applying that to my own life and also to my clients and students.

I started to realize one of the biggest challenges with addiction is actually sleep quality, because obviously when you don’t get very good sleep, you start to rely on external stimulants and compounds and substances and and drugified dopamine. Um, inputs like phone, social media, pornography, all these different things.

They, they become like an external coping mechanism or a soothing mechanism to soothe an internal, we call it disconnection, but I really just look at it as a neurochemical nervous system, dysregulation. And so much of that can be worked out by good sleep. But the problem is, and this is so much of what you address.

The problem is there is a dysregulation within the system. system with them, the body and the brain and the brain’s ability to process whatever is going on life experiences, relationships, stress, um, nutritional deficiencies, whatever may be going on. So I guess the point of that I’m trying to arrive at in, in so much of the question is, Sleep we know is really important, but it’s also an accumulative thing.

So, you know, it’s like, it’s something that we have to train over time. It doesn’t just happen over one night, right? Like if somebody has a history of poor sleep, like myself, for example, that can be a challenge to every day. Do the practices to get good sleep. It doesn’t just happen overnight. If you’ve been dysregulated, I guess is my point.

Matt Gallant: What I heard. Yeah. Underneath. And there was a lot there. There’s a lot there. Yeah. Is a lot of people, their early twenties have amazing sympathetic resilience, meaning that they’re able to go really hard for years, maybe even a decade or more. And be able to handle it. They don’t burn out. Um, that was my twenties.

Our good friend, Wade, that was his, his, his twenties and part of his thirties. And, you know, 20 years ago, Wade and I used to be able to party starting Friday and not sleep until Sunday night. I mean, that would absolutely annihilate me today. And obviously our mitochondria in our twenties is just incredibly powerful and it’s able to just continue charging us no matter what we throw at it.

And as you mentioned, when you start hitting mid thirties, things change and almost by necessity, we need to start becoming more optimized and out of necessity. I think at some point in everybody’s life, we need to learn how to manage our nervous system. And that’s really what I heard in your, in your share is, you know, if you’re just sympathetic all the time.

And you’re not learning how to schedule in and manage some parasympathetic activity, not just during sleep, which is obviously the most parasympathetic thing we can do, but throughout the day, um, we just become dysregulated on a nervous system level. That’s very real. And it kind of, my journey as an entrepreneur has been versus like managing my time, time management, scheduling things, and that was an upgrade, and then I read the powerful engagement.

amazing book, which talked about energy management and there’s some really cool principles, which we can get into because I think it was very relevant. And then in the last few years, it’s really been nervous system management, meaning that if I take a little bit of time throughout the day, and I just take a little, take a little break, and I’m a big fan of non sleep deep rest, I can Calm down my brain.

And Microsoft just released some amazing research recently, and they showed what happens on a brainwave level. If people don’t take a break. So they just track the brain, they had electrodes on meeting after meeting. And what happens is. Beta brainwave activity, which is highly correlated to anxiety, a certain, a certain band of it was getting higher and higher.

People were, people’s brains were getting worn out. Their decision making process was getting poorer. And the antidote is very simple. All you need is just these five, 10 minute breaks. Ideally, try to get some oxytocin and oxytocin is amazing because it’ll drop cortisol. So I have a, almost a one year old daughter.

So she’s, she’s an oxytocin, oxytocin machine. I’ve got three cats. I can go play with the cats, hug the cats. I can go outside, look at nature. Music will also increase oxytocin. And even music is interesting because. You know, if you’re listening to something like Metallica, okay, that is sympathetic music incarnate, right?

It is aggressive. And if you’re tuned into your nervous system, you’ll feel it, right? It just pounds and activate your nervous system. And then if you’re listening to soundtracks or carbon based life forms or ambient music, that is very soothing to nervous system. So. Even music’s an amazing nervous system management tool where we can become more activated, more aggressive, more intense, more stimulated, or we can calm ourselves down.

But you know, what a lot of people do is they wake up. Get on their phones, which is sympathetic in nature. They go right to work, drink a cup of coffee, grind, don’t take breaks, come home and then pass out and rinse and repeat. So I was chatting with Wade before we got on and we’re just chatting about how life changing magnesium breakthrough has been for, for tens of thousands of people, because we read the testimonials all the time.

And yeah, Wade said, yeah, probably 80 percent of the world is just like sympathetic all the time. Yeah. All the time. So, and that impacts sleep, you know, when you’re talking about sleep quality, the perfect sleep hygiene really starts like a couple of hours before, 

Ronnie Landis: right? 

Matt Gallant: You know, you want to try to slow down your brainwaves because the process from a brainwave level is you go from beta, which we’re like we’re in right now.

It’s great for thinking, focusing, engaging, but ideally you’re shifting down to more alpha, which by the way, as a, as a interesting side point, TV actually increases alpha brainwaves. So TV for some people is a good strategy. Now what you watch will obviously impact you. If you’re watching John wick four before bed, um, might not be that great for sleep.

You know, you’re going to be. Energize. And it’s interesting because I’m a big UFC fan and all my friends that come over, we watch the fights and we’ll comment the next day on our overing scores. And, you know, it shows up, right? I mean, the adrenaline rush from watching violence is real. So in a, in a perfect world, you’re watching comedy, you’re watching something, you know, that, that makes you feel good to feel good content.

And it’s a good strategy. And, you know, any sort of mindfulness. You know, meditation, a hot bat, um, journaling, reading spiritual information will also slow down your brainwaves and help prime you for a good night’s sleep. Cause when you hit the sack, your brain waves will start slowing down and everybody hits theta at least twice a day, once when they’re falling asleep.

That’s your hypnagogic state. And that’s when you start to dream, but you’re aware of it. And then you pass out. And if you’re getting a great night’s sleep, your brain waves will slow down into the Delta range. And that’s where you’re getting deep sleep. That’s where growth hormones produced. That’s where a lot of anti aging magics occurring.

And then of course you’re cycling in and out of Delta and Ram a few times throughout the night. And then there’s a lot of REM that happens later in your sleep journey. And that’s where testosterone is produced. But again, the majority of your testosterone, that’s where there’s a lot of emotional processing occurring, memory consolidation, neurotransmitter formation.

So again, you need enough deep and you need enough REM quantity wise. You need a button, ideally 90 minutes plus of deep. I get somebody tracking their sleep. And they’re getting 90 minutes plus they’ll tend to feel like a superhuman version of themselves the next day. And then REM you need about two hours plus and two and a half, three hours.

So those are good metrics to shoot for. And again, keep in mind that overrang Fitbit, all of these devices are only about, 60, 70 percent accurate. There was a device called dream D R E E M by a French company. That was a headset that was quite accurate. It was more like the 80 percent range. So I bought the vert, the V1, and unfortunately they’ve gone research only now.

They don’t sell directly to consumers anymore, but it was a great, because I was tracking with my O ring and with the dream, and I was chatting with other people that were doing the same thing. And we concluded that. The O rings and the Fitbits and all these devices were accurate in the total amount of deep and REM, but it’s just not that good at differentiating between the deep and the REM.

And it’s impossible because unless you’re tracking brainwaves. You can’t see it. It’s using secondary metrics, but to circle back to nervous system, the one thing that these devices are providing, which is an amazing value is your nervous system score. So it is tracking HRV, which is a direct measurement of your nervous system.

Health is measuring your heart rate. When does your heart rate drop? It’s measuring body temp. When your body temp drops. And those metrics allow you to get a good gauge on how stressed you are. So I’m a big fan of the readiness scores. When you wake up in the morning and you see a readiness score just crashed, that’s a sign that you should have a parasympathetic day, go get a massage, go to the spa, go outside, go walk in the park, you don’t try to.

To get a lot of sympathetic, sorry, parasympathetic activity so that you can recalibrate your nervous system. So yeah, those are just some kind of fundamentals for me. 

Ronnie Landis: One of the things that I really got from the aura ring was a, the ability to track the metrics. But I think for me it was actually, it was like a cognitive behavioral phenomenon where the fact that I could actually see.

The metrics, it, it influenced my behavior to improve my score because, you know, out of sight, out of mind and sleep is one of those things. It’s just like brain health. You don’t see your brain. You can’t really track the metrics of your brain other than like, Oh, I feel like shit or I have a headache or I feel good today, or, you know, very basic kind of self diagnostic.

Metrics that kind of go in and out of the window because life is busy and we’re barely paying attention to our state at any given moment. Um, that that’s one of the things that the aura ring really did for me. I didn’t get deep into all the little nuances. I could just see like, Oh, my number. And that had a dopaminergic effect.

When my number was good, I felt more motivated. And then it would actually, it would, it would influence the decisions that I started to stack my sleep optimization stack. One of the things I wanted to mention and get your take on, you mentioned that sleep is a preparatory process, meaning that you have to prepare for sleep.

The way that I, the way that I kind of create a framework around that, especially in my dopamine reset, is that it’s like a ritual. It’s like when you wake up in the morning, how you wake up and what you do in the morning and how you set the frame of your day is going to directly influence the quality of your sleep.

So it’s not just like, okay, now I’m ready to go to sleep. And then we go into that process. I set a ritual. It’s almost like a ceremony. If you think about it, when you go into sleep, you’re going, you’re shifting, not just your brainwave state, but you’re shifting. Consciousness, you’re, you’re shutting the body down and now your consciousness is going into its own subconscious journey.

And so it’s, it’s like a ceremony in a sense. And so the way that I created a framework around it was that when I wake up in the morning, there’s certain rituals that I do to go into a waking state to bring my nervous system online slowly, gradually. meditation, breathwork, journaling, gratitude, prayer, cold shower, sauna, hydration, those basic things.

And that starts to prime my nervous system to get ready for the day. And then as I get into the hours before sleep, I turn off the wifi. I put my phone on airplane. I take my phone and do not put it in my room anymore. I think one of the challenges people have is they can’t deal with their own thoughts because again, they’re too beta.

They’re too sympathetic. Their mind is going so they don’t want to really deal with that. And fair enough. It’s I don’t want to deal with that either. It’s very challenging. So a lot of times we might be listening to, you know, An audio book that’s soothing or something in the background to just pass out to, um, but what I found is not having the phone in the room.

And then that has made a huge difference, both in how I wake up and how I sleep. So, um, I’m curious what your thoughts are when it comes to priming your system for the day and then any, any insights that you have on helping to prepare for sleep. 

Matt Gallant: Yeah. Great questions. So first. The perfect day for sleep starts with sunlight in your eyeballs.

So like this morning I woke up again, I keep my, my phone on airplane mode and I go to the park, I live in front of a park. So I go to the park. I, I move for about. 10 to 15 minutes. That’s all I need. Um, again, I’m not trying to do exercise. There’s, there’s a great set of stairs. So I’ll do that just to get a little bit of adrenaline, a little bit of blood flow, but essentially it’s all about sunlight in the eyes.

And what does, what that does is it starts a circadian timer, which will cause me to fall or feel more tired about 14 to 16 hours later. So. The way to look at circadian clocks is again, you’re, you’re kickstarting or starting certain clocks based on certain things and light is the number one thing for sleep in terms of clocks.

So starting your day again, no sunglasses, no lenses, no windows, just direct sunlight in the eyes. For those of you that live in really brutally cold climates, I’m Canadian. I left a long time ago, but I understand not wanting to go outside when it’s minus 30. You know, blue light panels. I have retimer glasses that shine blue light.

There was the human chargers that were available for a while shines light in your brain. You need your brain to be hit with blue light. Essentially. That’s what you need in the morning. And then my ritual at night is about two hours ish before my target bedtime and target bedtime is a critical concept.

We’ll circle back to that because everything kind of. Is sequenced based off of that. So if your target bedtime is 11 PM, then two hours before, like at nine, I started to start shutting off all the lights. Let’s talk about darkness. So again, I wore blue light blocking glasses for a long time. And then I read the literature and it’s more about just the amount of light and the amount of lumens than it is blue light.

So I just dim all the lights or turn off almost all the lights in my house. And I don’t use blue light blocking glass anymore. It’s an option. Some people use salt lamps with dimmers. Some people use red light bulbs. Those are all viable options, but two hours before you really want to start creating a dark ish environment in your, in your home.

And then I turn on the AC like two hours before. So when I walk in my bedroom, it’s like an ice box. Which can colds critical. And then one hour before I take my sleep stack. So there’s a lot of incredible sleep molecules. So we’ll, we’ll get into in a minute that will prime your nervous system, prime your brain, prime your body for natural melatonin production to again, shift your nervous system, all of these different things will help you sleep better.

So typically an hour before I’ll do that. And then I’ll feel it 30 to 45 minutes later. And I want to go to bed because. I definitely have the genetic variant that causes me to want to stay awake. So for me, even wanting to go to bed has been a struggle my entire life. And the main things for me to want to go to bed is darkness and getting the right sleep molecules in because I can stay up till three, four or five in the morning.

Very easily.

Ronnie Landis: Is that a genetic variant specifically, or is that a personality trait or is it both? 

Matt Gallant: Well, I believe it’s genetics. And I think some people have more sensitivity to light, but I believe he’s genetic because I’ve been like that since I’m four or five, six years old. Like my parents used to fight with me to get me to go to bed.

One thing that’s really interesting. I remember reading this in power sleep. He talked about putting people in absolute pitch black environments and tracking how long people slept and how long people stayed awake now, because the world runs on a 24 hour clock. Um, we’re kind of trying to force ourselves to, to abide by that.

But a lot of people have a 26, 27, 28 hour clock, meaning that like for me, naturally. I’m probably, if I didn’t care about time, my natural sleep cycle would probably be like 17, 18 hours awake and in sleep for nine or 10 hours. And I know that because of, you know, gone off of time before. And that’s kind of where I end up.

But obviously I’ve, I’ve got a wife and a kid and a business and meetings, and I can’t, I can’t operate that way. So I think some people just have different clocks and I do believe it’s just my, my opinion, my theory that. From an evolutionary biology perspective, it makes sense that you have different chronotypes because if everybody is a morning person, well, if you get raided at night, it’s not going to be a good time.

So I think you needed people to be in the night crew and you needed people to be the early morning crew so that the clans could survive. So anyways, that’s my opinions. Obviously there’s a great book called the power of when. 

Ronnie Landis: So I was gonna, I was gonna bring that up with you. I talked about that in my addiction free lifestyle book.

I did an entire section on sleep and that was kind of the main focus. I got into this conversation around polyphasic sleep, monophasic, and then yeah, the power of when, and the whole chronobiology types. Which I just think are really fascinating. I don’t know the empirical nature or the, you know, subject object.

I think everybody is very unique. Everybody has their own proclivities, constitution. I think it’s all malleable too, based on what you bring into this conversation, which is lifestyle factors, epigenetic, psycho, emotional, meaning how are, how we develop our emotional processing has a huge influence. On our sleep quality.

Um, question. I want to, I want to ask you how important is structure in your day? Because you just mentioned something that’s interesting that most people wouldn’t have caught time. Time is an illusion. That is fair enough. That’s a, that’s a long conversation, but the perception of time and our biological interpretation, i.

1. our circadian rhythm, and our hormonal cycles, those are all very real, right? So I’m curious, like, how important is structuring one’s day to also the quality of their sleep? 

Matt Gallant: It’s critical again, it goes back to, I think you need those parasympathetic little breaks, um, or longer breaks if you need it. And you got to find what works for you.

Like I mentioned earlier, I’m not a napper. Once I’m awake, I’m awake. So napping, napping was an option. I’ve tried napping. It’s just hard. Um, and then meditation. Still requires a lot of mental energy. Like if you’re really, you know, if you’re meditating, you’re focusing. So that’s why like non sleep deep rest for me has been a game changer.

And it’s something I was doing before I even heard the name or the acronym NSDR. And it’s, it’s kind of the simplest thing you can do. I mean, you, you find a quiet space. You close your eyes, you don’t try to nap, you don’t try to meditate. If your brain’s racing, you’ll let it race. You don’t fight it. And what’s really wild is that if you get good at it, your brain waves actually hit Delta.

So you could hit like, you could hit a Delta, a Delta state. In a non sleep deep rest. And the most amazing thing about it is typically I’m recharged after five minutes. So after five minutes, sometimes seven, eight, but sometimes even three, um, I’ll be recharged. And I’m like, okay, I’m, I’m, I’m rebooted. I’m ready to go.

So yeah, it’s something that’s. You can practice, you can go to YouTube and do some guided non sleep deep rest stuff. I don’t use it, but yeah, it’s all I need. Typically it’s just one of those sometimes, like especially if it’s been a very intense day and then, you know, managing your stimulus, obviously you’re a fan of utopia.

Yeah. So structuring your stimulants at the right time, you took an apex today, like that’s something you want to take in the morning, you know, taking an apex at 5 p. m. is not a good idea. So, you know, trying to cut off your caffeine intake relatively early in the day. That’s more of an issue if you’re a slow caffeine metabolizer, obviously fast caffeine metabolizers can probably drink a cup of coffee before bed and be fine, but yeah, managing your stimulants, which again goes back to managing your nervous system.

If you exercise and I don’t do this, I tend to have peak energy around 4 PM is when I train, but it is better for sleep to train earlier in the day. So if you’re a morning person, that’s an edge. And, uh, yeah, just managing. You know, workload, like I’ll work at nights, uh, typically, but I’ll be working on the couch with my wife and the cats.

And I make sure that my computer shut down, like again, that two hour window before bed. Because you know, if your brain is still in that beta brainwave zone and you’re hitting the sack, you’re going to have to go through that downshifting period. And when you’re looking at people that have insomnia, 

there’s 

two things.

So the data shows that one, they have elevated beta brainwave activity, not surprising, and they have lower levels of GABA. They’re both 30 percent deficient in GABA. So the kind of segue to sleep molecules, but you know, you want to make sure that you’re, you’re ramping down your brainwaves as you’re getting closer and closer to bedtime, it’s absolutely critical.

Ronnie Landis: Yeah. And I was just thinking too, and I want to get into the brain molecules and some of the breakthrough products and stacks that you guys have created to support people with this, um, just on a personal question, I think this is, this is relative to all of us, cause we’re all human beings managing all the dimensions of life, you know, you’re married, you have a child, you have a multiple thriving businesses, you live internationally.

You’re a peak performer on multiple accounts. So that makes me think, okay, well, there’s multiple dimensions of your own experience that you’re tracking, managing, optimizing, and then there’s sleep, right? So it’s like, okay, how do I fit this all in? How do I, how do I, how do I manage everything and also prioritize sleep?

Matt Gallant: Yeah. To me again, when I ran the math on sleep back to that Eureka moment, I’m like, You know, if my brain’s working 20, 30 percent better, if I can get another decade of productivity, you know, later in my life, if I make better decisions. If I’m in a better mood and I’m a better leader, all of those things are going to translate to better business performance and better husband performance and better physical performance and physical health.

So yeah, it was just like a no brainer, you know, even though it was technically Losing time, uh, sleeping. And again, at that time, keep in mind, it was sleeping nine hours. One thing that’s been interesting is that a little side note is Ben, as I’ve gotten more and more optimized with my sleep and with my health, I’ve needed a bit less sleep, so I tend to sleep about seven and a half ish hours.

If there’s a heavy workload going on, like today, I’m going to go do legs. So it’s going to be a tough workout. Um, I’ll I’ll need a little more. I’ll need maybe eight to eight and a half, but I’ve definitely noticed. And I’ve talked to a lot of people that have gone through that, that as they’ve gotten healthier, they need a little bit less sleep.

I think workload matters. And as another side note, one pattern, I don’t have a ton of data. It’s just my own data that I’ve seen. If I’m training my body hard, it tends to prioritize deep sleep. 

And if 

I’m pushing my brain hard, it tends to want more REM sleep. And as we get into the sleep molecules, we can talk about how to structure your sleep stacks to kind of optimize one or the other, but yeah, no, it’s just been a non, an endless journey.

It still is an endless journey of, of optimizing obviously the business side. Um, where. It’s now it’s more about building teams and building systems. So we have 115 employees now. So the, the structure of things have changed, but there was certainly a time in my life where it felt like everything was on my shoulders and I had to work 12, 14 hours a day to make stuff happen.

And if you’re an entrepreneur getting started, I mean, it’s kind of a. A phase you have to go through. And then as you gain traction, you hire people and build systems and so on. So, yeah, I mean, we could do very deep podcasts and all those 

Ronnie Landis: topics. 100%. Yeah. And I’m super fascinated by it, but. So that that’s perfect.

Let’s go deep. Let’s go the rest of the podcast into the brain compounds and what you guys have developed. 

Matt Gallant: Yeah, it really started with magnesium breakthrough, which of course has been our best selling product since it’s come out. Um, I think we’ve sold over one point. 2, 1. 3 million bottles yet. It just keeps selling more and more every quarter because it works.

And, you know, back to nervous system. I, I do believe that magnesium is the ultimate like nervous system molecule. And by the way, we haven’t published this yet, but we just did a bunch of, um, experiments in the lab with red blood cells. And we showed that magnesium breakthrough outperformed every other.

single form of magnesium in terms of absorption. So again, it does work better. Um, you do get more absorption. We should, we saw that. And also in the cell culture test we did. So we’ll be publishing that soon, but yeah, I think that’s an incredible sleep product. Uh, two capsules, usually an hour before bed.

And 

the reason why magnesium is amazing for sleep is because. Magnesium is a precursor and precursor means building block. Serotonin and serotonin is a building block for melatonin. So one of the best strategies for great sleep is you want to give your body, again, all the key molecules it needs to naturally build melatonin and we’ll, we’ll get into melatonin a second.

When do you want to use it? How to use it, how much to use? ’cause there’s a lot of, in my opinion, major, uh, mistakes people are making there. 

Ronnie Landis: Mm-Hmm, . 

Matt Gallant: But in terms of building your own natural melatonin, magnesium’s amazing. Some great data on sleep and magnesium bisglycinate. And then if you take B6 or P5P, which is a bioactive form of B6, it’ll also help convert more of the magnesium into serotonin.

So again, it’s that, that alone’s a great sleep stack. We have that in sleep breakthrough. We don’t have all the forms of mag, but we got magnesium, magnesium bisglycinate and P5P in So about a year and change ago, Mark, Mr. Newts, and I started working on sleep breakthrough. So we did 55 prototypes and keep in mind that I’ve been trying sleep molecules for years and years.

And so has he. So we kind of put together what we thought would be the ultimate, and we’re still working on 2. 0, which is coming up the summer. So like we never stopped iterating, but probably the most interesting thing. You know, of course I was hyper aware of the magnesium, but the most interesting thing that I learned was potassium.

So Mark’s like, no, we need potassium in this. I’m like, well, I’m aware of potassium for hydration. That’s how I thought about potassium. And then I started looking at the literature and I found this old research from 2004 where they were doing research on bizarre mutant flies. And they, they found that potassium quiets down neurons, it quiets down your brain and sodium excites neurons.

So that’s a really interesting little strategy there. So in the morning, it’s a great strategy to put, you know, Himalayan salt or any kind of salt in your water or drink electrolytes. And at night it’s a great strategy to switch to potassium. And by the way, there is a table salt called new salt and you S A L T.

And it’s a potassium based salt. So for dinner, great strategy to switch to that. And of course we have that in sleep breakthrough. Calcium is also an amazing mineral for sleep. It improves REM and it helps convert tryptophan very popular amino acid. Of course, that’s what, you know, people say the Turkey and they feel sleepy.

The tryptophan, um, with calcium will be converted into serotonin. Which is again, a building block for melatonin and then zinc, another amazing mineral for your nervous system. It helps calm your nervous system. And it’s again, a co factor for melatonin. So those four minerals, amazing for sleep, but let’s get into some heavy hitters.

We mentioned GABA earlier. So GABA. For a lot of people is transformative for their sleep. And we tested pretty much every legal form of GABA. So valerian root, for an example, very popular sleep molecule. Again, it targets GABA. Phenibut was legal many years ago. A lot of people Use that, but that creates issues.

Your, your body can build a tolerance. We settled on pharma GABA. So pharma GABA has been developed by Mitsubishi. It is more expensive, but it has better data. And in our opinion, it hits harder. Like you, you feel it. So pharma GABA. That is what we settled on and you know, GABA is the molecule of chill and it really creates a powerful kind of relaxation response.

So for a lot of people, GABA is a game changer for sleep. Then let’s get into my, one of my favorite sleep molecules. Which is L theanine. So L theanine I’ve been using almost every night for probably seven or eight years. Um, a lot of people use it during the day. If you use it with caffeine, it’ll elongate the effects of caffeine and it acts as a kind of as a compressor on the jitteriness of stimulants.

So it’s really good during the day for that. But at night, What’s amazing is it’ll create a relaxation response without causing rockiness or drowsiness. And that was part of the challenge. Like we added a lot of things that help sleep, but then you would wake up feeling a little bit hung over, um, because the molecules were still present.

So we, we tried to really get it to the point where. You’d fall asleep faster, you’d stay asleep longer, and you’d wake up feeling refreshed. But both Pharmagaba and L theanine do something really interesting to the brain. It helps lower beta brainwaves. So we talked about that’s an issue for a lot of people.

And it increases alpha brainwaves. So it’s great for, again, just really priming your brain for sleep. And then last but not least is glycine. So in my opinion, I think glycine is one of the most important amino acids for health in general. It’s involved in so many. Critical processes from collagen production to detoxifying pathways.

But for sleep, if you do three grams, which is the dose we have in sleep breakthrough, if you don’t get enough sleep the next day, you will actually feel. More refreshed. And we’ve had so many mothers message us and tell us that, you know, sometimes they got to wake up cause their child obviously woke up and you’re like, I don’t feel as exhausted and tired as I used to.

And I’m like, yeah, that’s the glycine improves REM. And another really wild thing about glycine is that it’ll help lower your body temperature. So again, body temp critical for great sleep, invest in a chili pad or a sleep aid. Those are great devices to help keep your body cool, but the glycine will actually help push blood to your extremities and help help kind of lower your, your core body temp.

So yeah, it’s amazing. And that’s it. It’s a very clean formula. We also have silica in there. So we have. Silica from bamboos, another mineral, great for hair, great for nails. Um, we use it kind of for texture and flavoring and for flavoring, we use blue spirulina and organic berry extracts and just a micro amount of stevia.

So. Everything in there is an amino acid, a mineral or a plant. That’s it. There’s nothing synthetic. And, um, yeah, it works really, really well. You know, you want to use, you want to play around with the dosage. It is a drink. So it’s a powder mixed with a little bit of water. Just do a shot, take it about an hour before bed and play around with the dose.

Like I talked to my mom the other day, she’s doing like a quarter teaspoon, my dad does half a teaspoon. So you got to find what the right dose is for you. It does. It’s very strong. I mean, the pharma GABA. The glycine also hits the GABA pathways. The magnesium hits the GABA pathways. So you got to play around with the dose.

And once you find the right dose for you, it’s, it’s magical. We have another product called dream optimizer. And as the name implies, it’s designed to really boost REM. So you will notice a lot more lucid dreaming, vivid dreaming, the California poppy seed that’s in there really boost REM. And as an interesting side note, um, I don’t have a ton of data on this, but I just have an end of one.

I definitely noticed. A lot more wood. And again, that would make sense that if I’m getting more REM, I’m probably enhancing natural testosterone production. So again, just the end of one, but I’m definitely noticing more wood when I use dream, dream optimizer, which is great. 

Ronnie Landis: I think I’ve had the same thing.

I didn’t notice it until you just mentioned it. And I just assumed that it was strictly because of the seminal retention practices that I’ve been deepening into the last couple months. And that definitely has a huge effect for sure. Um, in the dopamine system and, and all, all the things, but now that you mentioned that I I’m going to have to, like, I’m going to have to like self reflect on that a little bit more.

Matt Gallant: Yeah. Yeah, I’m curious. I want to kind of get a poll going for the men using dream optimizer. But yeah, it’s, it’s amazing. So that product’s very different. And it’s a good segue to talking about melatonin. So as I looked at how much melatonin your brain naturally produces, it’s only 10 to 80 micrograms.

That’s it. And a lot of people have a genetic variant that causes them to wake up two or three hours earlier when they use too much melatonin. I’m one of them. So for me, melatonin, even half a milligram was never a viable option except in a few circumstances, which we’ll get into. So I don’t know. I looked at that.

I’m like, well, I’m overdosing here. You know, it doesn’t make sense. Why am I using 500 micrograms when I’m producing 10 to 80? So Mark and I worked on getting the spray down to about 20 micrograms per spray. And lo and behold, when I do four to five sprays, which is around 80 to a hundred micrograms, I don’t get the wake up effect.

So. I think the dose for sleep again, some people are using mega doses for antioxidant benefits. That’s a whole other story, but I think for sleep, I think 60 to a hundred micrograms is ideal. So again, with the spray, people can find the perfect dose for their body, their brains, which is again, kind of a revolutionary form factor.

And I recommend using dream optimizer, but every two nights, I tend to alternate. Like I used it last night. I probably won’t use it tonight. I’ll use it the next night. Again, if you’re traveling three time zones, using melatonin is a great power move if you want to get rid of jet lag. Use melatonin for about two nights, get sunlight in the morning, get a huge breakfast, a high protein breakfast and try to get some exercise.

You can annihilate jet lag if you do that for two days in a row. Um, the other times to use melatonin, if you stayed up way past your bedtime, And you get that second wind, which by the way is a cortisol spike using melatonin to try to basically shut your brain down. Good strategy. So there’s a few circumstances where I think melatonin is, is warranted, but it’s not something I would recommend using every night.

So we have dream optimizer, magnesium breakthrough and sleep breakthrough. Again, my personal sleep stack is two capsules of mag breakthrough. And sleep breakthrough that’s every night and then dream optimizer. I’m using that every two nights or when I’m traveling and so on and so forth. And it’s just been a game changer, especially on planes.

Now I can pass out on planes. I do recommend using the true dark glasses from Dave Asprey, the red ones, because there’s so much blue light in the plane that’ll really disrupt your sleep. So I just put on the glasses drink, drink, drink, sleep, breakthrough, Few sprays and boom, um, lights out and the flight agents will have to wake me up by the time we land.

Ronnie Landis: So that’s, that’s amazing. There, there’s so many things that I could monkey branch and go deep into with that. I know that you have a hard stop. Um, do you have any time at all? Like two minutes, five minutes. We’ve got two minutes. Yeah. That’s two minutes. Okay. All right. Last, last, last micro question before we close this out, sleep to me as a commitment.

Because so much of us have gotten such bad sleep and we’ve committed to the opposite of sleep. Sleep is a bit of a commitment. It’s like committing to your workout routine. You have to commit to your sleep routine. So for people that are listening to this, like myself, that are inspired, but there’s, there’s kind of like cognitive booby traps in the way.

It’s a restructuring process. Um, I’m going to tie two things together. I know that you guys with your products, you have incredible informational guides and manuals that come along with the Newtopia products with the bio optimizers. So not only do you guys provide incredible products, but you, you provide incredible guidance and education for people to implement the products.

And so I just want to hand what I just said over to you for people that are listening Transcribed That are like, okay, I really want to get this thing down, but it’s going to be a bit of a rerouting process. 

Matt Gallant: Yeah, it’s just incremental changes like, you know, I think change management comes down to picking two or three things.

And I know you’re a big fan of. Dopamine and managing dopamine. And one of the ways you can effectively use dopamine in your favor is, you know, there’s some great little simple habit tracking apps you can download from the store and something I’ve used successfully and help, you know, recommend it or people do is pick three things.

So three habits, put it in the, in the tracking app, whether it’s. You know, going to bed at a certain time, turning off the lights, I just simple things. And all you have to do each day is just click, click, click. And you start creating a dopamine loop for these positive habits. Three things seems to be about kind of the max that people can hold in mind.

Like I think one of the mistakes people make, I mean, I just probably dropped. 15 or 20 things people can do. Um, and yeah, you know, if you feel hyper motivated, you can try to do a few of them, but try to pick like two or three, I think probably the most impactful ones is getting light in the eyes in the morning.

Like that’s really been a game changer. And again, kudos to Huberman for just hammering that home. Um, it’s really changed kind of the quality of my days. Like the days where I do that, which is the majority now. I just feel like my, the quality of my day went up 20, 30, 40%. So that, and then, you know, darkness, make sure you’re sleeping in a pitch black room and make sure you’re in a cold room.

And if you have a hot metabolism, get a chili pad or a sleep aid where you can cool yourself underneath the sheets, get a good mattress. I’m a big fan of Essentia Canadian company. That’s that’s what I recommend. Um, Bunch of other mattress companies that haven’t tried, but get a really good mattress, no springs, memory foams, what I recommend, and then, yeah, try our sleep supplements.

Everything’s backed by a 365 day money back guarantee. Ronnie’s got links for you. So use Ronnie’s links. We have some support to Ronnie and you know, the products speak for themselves. They work, you know, the magnesium alone is a game changer. And once you’ve got the right dose dialed in for sleep breakthrough and dream optimizer, it goes to another level.

Ronnie Landis: Amazing. Thank you so much. Thanks for being the ultimate synthesizer. I really appreciate you coming back on the show. This was amazing. And, uh, all the links will be in the show notes. So that’s it for this incredible episode on sleep optimization. And thanks so much for joining me. Thank you.