About Our Guest- Tara Youngblood – The Science of Temperature
Tara Youngblood is a fusion scientist and a visionary leader in the future of sleep driven health combining multiple disciplines, including Alternative Medicine, Physics, and Sleep Diagnostics. She works with leading international researchers to further studies on cold therapy and its impact on sleep, and she wrote and published the leading white paper connecting more than 70 research papers to the effects of temperature on sleep quality and as an expert in sleep science, she is a highly regarded and sought-after international speaker. Tara’s research has led to more than a dozen patent filings, and she is the co-founder, along with her husband Todd, of Kryo, Inc., inventers of the ChiliPad™. At Kryo she contributes to the strategic direction and daily operations of the company and she also serves as the Chief Science Officer. Tara is also a wife and mother, a passionate global traveler, and has spearheaded multiple community philanthropic activities and international relief trips. Tara is continually seeking new opportunities to improve the quality of life by those most affected with sleep disorders. She and her family sleep soundly at their home in Charlotte, NC.
Full Podcast Transcription
Tara Youngblood 00:00
So the number of people I’ve talked to like, “Ah, I don’t have to actually sleep eight hours you mean like if I don’t sleep 8.0 hours I’m damned, I’m gonna fall apart, I’m gonna go to sleep hell wherever that is.”
Diva Nagula 00:22
Hello everyone and welcome to another episode of From Doctor to Patient. Today, I have the pleasure of hosting Tara Youngblood and we are going to discuss the science of temperature and its correlation to optimal sleep. You don’t need more sleep, you need better sleep. Environmental temperature is a universal and training cue for circadian cycles for all mammals. thermo-regulation is a major factor for life as it influences most biochemical reactions like sleepiness and queueing rest. Yet temperatures become less of an influence in our day to day lives as behavioral adaptation including well heated houses, good thermal insulation of clothing, warm vehicles and short exposures to cold has created an artificial single temperature climate, thereby disrupting our natural thermal regulation. What does this mean? Everyday, life is wreaking havoc on our sleep. Sleep deprivation is an epidemic. The Rand Institute estimates yearly productivity lost in the US at $411 billion annually. Studies of the sherpa community and NASA astronauts has shown the human body recovers and heals from trauma and exhaustion more naturally at lower temperatures, and the value of colder body temperature for not only recovery, but also energy and brain health and cognitive factors has already begun to catch on with the mass market. The popularity of cryo chambers seems to be creeping closer to a tipping point, as their use now extends far beyond the world of extreme athletes and science labs. But how do we harness the benefits of reduced body temperature while we sleep and our bodies are in prime repair mode? The answer is the Chili Pad. Developed by fusion center scientists Tara Youngblood and her husband Todd, who by the way, his uncle was the inventor of the waterbed. The Chili Pad is a cold therapy device that thermal regulates the bodies throughout the night. By circulating water through a specially designed mattress pad. It maintains a lower optimal body temperature, enabling dramatically improved sleep quality and quantity. In fact, many users remain in deep sleep up to twice as long with the use of a chilli pad. With two devices available the original and the new OOLER sleep system that provides enhanced control through a mobile app, there is an option for everybody. The application of this one device is to first dramatically affect the sleep deprivation epidemic and the productivity of millions of people without drug side effects and without a significant commitment of energy on behalf of the user. Tara Youngblood is a fusion scientist and a visionary leader in the future of sleep driven health, combining multiple disciplines, including alternative medicine, physics, and sleep diagnostics. She works with leading international researchers to further studies on cold therapy and its impact on sleep. And she wrote and published a leading white paper connecting more than 70 research papers to the effects of temperature on sleep quality, and as an expert in sleep science, she’s highly regarded and sought after international speaker. Tara’s research has led to more than a dozen patent filings and she’s the co founder along with her husband Todd of Cryo Inc., inventors of the Chili Pad, at C ryo she contributes to the strategic direction and daily operations of the company. And she also serves as a chief science officer. Tara’s also a wife and mother, a passionate global traveler, and has spearheaded multiple community philanthropy activities and national relief trips. Tara’s continually seeking new opportunities to improve the quality of life by those most affected with sleep disorders. She and her family sleep soundly at their home in Charlotte, North Carolina. Good afternoon. Hi, Tara, how are you? Thank you for joining us on the show today.
Tara Youngblood 04:41 Hi, thanks for having me.
Diva Nagula 04:43
You know, I was reading your bio earlier and this is an occupation or a type of scientists that I’m unfamiliar with. You’re a fusion scientist. So can you clarify or give us some information as to what that exactly is?
Tara Youngblood 04:59
So honestly, mostly these days I’m asleep scientist, because that’s where I’ve geeked out into that category. But when I graduated, and was very interested in really changing the world of nuclear physics, so I think everyone’s heard of a nuclear reactor. And that process is called fison, and where it pulls things apart. And what the sun does for energy is called fusion. And so my hope, and it was a big hope at the time, but it kind of very quickly in this country went away. There are hybrid fusion reactors in China and in France. And there’s actually one project that starting outside of Oxford, so I think it might have a resurgence. But this is what the sun does to make energy. And so it’s a cleaner way, the byproducts are things like water, which is a good thing. So my passion was really to change the world’s energy parameters from really big picture. The good news is it’s just transition to change in the world. energy from a human perspective, if we can sleep more, we can have more energy. So it’s a shift, but it’s a fancy sort of side side shoot of being a nuclear physicist, I guess.
Diva Nagula 06:10
Got it. And so how did that transition into your interests and the science of sleep and specifically, the regulation of temperature and as a means of improving sleep?
Tara Youngblood 06:25
It takes us back a fair amount my husband and I have invented products together over the years, we’ve brought over a hundred different ones to market. His uncle invented the waterbed. So there’s a pretty good history on on that. In 2007, when we launched the Chili Pad, it was actually much more an equation of I wanted to be warmer when I went to sleep. And Todd was always hot. And we ended up, I’d put pillows in between, and we’d have this separation of temperature in the bed and when opening windows and not. And so at the time, microclimate car seats were driver and passenger would have left different temperatures, I’m like, well, if you could have different temperatures in a car, it seems silly I can’t have different temperatures in my bed. And that’s what I wanted. So the genesis was actually pretty simple in the sense of just about comfort, unfortunately, a year after that, as we’re just starting to kind of get results back from people, including ourselves that okay, there’s something else there’s better sleep that’s involved in this too. Unfortunately, we lost our youngest son very suddenly. And the grief and depression pretty much eliminated my sleep. I did a TED talk in December. And the CDC has attributed that a lack of sleep at that level is the equivalent to driving drunk. And I pretty much drove drunk through my life for about a year, as I just really didn’t sleep at all. And I think for me, what that did was, here, I was selling a sleep product talking about sleep. And I couldn’t fix it for me, I didn’t understand enough about it to be able to tell other people how to fix it and live on myself. And that felt like a very hypocritical place to be. So the scientist in me says, okay, people are getting great results. And this is life changing for them. How do I translate that so that it’s life changing for me? And how do I separate out, those from a scientific perspective of what’s a control? versus how do you get consistent results? What is the right temperature versus just changing temperature for comfort? really getting into what happens in the body? Using some of that physics background and thermodynamics of applying, well, how much energy and heat does a human body put off at night? And how much heat and energy Do I need to take away in order to optimize sleep and why? And what is all happening there? So lots of time and research later is where I kind of got to today, is putting the pressure of my own need to be able to sleep and have consistent sleep and come up with that, what I call my sleep recipe, and how I can make that sleep recipe transferable to other people. How do I take that knowledge and apply that to someone else can have the same experience despite the fact that there’s 7.8 billion of us. And generally, we all sleep just a little bit different. We’re not all the same.
Diva Nagula 09:18
That point taken is a question that I have next view is. Since there are so many people in so many variables in enhancing sleep or reducing the quality of sleep. What have you found through your research as a scientist that’s universally applicable for people to optimize their sleep?
Tara Youngblood 09:37
So I will start with chronotype. Chronotypes were first sort of really looked at in the 1970s. So this is not a new concept. It’s actually genetically driven. So your PER3 gene will actually indicate whether you are a morning person or a night person or somewhere in between in that spectrum. But without genetic testing, you can usually answer a few questions and kind of get a pretty good sense on where someone plays in that spectrum. So it’s not too hard to figure out how to entrain everything you do to your personal body clock, because my body clock is a little bit different than yours very likely, even if we’re morning people, it may be shifted slightly. It also is powerful knowledge if you’re traveling and circadian rhythms or even this daylight saving time thing, if you have a sense on when your body wants to do something. It’s helpful for sleep. But it’s also helpful for exercise that information can tell you when you’re going to be cognitively at your best during the day when you’re most likely to be creative when you should take a sub one supplement versus the next. So the powerful part of knowing when to do stuff and creating that framework as a place to hang stuff on is sort of where I start. And then using those zones of time windows, it’s pretty easy to see what your body wants to do for sleep once you know what time it wants to fall asleep. bedtime sleep wise, I call them buckets. Partly it’s the farm girl, mother of four boys, I put stuff that is messy buckets, or bins. I’m a big bin person. So you look at bedtime. It’s a messy bucket, there’s a lot of things that go into it. As far as how stressed you were today, if you worked out a lot, what other disease or parameters are going on in your day, how tired you are going into it will mean whether or not you actually follow a sleep hygiene regimen, which is such an ugly… there’s nothing sexy about that at all. So when you look at what you should do, going into bed, there’s a lot of variables, you really should probably stop drinking three hours before so is that kind of part of your bedtime window or not really…
Diva Nagula 11:43
Anything, not just alcohol, like any liquid?
Tara Youngblood 11:46
Yeah, just all of those and caffeine, if you have a high sensitivity to that it’s like eight hours before, so that, having a sense, your bedtime bucket isn’t necessarily this just an hour before you go to bed a half hour, the five minutes you brush your teeth and wash your face before you go to bed. A lot of people have a different sense on what that bedtime is. But this is sort of looking at, what do I do that helps me fall asleep and get into sleep that that initial start. From a temperature perspective, it’s pretty magical. So there is your body is actually entrained with your circadian rhythm to look for a trigger. And that trigger is temperature. Clifford Safeer, out of Harvard first looked at this in 2003. And he coined it “asleep switch” which is really what it is. So when your body senses a change of temperature, and the key word there is change. Because we live in a constant environment inside our houses and our offices and our cars. And we’re not in a changing environment. So that’s part of the problem. But if you change your temperature by taking a shower, going and taking a walk or doing something that’s going to change that, it triggers neurons in your brain, the neurons in your brain are triggered, they actually release melatonin, they release all the hormones that we’re looking for. So people are taking melatonin. But it could be as simple as if they were to warm up, or cool down or change their temperature, their body would be like, oh, there’s a change of temperature, it’s in my bedtime window. Look, I’m supposed to be asleep and it releases melatonin naturally. Which is a way better thing to do. Temperature is really magical in that it has that unique access to your unconscious brain. And when you get into the next sleep state, it’s even more important because after bedtime bucket is really your deep sleep window. And first of all, there are multiple stages of sleep and you do cycle through those throughout the night. But that first half of the night there’s a higher probability. It’s called deep sleep zone because this is when your body wants to get deep sleep. And your body is also trying to drop two degrees in its core body part. And it’s one of my pet peeves is just to change the room temperature, lower it, but then we climb on a foam mattress, cover ourselves with blankets, and whatever that room temperature is isn’t getting in there. So our core body temperature wants to drop two degrees to get deep sleep. And you really should get close to that two hours of deep sleep. The problem about not believing in your window or trusting your window. If you go to sleep two hours later, your windows just two hours shorter, it doesn’t shift. That’s the importance of knowing that clock is it just means you have two hours less window of opportunity it shrinks the opportunity window. So staying up late with friends if your bedtimes 10 until midnight. It doesn’t mean that you can catch that up. That’s where the problem with everyone’s sleep debt if it’s truly about hours in bed, it’s not the same equation and we’re kind of missing out on the conversation. If it’s, I’ll just make it up. I’ll sleep in two hours. The sleep you’re going to get on that other two hours is not likely to be that same window. It’s not my kind of training it to that framework of yours circadian rhythm is really important in getting the right kind of sleep, not just total hours. The second half of the night is more your REM sleep bucket. And again, you’re getting all different kinds, you may even get some deep sleep in there, especially if you’re younger. Or if you’re sleeping cool enough, you can sometimes get it in there. But it’s more REM sleep and hear your body’s actually warming up from that lowest point just like the planets warming up. So it wants to warm up a little bit. So a lot of people, I get this a lot, that’s why we put scheduling in the lower units versus Chili Pad is even taught he likes to sleep, I swear he’d sleep on a slab of ice if he could, bedtime is cold, next window is cold, but he’ll want want to warm up a little bit as he gets warmer. And that creates a balance between REM sleep and deep sleep had a bunch of questions that people like, well, I’m getting great deep sleep, and I’m not getting REM sleep. And that’s often because you’re keeping it too cold into that second half of the night. And you actually may be getting more deep sleep. And if you’re behind on it, sometimes again, it goes back to that debt, that’s okay. But in general, we’re looking for that ideal balance of two hours of each. Really, that’s what Wait, when you wake up and you feel recovered and you want good HRV scores, all of those really come back to if you’re really balanced in your sleep quantities for those two, you’ll you’ll all your other results will generally continue to get better.
Diva Nagula 16:33
Now, correct me if I’m wrong. So my understanding is that you approximately want 20% of your nights worth of sleep spent in deep sleep and another 20% of your overall night’s sleep dedicated to RE
Tara Youngblood 16:51
Yes. If you’re getting eight hours, what I will say and we have spent some time working with the military, they don’t always get eight hours, there’s lots of people that can’t get eight hours. So we work with them on on again, finding that ideal window. Within the ideal window, you can get those two hours of each if you’re using temperature and the right window. So you can get those two hours in six. And the feeling with six and the feeling with eight is pretty similar. And that’s like our ideal goal, generally I actually like about seven hours of sleep is like I’ll feel great. So it T
is a little bit about finding your own recipe and what that looks like, but the most important message because I think the number of people I’ve talked to you like, “Oh, I don’t have to actually sleep eight hours. You mean like if I don’t sleep 8.0 hours, I’m damned. I’m gonna fall apart. I’m gonna go to sleep hell, wherever that is.” It’s really about thinking about your quality of sleep and waking up feeling rested. Are you feeling like you could go work out that morning? are you dragging? If you’re dragging or you especially after lunch here, there’s another temperature slump. And that’s where a lot of us will feel tired if we’re not well rested. Are you struggling with those things, those are much better metrics of whether your sleep equations balanced and right than just eight hours or not. Todd is a great napper. He’s goes to bed late, he doesn’t really need eight hours in that one segment. But he does do really well with a power nap.
Diva Nagula 18:26
And this is interesting that just came up for me is when you’re napping, obviously this is during the daytime or if you’re a shift worker, it’s reverse. But if you’re napping, should you get on the Chili Pad and lower your core temperature using the chilli pad?
Tara Youngblood 18:41
That depends on what your outcome is. Prior to the industrial age that I referred to where we went to eight hours, we actually slept in segments. The siesta is called that for a reason. There’s lots of cultures where that was part of it. After lunch, there’s a natural dip just like the dip we talked about like in the middle of the night. There’s a mini version of those that rate after lunch. And you can use your Chili Pad to actually amp that up and use that to get deep sleep there. Your body is generally going to want two hours of deep sleep total though. So it’s part of like, are you at a spot where that’s what you need to do in order to be healthy? Then absolutely do that. If you really want to be sleeping in an eight hour segment at night and that’s your window and that’s where you’re planning on doing it unless you’re not feeling well or there’s another reason it will potentially mess it up. But if you’re a shift worker, absolutely this is your chance to mimic your nighttime to to use your circadian rhythm use your ‘when’ and those same buckets or zones of sleep. We’re just shifting them we’re going to find when your body is also willing or able to get that same result but part of that depends on what you’re looking for for your total sleep allotment for the 24 hours.
Diva Nagula 20:00
Right. So and the other thing that you were mentioning before about sleep is, this is a problem that I have that I’ve now that you’ve explained how the older system works and how the REM sleep works… For me, what happens is that I get to bed and I’ll go through my deep sleep. And I’ll get my 20% roughly hour and a half to two to an hour and 45, if I’m lucky, a little bit, two hours, but then it because it’s winter time, around three o’clock, four o’clock, I’ll wake up, and I wake up because I am freezing. When I wake up, it’s hard for me to get back to sleep. And then I’ve noticed that my REM sleep is affected. So the idea here is that with the newer system, the older system, you’re able to modulate and program the temperature, and have it correspond with the different stages of sleep throughout the night.
Tara Youngblood 20:51
Yes, that is absolutely the power. And that’s where the scheduling, and we are in right now actually, again, there’s lots of craziness at this particular window of the world. But we should be rolling out even some more updates on that and just make that a little easier to understand. But my TED Talk, we’ve got some great YouTube videos on explaining that as well. But it’s all about thinking about those zones of sleep, and how that matches for you. So I do get those questions like, well, what’s the one temperature , what do I do here? And there is… naturally as humans, we need to be scientists when we as scientists have our own body and understand that what works well, for one person may not be entirely translatable, men versus women, there’s a huge disparity across socio-economic, even racial injustice in sleep, like everything else, unfortunately. So it’s really easy to… this is not a one size fits all answer. It is about you figuring out your chronotype, what works for you, and playing around with it a little bit. But within that it’s bedtime, whatever feels comfortable, deep sleep cold, and REM sleep warmer.
Diva Nagula 22:03
Right? And that’s, that’s important to tell listeners, because a lot of people, my colleagues and friends that I have, we all are trying to optimize our sleep function. Everyone’s like, what’s the temperature? What’s the temperature? And everyone’s thinking that the temperature that’s optimal from research or studies from other people is like 66-67. And as you alluded to, it’s not necessarily the answer for everyone. It’s not a generalized term, it’s an individual specific function that can enhance or reduce the quality of sleep.
Tara Youngblood 22:38
Yeah, and the bedtime, especially is really important to think about, because that’s really entrained to a lot of the habits, that’s why I love a weighted blanket, we just came out with a weighted blanket this year that’s cooled and heated. For me a big part of that bedtime is reducing my anxiety. Part of it’s probably carryover from the trauma of losing Benjamin, all sorts of other things. Sometimes it’s a stressful day at work. But softening that anxiety, as far as temperature for me means warming up, it means being a little bit warmer and feeling snuggly, and sinking in, I need that, that’s part of that feeling safe and good part of sleep for me. But it’s not for everybody, not everybody has, like, Todd will climb in, and it’s cold. And that feels good to him. So there’s a definite, especially bedtime, whatever temperature feels good.
Diva Nagula 23:29
And the weighted blanket that you were alluding to, that’s a new product, did you say that that
also had the function of modulating temperature as well?
Tara Youngblood 23:37
Yeah, so it’ll hook up to either Chili Pad or OOLER. So if you have an existing one, you can order just the weighted blanket, but then it doesn’t have a multi port on it. So you’ll have to choose, or, like I do, I just have to, so I have them because I actually don’t keep the temperature regulation on the way to blanket all night. I just do it at bedtime. So it’s kind of nice to have multiple schedules going. And there’s times where I honestly snuggling up on the couch, my son loves to sit under it while we watch a movie.
Diva Nagula 24:09
And I want to go back a little bit cuz you were talking, you’re giving us a very awesome pertinent information about the chronotype. What is the specific gene type that you’re referencing earlier?
Tara Youngblood 24:19
It was PER3 and the length of that gene will indicate where you are on the spectrum. There is some epigenetic influences on that. This time is really interesting when we talk about the influence of trauma on our psyche and how we transfer that. But from that perspective, there’s a lot of information on military going through marine boot camp will can shift that and so someone that’s a lifelong marine that may have started out being a night person will over time, like that is one of those things that can shift. So although it is genetically driven, and pretty good predictor. Just like a lot of things, there is things that will change over your lifetime. Women, we have different temperatures throughout our cycle. So there’s some flexibility on where we are in our cycle. As far as how temperature affects us, there’s obviously temperature changes as we’re pregnant for menopause, we are very messy when it comes to sleep.
Diva Nagula 26:19
With the parameters that we’re talking about the deep sleep and the REM sleep, and the utilization of the Chili Pad, or the OOLER system, there obviously, is it’s necessary to have some sort of tracker, what tracking device would you recommend that allows us to keep track of our REM sleep, deep sleep and HRV? Is there a specific tracker that you’d like to use or or any tracker will do?
Tara Youngblood 26:46
So I do use an Oura tracker I prefer that i’ve tried almost all of them out there. My one big disclaimer for anybody that has not used a tracker before is there is value and tracking it before you have an intervention and then seeing it afterwards. But if you’re just going to track, studies are now showing that if you just track and you’d literally just get bad news every morning, you will actually respect sleep less. So my biggest watch out and I’ve had conversations about it, is if you’re going to use your tracker as an optimization tool as a measuring stick, and I have a reason that I’m measuring, I’m going through a scientific process to improve my sleep to optimize it. Absolutely hook yourself up, use an Oura ring and and track your sleep because the benefits of utilizing that if you’re in that mode are fabulous. If you’re just looking to improve your sleep, the subjective measurements are actually as accurate in the sense of like I suggested, I wake up in the morning, do I feel rested? Do I feel tired? The sleep tracker can actually skew those results or you find people like they’re not asking in their own T
head like, oh, how did I sleep last night? instead? They’re like, how do I sleep last night they pull up their phone and go, “Well, this is this is how I slept last night”. There’s there’s got to be that balance between our acceptance of data because sleep trackers even Oura is one of the most accurate, that’s what we use for clinical trials. It’s sort of slated to be about as 90% as accurate as a sleep lab. Although being a sleep lab, you’re you’re hooked up to those wires, and you’re laying on your back and someone’s staring at you. So not thinking my sleeps normal there. So as far as tracking your sleep in your house, it’s the best method that I’ve seen. But that said, if you’re going to just measure for measurement sake, you actually might do it at a detriment to your sleep. So measure it with the idea that you’re improving your outcome, you’re gonna use it to change when you eat and how you eat what you put in those bedtime, that bedtime bucket or track it compared to temperature. You’re tracking it for a reason can absolutely do it.
Diva Nagula 28:56
Yeah. And it’s interesting. I wish that I had these optimization strategies when I was suffering through cancer. And I unfortunately, developed cancer. It was non-Hodgkins lymphoma as a result of poor lifestyle strategies, and just my constant amount of stress that I was under. And I was not taking care of myself, including not getting the optimal sleep. And I wish I had my tracking devices then because then I would have been able to determine how little REM sleep I was having or how little deep sleep I was having and then would have been in tune to what I needed to do to help fix that and optimize it for me to get better sleep. And it’s interesting. Now we’re in a time now where we’re under a lot of anxiety because of the fear of the virus and everything that’s just upon us. And it’s really important to take a step back and to address how important it is to sleep. It’s how we repair our bodies. It’s how we reduce our anxieties and we process things and during our sleep and it’s variable important to definitely maintain specific, an optimal sleep hygiene. With that being said, Can you take us through a routine? Not necessarily that’s specific to you, but a general routine to maintain and optimize sleep hygiene specifically, during these times that we’re facing?
Tara Youngblood 30:19
Yeah, so I really look at this as an opportunity. Obviously, an unplanned and hopefully short lived opportunity and, and all sorts of ways. But because our routines are disrupted, a lot of people are like, Well, my chronotype says, I’m this, but my, my work life, my kids, my what other all those other things that keep us on that treadmill of life that prevent us from doing a fresh start, there’s an amazing opportunity to do a fresh start right now and to to relook at all of those things. More and more studies are coming out tying lack of deep sleep to all timers, when we fall into deep sleep, really, at the start of our first deep sleep stage, our brains get washed of the toxins and the towel proteins there’s so many we get growth hormone, there’s so many different parts of why that’s so valuable. But it’s also like this unicorn of sleep in the sense that if you’re very stressed out, you’re drinking alcohol, even if that alcohol helps you fall asleep, it’ll actually destroy your deep sleep. So it’s a fake thing. Sleeping aids is another thing, when people get really anxious. The doctors, one of the first things you want to hand them is a sleep aid. They’re basically hallucinogens are part of that family that you actually hallucinate that you slept, that your level of consciousness may be lowered enough that you feel like you’re out. But it’s not actually letting you have deep sleep. So I think when you look at the chance to reset, and look at what our values are. The value of being in our family being closed down to everything, but our close family group, what is our family group mean? What does that team have quarantine? I heard someone use that term of, this is the team I’m quarantined with, and what does being part of that team look like? And we neglect that team as part of the daily lives when everything on the outside world is pulling us out, as a time to to nurture that indoor quarantine team that we’re on with our relationships with our kids, even just your dog or cat or whatever those is, it’s a chance all that honey do list or that list of things that what ifs that I would love to do that, oh, I’d love to redo my sleep, I’d really love to redo that closet or whatever level you are on that list of I would love to do that, but… this is the chance to remove that but for the first time and say, I can read that book, I can play Legos with my kids. Our guys built a fort this week, they haven’t taken a time to build a fort because they’re at that age where there are soccer practices and there’s a lot of things going on. Well, they built a fort this week, and the equivalent of what we can do as an adult to take time, because it’s okay to tear up our living room and turn it into a fort. It’s okay to tear down those habits of “oh, I eat out every Friday, I eat pizza every Friday” whatever those unhealthy habits are, we can let them all go.
Diva Nagula 33:27
Yeah. And I like that whole opportunity for a nice reset. And I guess what would be helpful is to maybe take our listeners through some strategies of assisting them through a proper reset. I mean, one of the things that comes to mind for me is really, we’re all faced under a lot of stress and anxiety and if we’re trying to optimize our health and well being and optimize our sleep, I mean, one of the things that we really should address is not to consume or over consumed alcohol, as we talked about earlier, how it actually disrupts deep sleep. And if you’re not able to catch up on and get those hours that you’ve lost, so it’s kind of like you’re losing out on the important aspect of restoring and your your health. And additionally, one of the things that I’ve noticed is that I’m watching the TV or I’m on my computer a lot more so than normal. So what I’ve started to do, and I’ve noticed that my sleep has been impaired, it’s just the overall length of sleep has been impaired. And I’m like wondering why, what’s changed? So it’s because I’m exposed to all this blue light. And so I’ve started to wear these blue light blockers and that’s actually started to help me fall back and fall asleep a lot easier. And I don’t have these moments throughout the night where I’m up and I’m back sleeping. That’s what was happening according to my aura ring. It was I was waking up really frequently throughout the night and it was because of my exposure to the TV screens and regular screens on my phone and my computer.
Tara Youngblood 34:58
Yeah, light is on another one of those really important, really unconscious, I think we take it for granted what our light exposure is. We look at, well, it’s daylight out, I’m on my computer, what does that computer like really have an impact? It really does and how our body interacts with it, those sort of unseen interactions can and really get us in the end. From a healthy perspective, your drive towards sleep, that sleep wake drive, starts when you wake up, and the sooner you get good sunlight the first thing we want to do is check our phones, like, where’s it at? What’s happened? What’s happened overnight? And get that news feed. But if we instead look for our sunlight feed first. And even if it’s just go out on your balcony, and get some sunlight, and just be peaceful, take a moment and do a 10 minute meditation but outside in the sun, it doesn’t even have to be a full out walk if you can’t walk anywhere right now. But to get outside and move your body some and get that fresh air and sunlight in whatever form that is, as early and as close to when you wake up. Because what it does when you start that as soon as you wake up, you actually move very gently towards that drive to go to sleep at the right time. You’re telling your body, yes, I’m awake. And it’s kind of the reverse of asleep switch turning on, you’re basically turning off that sleep and your body’s looking for that slight warming, it’s looking for that light to show up. Just like the sun’s coming up, we want to experience that sun as a trigger to say, “oh, it’s time to be awake.” And our hormones released according to that metric. So if you’re looking for that cup of coffee, then the natural burst is supposed to come from the sun, we got used to getting our burst in the morning from the sun before we got too tired and needed caffeine instead.
Diva Nagula 36:52
And this is a proper way to regulate our circadian rhythm first thing in the morning, right?
Tara Youngblood 36:57
It is, it’s not very… again, sleep is not that complicated of a process. It just wants really pretty
simple things, but at the right time.
Diva Nagula 37:08
Yeah, it’s more of a routine. And I think like we’re talking about this reset that people can utilize during this time. And it’s really fascinating, because if you think about it, if you are doing the right strategies and understand the right strategies, it will enable you to get a better night’s sleep, and you’ll be able to feel more rested, you won’t be necessarily feeling overwhelmed all the time and the anxiousness and the pressure of what we’re going through will be tolerated a lot better. We’re able to tackle it a lot easier. And I like the idea of talking about how we can approach sleep, not just right after we brush our teeth, right, that’s typically how we’ve always approached, it’s like “oh, I’m ready to go to sleep and brush my teeth.” But really, it’s the hours before that, that make up the make up or actually can reduce the quality of sleep that you’re having on that night. And so it could also come down to when you time your dinner, right. So if you time your dinner an hour or an hour and a half before you actually go to bed, it’s actually the worst thing that you can do, because then you’re digesting your food in the middle of night and your heart rate can’t actually go down to a normal resting state where it’s actually allowing your body to heal rather than focus on digestion.
Tara Youngblood 38:26
Yeah, and that’s definitely one of the other sort of misnomers is that the biggest meal of the day would, history wise, would have been lunchtime, because you would get up in the morning, strip the fires, you would make breakfast and, and really make lunch. And so lunch was in general, that busiest biggest meal of the day. And then you had all afternoon to kind of wear that off. And then obviously you’d eat leftovers or smaller bites, some people would have like a first segment sleep even and then just have the equivalent of wine and tapas kind of thing in the evening. So even two segments of sleep, but this idea of having this really big sort of that steak and potatoes meatloaf, whatever you’re thinking about, you know, anything that hungry man meal, having that at dinner time is a relatively new phenomenon. And our bodies are just not geared for that we don’t have a chance to wear it off. We don’t have a chance to have something to do with that. And our bodies end up having to manage that during sleep instead. And like you said, it’s just not a good combination.
Diva Nagula 39:32
Right now. I totally agree. I want to give you the opportunity. I know we mentioned the products but not in full detail. So I’d love to have you give us a little bit of what you guys have in terms of inventory and what you guys do in terms of promotion with the various products and where can we find those products also?
Tara Youngblood 39:53
Yeah, so we’re pretty simple. We’re an e-commerce company. So we are online on at www.chilitechnology.com you can also buy on Amazon as well. There’s better information on our website just on how things work. So if you’re curious or you want more information from a blog perspective or even more data on what we just talked about, that’s a good place to start, there’s two different products. Chili Pad is is what I like to call affectionately that old fashioned thermostat like the dial one that you had in your house, and you set it and forget it, and it’ll stay at that temperature until such time as you change it or turn it off. That’s our legacy of where we started, the OOLER, sort of is a take it up a notch, it’s an evolution, it runs on an app instead of a remote Chili Pad has a remote, has multiple fan speeds, so you can adjust the fan speeds, it has automatic cleaning, so we do sell cleaner for Chili Pad, but the cooler has a UV light in it. So it flicks on to keep the water from getting yucky. Because just like a humidifier… it’s a little bit more efficient on how it powers. So power usage, it’s about 30 watts difference, Chili Pad is 170 watts and OOLER is 140 watts. So it’s just a little more efficient. Neither one is a high energy signature, but it’s just a little more efficient that way. And the pads are, are pretty similar. But when you look at what we’re doing underneath you, the way it works is it’s really like a radiator. I like to think of myself as a Ferrari. But everyone else has their favorite cars. But we are an engine for lack of a better term. And just like I wouldn’t run a real Ferrari without a radiator. This is really what it’s doing. It’s a manifold or a pattern of tubes in the bed, and the water flows underneath you. So it can help you maintain that body temperature and allow you to drop it, it kind of gets past that blanket. So you’re underneath the blanket, a lot of people are excited that they get to use a blanket for the first time and they haven’t been they’re sort of sleeping under sheets or bare minimum and sometimes just naked. We actually did a survey recently, and apparently 20% of our users sleep naked. So there’s that as well. no judgement however you want to sleep, I don’t care about pajamas. So this allows you to maintain that temperature. So it really is just exactly like your radiator does for your car. It really is working on cooling or heating or helping your body maintain that, it does feel really great if you’re running a fever or kids of all use it over the years or when you’re not feeling well. It feels awesome. In the winter time, you know you can warm up. The weighted blanket is our sort of new offering it came out this January. If you’re not familiar with what a weighted blanket is, it’s truly like it sounds there’s extra weight in the blanket. And that may seem counterintuitive why that sounds awesome if you haven’t used one, but it actually, that deep pressure was first looked at for kids with autism, they were doing deep pressure therapy and they found that it really reduced their anxiety. And it turns out, it reduces that anxiety for all of us that need it. And so weighted blankets are just a really great way the reduce they reduce anxiety and release serotonin, which is also a great sleep hormone. So it’s a great equation to have in your sleep. But if you need to settle out during the day, it also feels good there. But it’s got that same tubing that exists in our pads, it’s just in a weighted blanket and you can adjust it, it can hook up to either a Chili Pad or an OOLER control unit, you can’t run two things off of one control unit. So you do need one control unit for each. But if you’re switching off, you can absolutely switch off different options.
Diva Nagula 43:45
They’re all fantastic. First thing I’m going to do when we finish off this podcast is I need to upgrade to the OOLER system because I think that’s what I need for myself since I keep waking up in the later part of the night because it’s too cold. So it makes kind of sense for me to upgrade it.
Tara Youngblood 44:02
You can upgrade we’ve had a bunch of people that you can upgrade everything if your pad is hitting where it wants to do well, though they wash and you can reuse them. You can just get the control in it if you want to do that too.
Diva Nagula 44:17
Some final thoughts. I know you were talking to me earlier before we started our podcasts about some things that you have in the pipeline?
Tara Youngblood 44:23
Yeah, we have a great app that we’ll be launching in November. I’m super excited about it. It’s looking at how to create framework and how to create a recipe for health and wellness at home, which seems very much suited to where we are in these days of how you can manage all of the complexities of wellness. Recently had a conversation about the failings of health insurance really become part of we think health insurance covers wellness. And it’s really about catastrophes and triage and just like our car insurance doesn’t cover oil changes or new windshield wipers and new tires and all those things that we have to maintain, we have to take owner start taking ownership of our maintenance program, and create a maintenance program. So this app really helps us create a framework for what maintenance we need to have in order to stay healthy and happy and create helpful resilience over a lifetime.
Diva Nagula 45:21
That’s awesome. I’m looking forward for that. But terret, thank you so much for coming on the show and being our guest today. And I think these tips are so valuable for people to optimize their health and optimize their sleep specifically, in the times that we’re facing. I think we really need to focus on ways that we could optimize our well being without having to impair our system with pharmaceuticals, or chemicals. And just use simple strategy that’s very effective. And it’s proven in time and time again, it’s very easy to use, and then doesn’t require a whole lot of effort.
Tara Youngblood 45:57
Great. Yeah. And if there’s more questions I told you ahead of time, but I did a TEDx talk in December. So if you go the TEDx YouTube channel, I kind of break down what my sleep recipe is, and how I got there a little more on my story. I do you have a book on Amazo, Reprogram Your Sleep, that also kind of walks you through a lot of those strategies. I have a blog on our website. And my social media handle is @TheSleepGeek. So tag me or ask more questions as well or reach out through your podcasts as well and pass along questions if there are. I love answering questions.
Diva Nagula 46:34
Awesome. Thanks again. Appreciate it.
Tara Youngblood 46:36 All right. Great. Thank you.