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04: How to Optimize Recovery Using Sleep w/ Nick Littlehales


A sleep coach Nick Littlehales shares techniques breakers can use to maximize recovery and fall asleep easily after intense practice sessions and night events.



About the Speaker

Nick Littlehales, the first and leading Elite Sports Sleep Coach who’s worked with top-tier teams like Manchester City, Manchester United, Liverpool, Brighton Hove Albion, and Real Madrid, not to mention Olympic athletes and global icons, in almost every sport around the world. He’s also the author of the best-selling book Sleep, where he introduces the game-changing R90 Technique, a strategy emphasizing quality over quantity by focusing on sleep cycles.

- R90 technique website: https://sportsleepcoach.com/

- Athlete Sleep Coach website for sleep licenses (JPN) - https://athletesleepcoach.jp/


Takeaways

  • Technology, increased time spent indoors and less exposure to light, shift from a polyphasic approach to sleep (sleeping multiple times in a day), daylight saving times, etc. made us live less aligned with the natural circadian rhythm.

  • Aligning with natural circadian rhythms helps us sleep better and function the best.

  • Understanding individual chronotypes can guide the timing of every activity based on your shifting energy levels.

  • We should pay more attention to how many cycles we go through in a week instead of the number of hours we sleep in a day. The first 3 cycles are the most important.

  • Creating consistent anchor reset points for waking up and basking in the sun helps establish a healthy sleep routine.

  • You shouldn't need supplements like melatonin if you're living aligned with the sunlight. If it shall be used, melatonin must be used with caution and in conjunction with other sleep-promoting practices.

  • On weeks you can't allocate sufficient time for sleep, increase micro-moments where you engage in activities with vacant mind. These include CRPs in the midday, 30-minute naps in the afternoon, and Micro-Reset Moment (MRMs) throughout the day.

  • Find out the number of cycles you need for maximum alertness. The number of days in a week with insufficient sleep should be 3 at maximum.

  • Prioritizing sleep and being proactive in creating healthy sleep habits can lead to better decision-making and overall success.


Time stamps

0:00 Nick’s message to Breakorial listeners

0:38 Intro

1:30 Nick’s bio 

6:26 General rule of thumbs of sleep

20:56 What is a non-human schedule?

23:52 Nick’s view on melatonin supplements?

28:43 Anchor Resent Point and morning routine

38:24 How to get on with days with insufficient sleep

53:50 Putting an “ing” on sleep

55:24 What if you can’t fall asleep until… morning?

01:02:11 Outro and About Nick’s services


Transcripts

0:00 Nick’s message to Breakorial listeners

And now I would advise anybody, however simple this sounds, is, write down sleep and then write down sleeping and put and “ing” on it, and just start to be more proactive in your attitude towards sleep, because it starts when you wake up in the morning. When you start this, that's where you're sleeping, starts just like all the other health pillars. So just put an -ing on it and start to think about, have you done anything today that's going to help you sleep tonight? And if the answer's no and start doing one thing.

0:38 Intro

Hitomi: Hey guys! Welcome to Breakorial, the podcast for b-boys and b-girls wanting to maximize recovery and unlock their full potential on the floor. This episode is about sleeping strategies to optimize athletic performance with our guest: Nick Littlehales, the first and leading Elite Sports Sleep Coach who’s worked with top-tier teams like Manchester City, Manchester United, Liverpool, Brighton Hove Albion and Real Madrid, not to mention Olympic athletes and global icons, in almost every sport around the world. He’s also the author of the best-selling book Sleep, where he introduces the game-changing R90 Technique, a strategy emphasizing quality over quantity by focusing on sleep cycles.

Without further ado, let’s get right into it.


1:30 Nick’s bio 

Nick: My name is Nick Littlehales. I fell into, the sleep industry. products, mattresses. the clinical side of sleep quite a long time ago. I, as you pointed out, became very aware of how important sleep was to us all as human beings. 


However, the majority of us would take it for granted. you sort of fit it in at the end of the day. And I fell into the world of sport, purely by accident. through some connections and started to put across my understanding of sleep how I'd interpreted it, through working with clinical academics through to just watching everybody sleep. 


I was a director of a big company. so I traveled the world and was very interested in it. So I did a lot of research. and I started to put across my sort of techniques and understandings into the world of sport. 


So the world of sport are just human beings, with an occupation called sport. but I started to apply certain things that seemed to make a difference and started to help. And so it developed an understanding about. Yes, it's important, but, how do we sort of redefine it for ourselves as individuals? And that journey started around 1998, which is a long time ago. There were no sleep coaches around them. There was very little data. we didn't have phones and smart devices. So that journey took me through a number of elite athlete organisations, from football in the UK, to things like cycling, with British Cycling and team Sky around 2008 into the London 2012 Olympics. 


Then I was asked to write a book about my interpretations about sleep as this health and wellbeing pillar that's been ignored. that was published in 2016, with a publisher called Penguin Random House. And that little book, traveled into 18 different languages. became a bestseller in a lot of characters. And, it was quite overwhelming in some respects because I'm not clinically trained or academically trained in the subject of sleep. but it seemed to resonate with a lot of human beings around the planet as to helping them be able to to redefine their their own approach. 


And, I think the key thing to end my introduction was since 1998 to where we are today. A lot of things have changed quite dramatically in the world of technology. In the world of 24/ 7, in the world of social media, in this sort of very small world, this planet we live on because we've sort of globalized it. 


And so we've got we've got a lot of things available to us that are very exciting but they're also a little bit scary because we move so quickly with them that sometimes we have to sort of step back a little bit and go, we're moving too quickly with this, because the impacts it's having on us as human beings is becoming more dramatic than it should be. So, my role as an elite sports sleep coach is to be able to deal with both sides of the performance aspect, but also the challenges that individuals face inside of their occupation called sport. And it's also brought me to having conversations with something I would never have thought about would be to talking to you about breakdancers and breakdancing in the Paris Olympics. Yes. Unbelievable. 


6:26 General rule of thumbs of sleep

Hitomi: It definitely is. you said… you mentioned how, like, the world is changing and, all those technology and stuff I guess you're referring to. But what do you think are the basic, like, basic rules that you want to keep constant for every individual, no matter what kind of lifestyle they're having? 


Nick: I think the, there's a number of little things that have, that I identified, you know, in my journey was, up until up until we sort of invented electric light. Yeah. which was around the 1930s. There's no evidence of human beings sleeping in just one block. it was always a sort of multiphase approach, where we would sleep in shorter periods within any 24 hours, because we were very much more aligned with circadian rhythms, which is basically our planet going around our sun, creating rhythms. 


So there was another one that cropped up, which is, the daylight saving time. It doesn't affect every country in the world, but still in, you know, the vast majority, we mess around with clocks and timers and, so a lot of countries that sort of adopted it went back to their normal routines. So there's far more people on this planet who don't get affected by shifting the clocks, and don't get affected by what's the outcome of that, which is seasonal affective disorder, which is claimed. We are we move into the dark months and into the very light months, and then never mind the seasons, that was another one. 


And then, of course, you know, suddenly we, we shift from, our whole behavior, was very much about we could be active mentally and physically, but we also had quite a lot of time to be inactive. so technology shifted us from things that we were doing that we weren't planning. It's just that we, you know, I could write things down on a piece of paper or in my notepad, but I couldn't do anything with them, with my thoughts or with my ideas. but now I can do that and instantaneously impact the rest of the world. 


So I think the thing that I think is the most common factor is to is to remind us all, it's a simple thing that we are actually human beings. We're on a planet. There is a there is a it's rotating around the sun. It creates this sunrise, midday sunset, rhythm of light, dark and temperature shifts. we have those seasonal elements involved with every, every year. And it's just to remind us that we are actually mammals on a planet, and we have functionality about ourselves as human beings that are directly linked to those rhythms. 


So the first thing is just to make anybody aware of that, you you're actually a human being. And you know, if you want to, if you want to be on this planet and you want to do certain things in certain ways, you do have to remind yourself that all the outside influences that come into your world can have consequences. If you're not able to sort of manage them a little bit better than just allowing them to enter your world without too much thought. 


The other one, I think, which there's always a little bit of debate around in the the sort of research communities which is chronotype and, and there's a, there's a, there was an element always of it being a genetic, you know, how to humans would react to daylight blue light sunrise and the hormone serotonin on suppressing everything and making us very functional without getting too technical or clinical on that point. but there's another one because, you know, as we as we have the ability to learn and research things in so many different ways in all sorts of different fields, there's more of a tendency to think it's about your formative growth years. 


So your parents, where you were brought up, whether you lived in a city or you were lived out in the countryside or how your parents acted around you, what sort of things did they make you do? And it's it's sort of it's very much more I think that that element is you have this little circadian rhythm inside of yourself, because of that. 


And so you get a nice relationship about the four phases of the day, you know, sunrise, midday, sunset, you know, 6:00, 12:00, 6:00, 12:00. In the 24 hour clock, you get more. I'm also to define relationship with what are your best phases? 


You know, so the the morning type person who who does seem to want to get up and be active in that first phase of the day is not so active in the third phase of the day, like between 6 p.m. and 12:00 at night. So the night time, chronotype, the PM-ers I call them, the owl, is is very much that person who doesn't start the day as quickly or as functionality gets set in as quickly. 


So there's little characteristics about us all. We are human beings. We're on a planet. There's rhythms around us externally, there's rhythms inside us internally, and we have these little nuances of our own little clocks and our own little rhythms of how we've been brought up And just being more aware of that helps you to manage what's coming your way. And you can't change the world. but what you can do is go if I want to be a breakdancer, for example. And I'm a female, for example. 


Then there's a number of factors in play for you as a female versus a male. There are possibly that little thing between your natural chronotype when you'd like to do something, like when you'd like to train or do events and classes could be different to another female in the same team, you know? And there's the influences around you, like parents and friends who may have a slightly different chronotype to you. 


So you want to do things together, but you need to know how to do it together. If you're aware that maybe there's opportunities for it to be better for you, if you did it a slightly different time of the day, and the way that sort of comes together is going back to that first bit of this polyphasic recovery process that we were more aligned with. 


And that means when you look at your 24 hours, you don't think of it as Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, Friday, Saturday, Sunday. You see it as a rolling 24 hour process. This? Yeah. The earth going around the sun. It happens all the time. That's what it does. And we're aligned with that. And you then start to think of my 24 hours in front of me, and the way you sort of able to make that make a bit more sense, because it's about having this sort of natural rhythm is to in a clinical environment, you've got, sleep measured in 90 minute cycles. 


So they'll, they'll look at the first 90 minute cycle, all the brainwave patterns being developed, and then they'll look at the second 90 minute cycle, third 90 minute cycle, fourth and fifth and maybe sixth. And that's because some would look at 60 minutes. But within that 90 minute cycle, the various brainwave patterns are developed. And some of those restorative stages, some of them are lighter sleep stages and various things. 


So suddenly you change your aspect to it's not about how many hours you've allocated to sleep. It's actually about how you and your brain go through these cycles when you're asleep, because your brain is in control of it. So I think the key things is you can then put some things in place where you have a nice anchor point to your day, like your own sunrise. You can then look at your 24 hours like 16 90 minute cycles. 


So cycle one through to cycle 16. You can start to see where your sleep times would be, because you've got this nice little subconscious rhythm. And so you can start to develop a sort of, a nice little subconscious plan of are you doing anything when you start your day that's going to help your brain when you go to sleep later, develop what you want it to do. And in the first three cycles of your sleep, while you're asleep, off you there. If you're sleeping away, head on the pillow and your brain's going through this process when it's really trying to develop some of the most restorative sleep stages when you're in a very deep, semi paralyzed state. In the first three cycles. 


So if you sort of go to sleep around 11:00 and you have a nice wake time around 6:30, well, that's five 90 minute cycles and that's 7.5 hours. So 15 minutes in and 15 minutes out is kind of your eight hours, which everybody's kind of got that number in their head. So then you sort of think, well, between 11 and 12:30 is my first cycle and my brain would like to look for deep sleep. The second cycle is 12:30 into 2:00 in the morning. 


So it likes to look for it again then, then 2:00 into 3:30. It's kind of still looking, but it's kind of now being influenced by the sun is coming back to wake up my zip code, you know, and it's kind of in the fourth and fifth cycle of that sleep. You're in a recovery state, but it stops looking for that deep sleep, stages. So you start to be able to think about the most important cycles of your 24 hours when you're asleep. It's probably the first three. The second two are important, but not so important in that 24 hour clock. So it gives you a bit of structure. 


So the answer long answer to your question is the three. The three key things is. Circadian rhythms. You're a human on this planet, and being synchronized with that more often than not is your key to success. It's never perfect. There's too many things we have to deal with, too many variables, but it's more often than not, you know, and just being more aware of, you know, what? 


Some people can be in between us, but that's because they camouflage it or ignore it, you know? So in an ideal sort of scenario, understanding your chronotype, which is your natural characteristic a little bit better, means you can plan your day a little bit better, and you can be more aware of your key influences and sleeping in cycles. it certainly shifts you from, you know, waking up in the morning at some point, cracking on with your day, getting to a certain point, like in your world, you know, finishing the day around 6:00 because you're at school or work and then suddenly having to do events and classes right into 11:00, 12:00 at night. It certainly instead of sort of getting that point and going, right, I'm going to sleep now. Well, you can't just switch it on. You know, it. It's a very natural process. 


So you kind of think, well, I know what's coming today, don't I? Absolutely right. I know what's coming. We're doing classes tonight at 11:00. I'm not going to get back until 12:30. And I've got to go back to school again tomorrow for 8:00. So you're already know that when you start cycle one in that process. So you can think about little things that you can do on that journey up to those pose to protect yourself from the consequences of what you're being asked to do. And then you get more awareness. 


When you get more awareness, you get more confidence. And when you get more confidence, you stop worrying about it. And when you stop worrying about it, because that's sleep's biggest disrupter is sort of thinking, am I going to sleep okay tonight? How will I feel tomorrow? What happens if I wake up too early? So that's really the there's lots of other things that you can put into play. 


But if I was ever looking at any organization, that's where you would focus with the people in charge of the organization, the coaches and everybody else involved to say, we we can do this. We've got certain things we've got to do. Of course we have. But we've we've also got to be far more conscious that we're all human beings and we can't keep doing non-human schedules because you will not get success from that. Certainly not the success that you want. 


20:56 What is a non-human schedule?

Hitomi: What would you define to be the non-human schedule that you were talking about? 


Nick: Some of us, you know, we we seem to be able to run 100m in 9.58 if you're Usain Bolt. Some of us can work night shifts and and not really feel too uncomfortable about that. so within all the aspects, there's there's lots of people who can go to the extremes, and, and, and do things slightly differently to lots of others. 


I think what you, what you tend to define as a non-human is. Is when you start to look at any seven day period and within that seven day period, there is very little time at all for that human being to reset, you know, and reset is. You know, being able to just step out of everything that's going on around them and just have some time out for themselves. so that helps them prepare for the next bit. I think sometimes it's difficult to define what is non-human. But I think if we're struggling, that's how you define non-human. 


So if you've got people who are struggling with their mental health and wellbeing or they're struggling with their eating habits, they're struggling with not being able to sleep, comfortably and, and successfully, they start to, you know, maybe they're not performing in their schoolwork as, as well as they would have liked. maybe they're going towards things that, you know, things like caffeine and stimulating drinks and in other areas it can get a little bit more, Well, you can move into things like sleeping tablets, melatonin supplements. 


You know, all the little things. So you tend to sort of shift from being, a sort of naturally functioning human. You've got a number of things in play that are counterproductive to that process, and they can be interventions like supplements and drugs and energy drinks and over caffeinated, but they can also be alertness, mood, motivation, eating habits, all that sort of thing comes together. So you can see when a non-human schedule is having an impact on any particular individual group by their habits that they're adopting to try and cope with it. 


23:52 Nick’s view on melatonin supplements?

Hitomi: So you're saying like if you're using melatonin like agonist, for example, like that is sort of unhuman because you're basically trying to shift yourself and your lifestyle from what's normal or what used to be normal. back when we didn't have any. 


Nick: Yeah, it sort of it it kind of is a little bit like that because you sort of. If you if you suddenly want to start taking melatonin supplements because you've found out about it online, you know you don't need any medical advice. 


You just tap it in your browser. well, you first ask yourself, are you melatonin deficient? And if you if you can't find that out, then learn more about how melatonin is produced. What sort of, what sort of things factors are in play about melatonin. Then you suddenly find out about serotonin because they work very much in harmony. And then you sort of think, well, what I should do is actually download a light meter onto my device. I get a little light meter app for free, and just get this little dial up and wander around. 


And it's not scientific, you know, you can get very scientific but just to become aware that where you're sat in your office or in your bedroom or in the kitchen, or when you're at school where you sit in a classroom, you just become aware of lux levels, you know? So I'm sitting here and I become very aware that it might be nice and light, but the lux level could be in just a few hundred lux, right? 


Lux is where you measured sort of light. I know that daylight is measured as lux. I know the inside of daylight. We've got this lovely blue light, which is our energy source, you know. So at the right time of the day, it's great at the wrong time of the day. It's not so great. So. It's sort of I suddenly become aware that if I'm sitting here talking to you for 60 minutes in this life, I know because I've got my awareness and I've used my app for a few weeks now. I don't need the app because I can tell, right? I've got this awareness. 


So if I spend some time here, I'm going to be I know that sort of my light receptors in my brain and my little gland in my brain is trying to produce melatonin, to tell my brain to suppress me, to shut me down because that's it should be there in the phase three of my day, not the start of it. So I kind of think like I need a sort of better relationship with light. So it's kind of I'm taking a supplement that's got melatonin in it, and I'm taking it at a certain point in the day to try and encourage that, to tell my brain to suppress me and take me into sleep. However, if I haven't done anything. 


Since I woke up this morning to help that process. All this is going to do is become if I don't take melatonin, I've got no chance of sleeping. Then it stops having any impact. From that initial. I've done something. I've taken melatonin. So I think I slept better last night. Then it becomes it doesn't really have any impact. Then it changes other things that are going on, and then people start taking it in all sorts of random parts of their day. And if they get back from a late night training session, they might be taking melatonin supplements. 


Think it's going to help them get into sleep quicker. So it all becomes a little bit. So any intervention can be used as long as it's as long as you've had a more considered choice about why you're using it, how you're using it, and what sort of long and short term impact it might have. But the rule is basically you shouldn't need it. 


Hitomi: So even if you use that melatonin supplements, it doesn't really you know, it's not really effective if you don't, take your light into your eyes every morning. Or it's just like having melatonin every day and it's not going to improve. It's going to it's not going to change the initial like issue or problem. Basically. 


Nick: Well, from from my experience, no. because it's, you know, we all have these little things. 


28:43 Anchor Resent Point and morning routine

I know it was in one of your, your questions, and I, I very much focus on a thing called an ARP, an anchor reset point, and you can call it what you like, but it's, it's it's my most consistent wake time. Right. I'm a morning chronotype person, so I love the mornings. I very much want to be very active, you know, so all my functionality gets done pretty quickly. there's always that occupational, challenge with your wake time. 


But fortunately, because I'm a morning chronotype, my most consistent natural wake time is the same as my occupational one, because I live in an AM-er's world. Now, if you're a PM-er, a night timer, then you have to get up with me. Early to get to school, but your natural start time might be two hours later. So I think of our anchor point of is to make sure we have a consistent start to our day. So it's not. I am waking at 6:30 every day. 


What I'm doing is, is I try to create rhythms and natural flow with any athlete or myself, is that I'm waking in my final cycle of my five cycles. So cycle 16. Right between 5:00 and 6:30. So if I'm naturally coming out of sleep between 5:00 and 6:30, hopefully closer towards 6:00 than 5:00, right? Then I start to think there's something up because I'm waking a little bit early in that cycle. 


Then basically I just, you know, expose myself to plenty of light because I know what's happening is the blue light is triggering serotonin and removing the melatonin. It's making all my bodily functions come to life because I've been suppressed in sleep. And it also sets a little clock that says about 12 hours from now, we should be producing melatonin because we're moving towards that phase of our circadian rhythm. So it gives a nice start point to everybody's day. 


And because you have those seasonal shifts and you've got that daylight saving time, it's just nice to say that if you apply a random approach. So sometimes you put the alarm clock on for 8:00 in the morning or 9:00 in the morning or 6:00 in the morning or whatever it is, because sometimes you can go to sleep at 8:00 or 9:00 at night, but then the majority of the week it's gone 12:00 because you had classes is the more you've got that randomness, what you're asking your brain all the time is to constantly adapt. 


And it does it brilliantly because it's an amazing organ. However it's going, what time of day are we out here because you're doing this? But my sort of internal rhythms and external rhythms want to be a little bit more in that phase. And then you're doing this and now you're hitting me with caffeine, which is fine, but it's sort of we should be in a nice little siesta period just after lunch when we have this natural rhythm. We should be having a little recovery moment here or late afternoon. why, you you should know as well that a lot of people wake up around 2:00 or 3:00 in the morning and can't get back to sleep, and they worry about that. Well, it's actually a very natural phase in the 24 hours for us to be awake when you only look back to sleep wake cycles. 


So it's called a sort of tri- phasic and biphasic approach is that you would sleep not only in cycles, but then you'd take some recovery midday, the old siesta in certain parts of our planet, or late afternoon. So you'd be gathering your recovery that enabled you to go through the 24 hours in a nice rhythmical way. And I think that's that's where you sort of get to that particular point of the sun is going to rise. It will shift through the seasons, be aware of it. But so if it's rising at 4:00 in the morning, be aware. Right. If it's rising at 5 or 6:00 in the morning, be aware so we can because we're inside, we can try and manage the external sunrise because we have to. And you can use sort of blackout and things like that. But you also want to be aware of you need light. 


You need that sunrise. If you are outside all the time that sun would rise. The temperature would go up a little bit. The light would hit your receptors and off you go, huh? And when it disappears, you're moving into a much lower level of luxe, like amber lights and things like that. And that means that melatonin triggers happen naturally and they move you towards the state. So I think this sort of what we really focus on is finding out what is your natural wake time based on your chronotype. Then we look at what's the most consistent wake time because of your occupation. And school is an occupation. 


So you look at that and go, well, I now know that my occupational ARP and reset point consistent wake time is maybe 1 or 2 cycles before I would naturally start, if I had full control. So you and I could be, you know, morning in the nighttime chronotype person. I start my day at 6:30. You start your day at 6:30, but your natural start might be 8:00, a full 90 minute cycle on. So you already know this. 


So you need the light? Not more than I do, but you definitely need light to stimulate your functionality quicker. Along with me. Otherwise, you are going through the day in sorts of things are not happening when you would like them to happen. They're happening earlier and shifting you around. So I think that's where it sort of it comes to it. So go, oh I can't, I don't want to wake up at the same time. Well it's not a wake time. It's it's basically just your sunrise, you know, you I start to expose myself to light around 6:30 every day. 


No, no weekends around 6:30 every day. And I just make sure everything is on suppressed using that light and it gets into bowel and bladder. Bladder is normally easy for us all. ba, bowel sometimes not, you know, eating some some good healthy stuff and getting rid of the waste. So you're taking the good stuff into your day and processing that and hydrating little mental and physical challenges, which could be just, you know, doing something around your home. A little mental challenge, like making breakfast can be a mental challenge of getting that in there and getting just little tiny things. 


That means when you sort of leave your home. You. You've done certain things. That means you're a human ready for the planet, right? whereas a lot of people, a lot of that functionality doesn't really happen, until quite a few cycles into the day. So they're always behind themselves, always in catch-up, you know. So I love ARPs. You mean just having the light at the same time of the day, every day? And it's not really about waking up at the same time? Yeah, it's kind of it's kind of I sort of sometimes in the coaching world, the last thing you want to say to somebody is do this, do that and do that. Right. 


Just take them on a little journey and they suddenly then look back and go, wow, I've stopped doing this. I'm now doing that. I feel like this. And that's amazing because I'm sleeping through more often. I'm actually doing this. That's having less impact. Why is that. And that's we said well we started to have a relationship with our brain. 


And we sort of ask it the question, would you like a consistent start to each 24 hours? Yes, please. It says, because that sunrise, would you like to be exposed to plenty of daylight? Blue light? Yes, because that's what triggers everything that makes you a human right. And would you like that to be consistent every 24 hours, 365 days a year? Well, yeah. You know, so and then what's going to happen. So. Well, if you do that, you know, I can make sure that everything you do in the first phase of the day is going to be optimized. Oh, cool. 


38:24 How to get on with days with insufficient sleep

Then would you like me to just, you know, take Hitomi and we just go and sit on a bench outside, you know, the school, and we just sit there for five minutes together and just look at the sky. And we just go. We're just having a little vacant mindspace moment. I mean, in every culture, there's lots of things. So excuse me, there's lots of things that people do to create those little moments, but how valuable they are is sometimes lost. And we just sit there and go, would you like that? Yes, I would, because as we travel through the first phase of the day into midday, it's nice to have a little bit of a reset. 


And while you're there visualizing the wonderful sky, or maybe you're doing a bit of exercise, yoga pilates outside, whatever it is, you're just getting a nice little reset because pointing your brain at clutter, problems, issues and all that sort of stuff, that's that's the kind of emotional things you get back from it. But if we're just sitting there, aren't we? It doesn't take too too long for that to sort of we go, life's not that bad. And we then go right, we need to do that later because we've got an event tonight, you know, so we get that little nice little mental reset. Would you like that? Every day around midday. Yeah, even if it's for 15 minutes. Just do it because it really helps me. Help you? Right. I'm talking to my brain now. 


And then late afternoon. Wow. If you could give me. If you give me 20 minutes. 30 minutes. Right. So I won't bore you with the technology, but a 90 minute cycle while you're asleep. 30 odd percent of that is 30 minutes. That's where the napping thing comes from. A short period of micro sleeping is if we could just have 30 minutes in the afternoon just for us to, you know, just do something we like doing or something different, or maybe just give the opportunity to the brain that maybe just says, well, you might just want to just snooze it out for a little bit, you know, just just for a short period of time. 


Would you like that? Well, yeah. Because if you create the space, I will let you know if we if we should go somewhere a little quieter because we might snooze it out for five, ten minutes right within that 30, or we might not, but as long as you create it. I'm able to take advantage of that for you. Great. What does then, that enable your brain to do is to take the pressure of phase three. And phase three is your 6:00 into 12, right? 


And that's when you're having to leave one set of challenges with school moving to, you know, hydrating, fueling up because then you're going to classes, then you're being pushed into that later period of time, and then you've got to try and get some cycles in before you start again. So it sort of goes that 30 minutes in the afternoon, right. That's going to help protect that when you get back from your event around 12 or half past 12. 


You've already had the conscious mindset, if you remember before I said 11:00 into 6:30 is five 90 minutes, like, well, 11:00 into 12:30 into two. So immediately what I'm thinking about when we have our little break midday, just five minutes on the bench, we just go, well, we're going for 2:00 tonight, aren't we? Right. Because if we can grab our little 20 minutes later on around 4:00, 4:30, even if it's just 15, 20 minutes, grab it. Right. That'll mean that we can go and do that event. Right? That means we'll get back around 12:30. 


That means we don't just try to put our PJs on and worry that we've got to get some sleep. We just relax. And get home and think about the light in our home, you know. So it's very much about that melatonin sort of type of environment with the light. We think about chilling out. We think about bowel and bladder. We think about do we need a little snack or do we need to watch something? Or do we need to listen to something just to get ourselves out of the hip hop dance group? Right. And we got to get it down. 


And that gives us time with our brains to then go. Right now it's time to go to sleep. And I'm going to sleep between 2:00 and 6:30, which is three cycles, 4.5 hours. If I can sleep through that, I've got 4.5 hours. Start my day light bang, do the midday, do the 30 right then when I've not got those classes, don't try and go to sleep earlier. Don't try to be later, just go. Today we're going to go for 11:00 because we haven't got any classes on, but we've only got two days without classes and then it starts again. 


So let's just keep some sort of rhythm that on most days, on some days you can say 11 into 6:30 is you, five, some days 12:30 into is you four cycles and some days it's going to be three cycles, 2:00 into 6:30. But as long as you've got as long as you've got that sort of. That nice rhythm to starting the day, right. So we only got three cycles last night. That's not a problem, right? Give me that 30 minutes later on. 


So when you sort of said before about the non-human bit is if I'm looking at you guys and you're going, it's 12:30 before we get back and we're doing some pretty high physical, stimulating stuff, sensory stuff as well as physical stuff that you do that and you do that if you do that consistently, I mean, for more than three days a week, right? If you do that more than three days a week, you have to be giving them a human 30 minute CRP late afternoon. 


You've got to be creating that space. And some people will use that really positively. You need to give them that. Otherwise you will see them constantly dealing with fatigue. And all the stuff you do about training and nutrition and you know how to be the best breakdancers at the breakers on the planet. You know, all of that stuff you're doing in that part of that phase of the day is only going to have a sort of 50% impact. I exaggerate, right? It's it's not going to have its full potential because most of the people will either forget what they learnt, will either have to be reminded constantly about little techniques and tactics. 


They may not be able to repeat them as often as they should, because they're not able to take on board what was happening in that period. So you just tell everybody this is non-human because you're kind of wasting your time training at that night, at that time of night, if you're not giving them the space to come to that, to take full advantage of it. And by the way how many what's the chronotype mix of the group? You know who's the coach? Who's the other influencer? What about your colleagues inside of that group? Male and female. You just go. 


Well, we should all be doing certain things because Nick's a morning person, so he needs. Right? He's going to start at 6:30, whatever you do. Right. Because he needs the anchor point with his brain. He needs to be able to at least grab some sort of 15, 20 minutes midday while he's having his lunch or something. 


But don't put him under pressure. Let him do that in his own space and he definitely needs 30 minutes late afternoon. Why? We can't afford that because they're at school. So what are these two things? Talking to each other or not? Because it helps with schoolwork and trying to achieve what you wanted. Schoolwork. So it's all about that 24 hours. And if you give Nick that 30 minutes, what he does he will either micro sleep. He will either do something really vacant mind space.


Either listen to something. Read. Pilates. Yoga. Meditation. Something. Anything to just completely distract himself from the outside world. And if he does that, he can come to the event and the training classes tonight. And when he comes, he will take on board everything that you want him to do and be better every time he trains and practices. If you don't give him that, he probably will burn out sooner than later. So it's kind of like pointless if you're doing that without that. 


Hitomi: So the point is just what the anchor point is in the midday, you take like 30 minutes and have the light or your anchor point. 


Nick: Your anchor point is your sunrise. 


Hitomi: Okay. 


Nick: Right. The most consistent stuff. what I call is a controlled recovery period, a CRP. That's basically what everybody knows about napping and stuff like that. Whether you're sat on a bench or in a bed or in a hammock or curled up on the floor under a tree, you know, on a blanket. So you just think of that as a that's my little 30 minutes because that is a cycle. It's part of a normal human being process where most of us get that little slump midday, maybe when we take on a bit of food, lunch and we get this little bit of a, oh, I could probably snooze it out, but we push past that. We get another one late afternoon before we hit the evening, and we push past that as well. So it's kind of just releasing, you know, if you think about them in not thinking about what I'm going to do a 90 minute cycle midday. No, no no no that ain't going to work. But if you just think the way I always think is, is there's sorry about the terms, but your ARP is you're consistent wake time. Right. You know, 6:30 7:00 8:00. Keep it nice and simple. But don't pick 7:26 or 7:16, you know, keep it nice and rhythmically to 90 minutes. 30 minutes. Da da da da da da da da. So you don't have to think about it. 


So I just go, right. Lots of light. Whether I need a device to create that light, or I just need to get outside as quick as I can, I need an unrushed start to my day even though I only got three cycles. I need to let that happen. Otherwise the rest of the day is going to be under pressure. And I just think the other one that I have in is is it's like they're called MRM's, but they're they're just little micro reset moments. And that's nothing more than I'm set here in my desk. And if I just look out of my window. Into thy garden. Just for a couple of minutes by a window or something. Or refilling a hydration bottle. 


You know, just taking a little moment to go. Oh, yeah. Dub, dub. Dub. If I think about as many of those as I can get into my day. Rather than not. So I can just take advantage of just standing by that window just for a couple of minutes or just getting outside. So what you do is you create habits that you master. They become subconscious. And it means, as I'm going about my day, whether I'm in familiar environments or not, I am very, very aware that if I'm talking to you for more than an hour, I need to step away and step back in. And that can be nothing more than a couple of minutes. Right. 


If I keep doing those things and I keep thinking. They don't want me to have a 30 minute slot late afternoon, but I'm going to try and I'm going to every week. I'm going to look at my schedules, look at my classes, look at this, look at that. And I'm just going to go, well, I could get at least 15 minutes in there. And if I get 15 minutes in there, because normally you get 15 minutes and you all go off and do something, well, you sort of go, well, there's 15 minutes around 4:00. 


I'm going to grab that for me, and then I might be able to turn that into 30 minutes in a week or two, you know, and you just start and somebody says to you, hey, you're coming to the gym? You're coming to this lecture at 4:00? And you go, well, no, I'm, I'm going to the one at 5:00. You know, you just start to be very aware and more observant about you're human being on a planet with these circadian rhythms, internal clocks, hormones being produced at certain times, the phases, your chronotype, you become far more aware of that. 


And then we just, you know, if I spend time with you, as your high performance sleep coach, we wouldn't actually be focused on when you're asleep. Because your brain is in control of that. What we would be doing is thinking out little, tiny, little practical, achievable things that you could do without any not getting in the way of anything that you normally do, but just get a few little tactics, a few little habits mastered, and then you're going into every day really confident about your doing certain things that will, when you go to sleep, put yourself to sleep at 2:00, 2:00, but I'm going to get in at 12:30. No, wait for the next cycle. Right. 


Because your brain will like this, right? And once they start. All right. Well, I woke up this morning and I actually feel, you know, a bit tired, but I'm okay. Lots of light. Get on with it. Cycle one. Let's go by the window. 30 minutes in the afternoon. Oh, I like the little snooze out. What was that like? Got home, was less worried. You know, I'm all excited. It's not a problem. Wait for 2:00, you know, and so you start to get this this whole process going. And that's why it it suits you. It's got very.


53:50 Putting an “ing” on sleep

You know, it might sound a little bit funny, but when I was working with a lot of young athletes in academies and things like that, I just changed. We all like making abbreviations of certain things. CRP ARP lol. Whatever it is, you just go, let's just put an ing on it and they sort of look at me and go, what do you mean put an ink on it ING. I said, well, eating, drinking, hydrating, exercising they're all health pillars that are about actively doing something, eating good food, drinking enough water, you know. So sleep, sleep. It's like stop. It's like the end of the day. We fit. Sleep in. No, not let's go sleeping. Right. Yeah. We're going sleeping So let's get an ARP in place. Let's get loads. Think about loads of light. Let's do this. 


What about cycle one? Let's do a few little things. Let's go by the window. Yeah, well we're sleeping. Oh, yeah. Because we're starting to be a bit more proactive in our approach to it. And just sometimes by changing the word or how it's pronounced. Can give somebody a completely different perspective on sleeping is something I do. Not something that happens.


55:24 What if you can’t fall asleep until… morning?

Hitomi: So as breakdancers, we kind of have days on which like we cannot fall asleep until morning and we realize it's time to go to school. 


Nick: So on days like that, do you still do the ARPs that you explained before? Just having the light inside into your eyes and you just go to school without any sleep? Is that it? Is. Is that a problem? I think it's one of the you know, you asked me, you asked me the question and you've just answered it, haven't you? What's the non-human schedule? Well, what you're saying is that we've all experienced it throughout my whole lifetime is because of anxiety, stress, excitement, worry. You know, there's something major happening tomorrow, and I've got no chance of going to sleep because I'm just so excited or so nervous about an exam or child being born or an Olympic final, you know? 


So don't try and sleep, because trying to force yourself to sleep when you know that thing is going to make you adrenaline, cortisol all over the place. So don't try. Just don't try. Right. So it is a sort of tactic that when we ever do that. By accident that we just don't sleep and we still have to get on. Strangely enough, we'll still smash it, right? However, not if that remains consistent. Then it becomes a different method. 


So what do you say to yourself is, you know, I sent you that little graphic about sort of seven days over 99. So what we're looking at is going, oh, Monday, right, 11:00 into 6:30, 30 minute Tuesday classes. That means 2:00 into there. That means that Uh-Uh, Wednesday looks like that means that, how many cycles are we going to get in the next seven days? Because five, five nocturnal cycles is 35 a week, you know, and seven CRPs, you know, so you start to get numbers and you said, all right, that's going to be a tough week. So you can kind of go, well on that night. 


Let's look at other recovery tactics rather than trying to force yourself to go to sleep or try worrying about you can't get to sleep because there's too many things in play that says, we just want to roll through. And what happens when you've got these 16 cycles is if I said to you. Right. We're going to do that Monday. We're going to do that Tuesday. Now Wednesday when we wake up. Right. We need to increase our little micro moments. Right. Get by the window, do that increase. We definitely need our we definitely need 20 minutes midday at least right to just let's go and do some pilates quickly and whatever.


You know we definitely need that 30 minutes in because what's going to happen is we're going to go to that thing. We're not going to get back until probably 2:00 in the morning. We can't rush in to sleep like that. So leaving it then, now we've only got two cycles left. So when we get back around 1:30 in the morning, 2:00, let's just use some sensory recovery stuff and just, you know, a bit like the CRP in the afternoon. Let's just put some nice, you know, meditation on music, whatever it is, and read a book. 


Chill out just chill out and not try to go to sleep. What might happen is sleep onset. Comes along because you're not trying to push it, and you might get two cycles between 3:30 and 6:30, right? You might get those two cycles, or you might not if you haven't, but you've been doing recovery things right just to go through that process. And then you start the day exactly as you would normally, and it'll just help you always reset. But the key thing here, you know, people listening to this, oh yeah. Yeah, that all sounds great, doesn't it? 


The key thing here is like on that little seven day forecast is that you can see where the pressure points are for you. Right? Because that night you and I are not going to get back until late. That means we probably won't try and sleep, but then we've got to. What happens in the next 24? Oh, we can go back to 11. Oh, nice. That's all right. So that won't have too much of an impact And we can start to see, it starts to become far more important to us of how we roll across those seven days. 


And you can look a lot further into the future. and a lot of athletes and us, we have to but you can certainly I think the benchmark is, is sort of every 14 days, you know, a couple of weeks. You start there Monday, take it through Monday into another Monday, and you just go, oh, Tuesday's going to be a horror, you know, because I've not only got an exam that morning, but I'm not going to get back until 2:00 in the morning from an event that's not good. So before we even get close. We take all the pressure of actually going to sleep because we're going to get that in on Tuesday, move it into, you know, Monday will shift it into Tuesday. 


Little CRPs da da da da bang it in, move it to there, not even try to sleep, go to the exam, smash it and then get back on track again. You know, rather than I didn't get any sleep last night. I'm not going to do the exam. Well, no, no, we already made that decision two weeks ago of how we are going to to shift around. And because we know we've had our little light meter around, haven't we? You sort of go, I know that whatever happens, whatever we've planned and done, and if I just get lots of daylight into me, the serotonin will be nice and high. That keeps me fully functional and every single way. 


So I've got every chance of being in that moment, you know, at at least my peak. Now, if you already know that how many of the people you know in your world would even be thinking about their light exposure going through the period of seven days or 14 days as to how they can protect themselves from the crazy non-human schedules they're getting asked to do. Probably not that many. 


01:02:11 Outro and About Nick’s services

Hitomi: Thank you for tuning in! If you want to optimize your sleep performance, Nick offers personalized 1-on-1 support for athletes and individuals, as well as webinars and team workshops. Learn more at sportsleepcoach.com.

Nick's global network includes licensed sleep coaches like Tatsuto Yano, founder of Ortho Sleep Academy in Japan. For Japanese speakers interested in the R90 technique and certification, visit athletesleepcoach.jp.

 
 
 

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