117.) Dr. Jaime Tartar | Optimizing Parenthood | Creating Healthy Sleep Habits

The first half of sleep is really important for all humans. It's really a time where we get a lot of non-ramb, a lot of deep sleep, and then that second part of sleep is where we're really focusing on and getting a lot of rapid eye movement sleep, which developmentally plays an important role. But lots of important things are happening during REM sleep. One of those things, right? So it's like problem solving, some like muscle memory consolidation, but also emotion processing. And so if you take away that second part of the night sleep, by waking up too early, especially for adolescents, you're taking away the time of sleep that they were using to process their emotional lives. And so now they are vulnerable the next day for moodiness and just sort of that general vulnerability. - Hey everybody, how are we doing? This is Brendan Stickels from O2X Human Performance. And this is optimizing parenting. The O2X podcast on the world's toughest leadership challenge, raising little humans. Today is our most important and possibly controversial episode 'cause we are going to talk sleep. We've brought in O2X Specialist and Professor Dr. Jamie Tartar. Jamie is the chair of the Psychology and Neuroscience Department and Nova Southeastern University, Denon Fort Lauderdale. She got her bachelor's in psych from NSU, master's in psych from Florida Atlantic, and then PhD in Behavioral Neuroscience from the University of Florida. She was doing her post-doc research up in Massachusetts in Cambridge at Harvard when she found out her and her husband were pregnant with twins. And so the precipice of this episode is, hey, all this sleep science is great, but let's talk about where the rubber meets the road and one of the world's leading sleep experts and researchers thinks about the day-to-day trials and tribulations of getting kids to sleep, not just as infants, but also as toddlers, as backpackers, as adolescents, teenagers, and then young adults. Jamie is wonderful. She is hilarious. She is practical. She's incredibly smart. She's thoughtful, a wonderful researcher, and a wonderful mom. Conversation was great, really interesting. So stick around 'cause we talk melatonin. We talk why teenagers want to stay up late and want to sleep in late. You're not gonna like the answer, but we talk about it. We talk about the impact in nightlights, co-sleeping, whether when you should turn screen time off, emotional development, how to improve kids' test scores right away and whether or not we should extend daylight savings or stick to standard time. So Jamie's super fun to talk to. This conversation was really fun for me. So I enjoy it. Welcome to O2X. - Thank you. Thank you, Brendan. I'm happy to be here. - So Jamie, I learn something every time you and I talk, every time I sit in the class, but I was so excited about this conversation that I couldn't sleep last night. And I did a bit of a deep dive into Google Scholar about your research. And I found that your second most sighted article with 267 sites was written in 2009, entitled Experimental Sleep Fragmentation and Sleep Deprivation in Rats, increases exploration in an open field test of anxiety. So as a history major, I had very little idea what I was reading in this article, but let me ask you two specific questions. One is, how come you only used male rats in this study? And do you think you were just contributing to the patriarchy of science? Because I know you have strong feelings about using both male and female rats in studies. And so I was a little bit offended. - You know, I actually offended myself with that study too. Unfortunately, we did only use male rats and I'm embarrassed that you caught onto that. I tried to do better. I tried to be better. At that point, it's really a matter of not being able to control for what would be like a little rat menstrual cycle. So we can't really control for their hormone releases in that study. So we went with male rats. And I'm again, like to apologize for that. But it was a interesting study. You know, it was so long ago I'd have to back my brain to remember that it was studying. - The other thing that I don't understand is in the sleep deprivation aspect, you deprived the rats of sleep on a treadmill. Is that correct? There's a little rat treadmill that exists in the. - There's a little rat treadmill. So we are trying in that study to sort of emulate the fragmentation that you see, especially with obstructive sleep apnea. Because with that disorder, there's two things that you have to be concerned with. One is a hypoxia where people stop breathing. And then the second part is the fragmentation. And so the only way we can really keep. At least I didn't do this study on humans. - That's fair. - The only thing we could do is kind of put them on a 90 second, 30 second treadmill. So they would sleep when the treadmill was off. And it would go very slowly, almost like a three mile an hour treadmill walk for humans just enough to keep them up. And then we did control for that. So we had a control group that we controlled for the total time that the treadmill was on, but they were able to sleep for longer bouts. - So I love it. It was interesting. And so the study is about the basically sleep deprivation and how that affects anxiety, correct? How that affects anxiety and the exploratory behavior. So it was actually super fun to read. But how does Jamie grow up. I think he grew up in Florida, is that right? - No, I grew up in Palmer, Massachusetts. - Oh, I didn't know that. You were educated. Your continuing education was all on the state of Florida, is that right? - Yeah, yeah. - So how do you grow up in Massachusetts as a little girl and then find yourself in a world where you're doing treadmill experiments on rats and into private, into private room sleep? What were you like as a little kid? Were you super into science or what were you into? - Well, we should probably premise all that by saying I'm a middle child out of five. - Out of five. - Out of five. So all the things that go with being a middle child. So problematic, emotional. My sister who is the second oldest, she was the star. So I was in her shadow for a long time. So yeah, I wasn't really a lot of them. My older sister, she's very talented. She's a singer and an actress. So, and then after me came like the only boy and then the youngest, I was in, not really a lot of highlights growing up. - I didn't know about that. Well, you wound up doing awesome. But how did you get into science? Were you a scientific, math and science kid growing up as a child? Actually, I was a bad kid in high school. - That can't be true, Jay. - No, I was a bad kid and that's okay. But I was always intensely curious. So I would, instead of like, I would skip class and I'd go to the library and read books. I think I was got before golf was cool. It wasn't really the area and I was just ahead of my time. So I was very curious and I was always curious about why humans think the way they do. Sort of the human brain and what makes human tech. - Yeah. - Even now, like I'll spend a lot of time on, instead of when I do about social media, I'm not really interested in the articles as much as I'm interested in reading the comments. - Yeah. - And just trying to figure out like what are people thinking? So I was interested in psychology at first and then I realized that that was really frustrating because I couldn't really get to the nuts and the bolts. So that sort of led me into neuroscience, which was really comforting because it's facts and it's information and you can test it and you can measure it. So I think I've always been interested in just human brains. Like a zombie. - Yeah, exactly like a zombie. But when specifically did you get the sleep bug, no pun intended? When did you really either make the decision or did circumstance lead you down the world to being a sleep specialist? - A little bit of both. My PhD was really looking at stress. At that point I was still studying non-human animals, rodents and I was really interested in stress. Like what happens to the body and brain when people are stressed? Because everybody will stress all of them. And I ended up working as a job in the lab of a really well-known sleep researcher down here. He was at FAU, Bob Verdes. And his work was really interesting. There was a PhD student in the lab at the time who was a great mentor towards me and I got really interested in sleep. And that was just my job as a lab tack. And so then I ended up switching kind of fields and going into sleep research for my postdoc. And it was really interesting because all the stuff I had learned about stress and the neurobiology of stress was directly relevant to sleep. And so now I kind of do both of those things. Like sleep and stress research. - That's awesome. So you're a sleep doc, you're doing research, you've got rats on treadmills. And then you and your husband have a family and not only does one baby show up in your house but two babies showed up in your house, is that correct? - Yeah, that's when I was doing my postdoc because as you know as a parent, there was no good time to have children. So we're most scientists. And at the time, so I was working with rats at the Harvard as my postdoc and I was doing a very specific thing called patch clamping, where you record from individual teeny tiny little cells. And it's really time intensive. So we found out that we were pregnant and we were super duper happy. We were like, oh, this is great. We're gonna be family, this is wonderful. And then I found out that we were having twins and I'm like, oh my God, I can't do this job anymore. Because it just wasn't gonna happen. - Yeah. - So we started looking for jobs, kind of panic looking for jobs. And I never thought I would teach for a living ever. And I ended up getting a job at a primarily teaching university and I've been here for 19 years. - Amazing. So how much sleep were you getting when you were pregnant? So this is a roundabout way of asking, how important is sleep for women who are pregnant? Does sleep have an impact on the development of the baby? Does sleep have an impact just predominantly on the mental health of the otherwise stressed out mother to be? Like how was your sleep experience with those two human beings growing inside you? - It was difficult. I mean, at the beginning of us, okay. And I think like most women towards the end when you just get big and uncomfortable, things get more difficult. So we always try to find pillows and support things and trying to like contort our bodies into ways that might allow us to sleep. I do think it's an understudied area. When we do research, there are certain protected classes that with institution review board, human protections, you just have to go through a little bit more scrutiny when you study women, pregnant women and babies and children. I don't know if that's the reason I know that. I think it's understudied women or pregnant and what their sleep was like. But I think in general, once you, especially once you have kids, sleep becomes more difficult for moms and dads. - Yeah, yeah, of course. So I want to talk about speaking of things that are understudied and underreported. I think there's so much written and talked about and discussed about infant sleep. Like anybody who has a baby, what do you ask? How you sleep and has the baby sleeping? Like what's the baby way and how does the baby sleep? Like the two big questions. And then I think it's kind of forgotten. Like nobody talks about, or I think less people talk about how much an eight year old sleeps or a 16 year old sleeps or a 21 year old sleeps. So I'd like to really dive into that. But in your experience, how is it like being a sleep researcher and a sleep expert with two small infants living in the house? How'd that go for you? - That as well as you can imagine. Because babies don't sleep like we sleep. Their sleep is polyphasic, right? So they sleep all the time. They really have like the non-RAM, RAM typical sleep cycles that we have when they're newborns. They do spend, you know, like 64% of the time sleeping. It's just not when we want them to be sleeping. (laughing) So, you know, they all say, I know a lot of people say, "Oh, sleep when the baby sleeps." But I'm like, but I can't. But I think fortunately, it's a difficult period, especially when my babies were bad because like they just wouldn't sleep at the same time. So one baby would wake up and then the other baby would suddenly sleep and then what we ended up doing that would work because they just wouldn't get their crap together and synchronize. At first we ended up, like he had a baby and I had a baby. - Yeah. - And I would always get the bad baby. Like whichever baby was gonna have sleep problems, like it would be my baby. And then we realized that we sleep differently or I was more of a night owl and he was more of an early bird. And then we just said, okay, I'm gonna get everything that happens before like 1 a.m. And then from 1 a.m. on, he was on. And so like around midnight I'd be like, oh my God, please stay asleep, please stay asleep. - You switched to the shift work technique. - And we had the shift work that ended up working for us. And you know, like most babies around six months, they started sleeping and more sleeping through the night. - Well, it makes me feel better that you, one of the world's leading experts in sleep also couldn't crack the code of getting it into sleep at 10 o'clock at night so you can have a moment to yourself. - I think you know how much you know, you can't fight biology and unfortunately their sleep just is not biologically wired the way ours is. - Yeah, speaking of biologically wired, one of I think the most interesting and terrifying conversations I've ever witnessed with you in a classroom was the explanation of why teenagers have trouble going to sleep at an appropriate bedtime. Can you talk about that? Like if you have a teenager between the ages of 15 and 20, why do they have a tendency to become night owls? - Yeah, and I think that's something a lot of people don't necessarily appreciate is there is a change in happens and adolescents that they get shifted to become what we would talk about a sort of night owls that their melatonin release is delayed by about two hours. So it's not entirely their fault. So teenagers tend to stay up late and they tend to want to sleep in late. And that's just a natural biological change that happens as part of development. So they're, you know, one thing we want to recognize is you know, they're not being lazy. Like when teenagers want to sleep in, that's just them doing what their brain is dictating that they should do. And what we were discussing was I asked to one of my friends who's an evolutionary biologist like why would that be? Because everything that happens, you would think there would be some type of, it would be adaptive at some point in human history. So he gets back to me and he's like, oh, well, that's because if young, reproductively viable humans are up later than everybody else, they can be reproductive while the old people are sleeping. (laughing) So, it was a fun answer. - It was a fun answer is one way to view it. It's also an absolutely terrifying answer that like while middle age people like myself now tend to want to go to bed earlier right around the time our children want to stay up later, it has a evolutionary component of their biology that they're at their most reproductive. So that's not great for us with teenagers, but I guess it makes sense. - Yeah, I guess it makes sense. It's kind of, you can't prove it, but it's an interesting, I think, take. - It's an interesting take. So with regards to teenagers, a couple things that there is research and there are strong theories about, I read once that if you wanted to improve test scores in high school, you could do it overnight if you started class at 10am instead of 8am. Do you think that's a reasonable theory? - Absolutely, yeah, I think that's probably one of the things that bothers me the most about sleep and development is teenagers, high school students, because like we said, okay, well, they're biologically driven to go to bed later. And my kid started the high school at around 720, and it just doesn't work. You see a massive drop off from middle school to high school, a massive change in sleep efficiency, sleep quality, sleep duration, and it's really harmful to kids. You know, one of the best, it's about eight to 10 hours, like they need eight to 10 hours of sleep. And for lots of reasons, some of them are fixable, some of them aren't fixable. They're gonna wanna go to bed later, and we're kind of fighting against their biology by trying to have them wake up earlier than part of their natural circadian rhythm. - So I love you just used to phrase, some of them are fixable, some of them are not fixable. It's interesting, I think, as it is to talk about rats and treadmills and teenagers and their reproductive desires. Like I do wanna put you on the spot with some of those things that are fixable. So as a parent of a teenager, what do you think is fixable to try to mitigate their natural desire to stay awake late and their natural pushback to having to wake up early to go to school? Is there any recommendations you have for the parents of teenagers to fight those two tendencies? - Yeah, no one's gonna like the answer, because the most fixable thing that all parents should do is get their kids off of electronics at night. - Yeah. - I got what I said. - That's it, that's it. Everybody, all 12 of our listeners just log off of the app right now and start listening. - I'm sorry. - No, but what specifically, for all human beings like how far from bedtime should you not be looking at your phone in the ideal world? - Minimally an hour, I would say, but two hours be maximum. I mean, you can look at the literature yourself, like the minute you put a smartphone in a kid's hand, their sleep changes, day one, their sleep changes. And I think that paper was like in 2021, so it's probably I have 100% now. But at the same time, if you look almost, I think it's like 97% of adolescence, use some kind of technology an hour or two before bed. And that's, you know, what does that cause? It causes difficulty for them falling asleep. Then they wake up too early because of their school schedules and that's leading to insufficient sleep. It's leading to them not getting enough room sleep. And then that's gonna lead to all kinds of vulnerability as far as like mental health and those concerns. - Yeah, can you expand on that a little bit? What does the lack of room sleep specifically do to all human beings, but in particular adolescence? So all sleep is important because of it. If it wasn't for me, we wouldn't do it. So the first half of sleep is really important for all humans. It's really a time where we get a lot of non-ram, a lot of deep sleep. And then that second part of sleep is where we're really focusing on and getting a lot of rapid eye movement sleep, which developmentally plays an important role. But lots of important things are happening during room sleep. And so if you take away that second part of the night sleep by waking up too early, especially for adolescents, you're taking away the time of sleep that they were using to process their emotional lives. We look to statistics where we can see pretty easily that relative to times in the past that kids today are kids today. They're much more anxious, they have high rates of depression, due to lots of things. But I can't help but wonder about the fact that we are directly impairing their ability to get good sort of that emotionally rich room sleep. So I think about that a lot. Now that you mentioned it, like my kids have a requirement to do homework on a laptop where it's not just like, hey, go open a textbook and take notes of the pen, there's a requirement on a laptop. And so a lot of times they're doing that right up until they go to sleep. So it's not even just the doom scrolling Instagram and comparing yourself to your other high schoolers that the school, society, us as parents, we all impose some of that extra screen time on them. Even though our hearts in the right place, but my kids are definitely on the computer within two hours of going to sleep. On the muscle memory side. So like we talk a lot at O2X about young athletes, and using your body on the muscle memory side. If your goal is to be good at any sport, whether it be shooting a basketball, hitting a golf ball or playing football, is that REM sleep key to that? Or are you getting enough sleep when those first couple hours to participate in athletics? - Yeah, that's a great question. I mean, only good things happen when you sleep. Only good things are happening to your body and brain. Nothing bad is happening during sleep, especially for people who are physically active. So we want to promote both parts of sleep because we know in like that first part, especially for kids, you know, they're growing, they're going through some stuff, where their bodies are changing. We want to really highlight that first part of sleep. We get that big bowl is released almost of growth hormone, which is critical. And we want to make sure we're getting a lot of deep sleep to make ensuring that our bodies and brains are repairing and restoring. And then that's seen as we get closer to mourning, we can maybe want to switch a little bit and go through those longer REM sleep cycles, where our bodies are paralyzed, where we can get a lot of no muscle restoration and some of that motor memory consolidation, making sure that we can again, like deal with our mood the next day, but it's all important. So we don't really want to cut off the first part, but we don't want to cut off that second part here. - It's doing two different things. Is that correct? So like the sleep between hours zero and five, is that right? Between zero and five and then the hours between six and eight are doing two different things? Is that roughly where it falls? - Yeah, I mean, and as it goes on, I kind of, you know, if you have these like sort of 90s minute cycles, you know, after maybe the first couple cycles, you're not really getting a lot of deep, deep sleep anymore and then it kind of tapers off as the night goes on. - O2X's podcast is brought to you by Building Homes for Heroes. Building Homes for Heroes is an absolutely incredible organization that O2X is lucky enough to partner with. Their main mission is to build or modify homes and then give them mortgage free to injured veterans and first responders. They also provide support services to enable these populations to build better and brighter lives and reach new heights. Through partnership with Building Homes for Heroes a variety of military veteran and first responder populations will receive access to O2X's training and education and allow us to create positive impact on each respective organization. Be sure to visit buildinghomesforheroes.org, which can be found in the episode description and donate to their incredible cause. - So I definitely have people in my life who swear that they can survive on four hours of sleep. What percentage of the population deviates from the norm? So if the average teenager should get eight to nine hours of sleep, at least seven to nine hours of sleep, what percentage of the population is genetically predisposed to be able to survive on less than that? Or are those people just full of it? - That is awesome. Very good. It's almost like you're really good at these podcasts, asking all these great questions. - So I've sat in your lecture enough and like written down. I'm like, oh, I can't wait to talk to Jamie about this and now you're just gonna get 45 minutes of me braiding you. - But I think you're right. I think people tend to underestimate, or I guess underestimate the amount of sleep that they need overestimate themselves a little bit. There are people that don't need that as much sleep. We say like seven to nine because that's most people, right, most people are just average, except you, right, on the rest of us. - That's right. - So there are, in that there's like a little clock in your brain and the way that that clock works is it runs on its own little 24 hour cycle and it does that intrinsically through the timing that these genes are expressed and then their protein products kind of shut off their own expression and this is sort of a cycle. It takes a certain amount of time about a day, circadian rhythm. That's where you're circadian or those intrinsically generated from and really depending on like which flavor of gene you inherit from your mom or your dad, it's gonna change you as an individual and how deep your sleep is, how much sleep you need, whether you're biologically owl or you're more of a morning person, these are kind of small changes that make us all, that are so idiosyncratic and it makes me different from you and that's fun, we have slightly different sleep schedules. But there are some people that have inherited certain gene variations that do allow them to be short sleepers or natural short sleepers as we would call them. It's just really rare and I don't know that we know the number like percentage wise but like I'll sometimes do a crown, you even imagine like finding someone who's like seven feet tall, like you don't see them very often. And that's probably the likelihood that you're actually natural short sleeper. So I would say assume eight and less. And well because that's it right in my own research 'cause I did study rats but now I study humans. They're fun. - No treadmills on the humans though. - Well because most neuroscientist study rats, like I'm weird because I'm a neuroscientist that studies humans as a model for humans. But it's interesting. But when we study humans and we take sleep away from them, we see what most people see, is that they don't think they're underperforming. They think they're fine. So we'll test their attention and we'll test their emotions and we're testing college students. Like they're there at the, believe it or not, they are cognitively at the top of their game. The brains are fully developed. These guys are just cognitively amazing and we take sleep away from them for even one night and even then their attentional systems are shattered. It really just a lot of emotional instability but they don't think so. - Oh interesting. - So I don't think we always recognize the impairments that we have with sleep loss. - So to unpack that a little bit. So like if I had a 16 year old who only got four hours of sleep, they went into school at seven o'clock in the morning and they took a test. Obviously their test scores are going to be lower than if they had gone a full night sleep. But their perception of how they did on the test, you think wouldn't change. You think they wouldn't recognize that they weren't as sharp as they would otherwise be. - Maybe the test they might have but if we ask them, do you feel like you're able to pay, oh yeah, I'm fine. And then we test them on these very basic cognitive tests and they're demonstrably not okay. - And they're not fine. We talked about the percentage of people who could survive on a couple of hours of sleep. There's obviously a ton of people who have problems falling asleep, staying asleep, some sort of sleep deficiency or diagnosis. Give a shuag as to what percentage of the population you think also meets that criteria. - I think for people who have difficulty falling asleep, we tend to see usually about like 30% of people are gonna have issues with that with some form of insomnia. And when you're looking at kids, that number gets even higher. So some reports of up to 40% of kids have some kind of sleep difficulty. - Really? - Mm-hmm, yeah. So put that in the context of when we were talking about these numbers, we're talking about children and adults living in industrialized society. - Oh yeah. So you once told me that story of how one of your friends was talking to somebody who spoke a different language and I think it was an indigenous population and there was no word for insomnia. There was like that insomnia is a modern invention. Am I phrasing that correctly? - Yeah, yeah, it was a research. He's really not my, I wish he was my friend. - No, man, I think every scientist is your friend. I think that all scientists just like hang out in the same apartment complex and just have nerdy conversations together. - Yeah, they're like the Hudson population, the Calary Sound Tribe, they're not struggling with insomnia the way that industrialized humans are struggling with insomnia. - You think that's because they're operating on the sun. They're literally just like their circadian rhythm is tied specifically to the sun. Is that what's letting them sleep peacefully? - Yeah, they really have a lot of natural keys. And you know, I took around that if you, I'm not even a joke, if you really want a hard reset for your sleep system and your central nervous system in general, go primitive camping for a week. - Yeah. - That'll hard reset you. - How much of the 40% of teenagers who have insomnia or sleep problems? How many of those problems would you have solved? If you went no screen time, no caffeine and went and lived in a tent in Colorado for a week. - Well, I don't know that that, but there is work to show that if you look at the adolescence in general when they're able to, on the weekends and then when they're on vacation, you see right away, there's that trend, that natural trend towards later bed times and sleeping in longer. It's very clear that that's, you know, once they're given the opportunity, they revert to that sort of natural trend. - That's crazy. I'll give my teenagers a little bit of a pass on Saturday then when they're not necessarily being lazy. - They're not being lazy. Kids are sleeping in on the weekends, I would say, let them, they're paying off a sleep debt. And so it just let them sleep, they're not being lazy. - It's the same as never wake a sleeping baby and never wake a sleeping teenager. - Never wake a sleeping teenager. - So we talked about teenagers for kids who are school aged, I think that in our house, we had a very specific bedtime routine up until kids were about three. And then once they could brush their teeth themselves and put on their jammies, it kind of became a little bit of a pass for me to tell kids to go to bed. And then I would like pop in like kiss them good night and then roll out. - Do you ever recommend it? - Yeah. - Yeah, see ya. I'm gonna go watch it. I'm gonna go watch Netflix and talk to a grownup. Do you have a, in your own experience or for parents of school aged kids? I know nighttime routines are as important for me as a 48-year-old, probably as it is for a two-year-old. What about those school aged kids? Do you have recommendations for a process to either build those lifetime habits to like value sleep or for their own development? Like what did you guys do as a family? Or do you have any recommendations for parents of school aged kids? - Yeah, school aged kids will say they tend to do better than high school kids. So usually if we look at totally the average, they aren't usually sleeping better. So with this age group, you're not fighting the sort of biological shift the way you are with adolescence. But I think you hit the nail on the head. It's all about routine, routine routine. Because we know that brains are prediction machines and all your brain, your brain, kids brains, adolescence brains, they just won't know what's gonna happen next. And your brain can kind of prepare for an event when it knows that that event is going to happen. And even with adolescence, there's a nice study that showed just spending what can help an adolescent with their sleep, too, is you're trying to shift back that sort of sleep schedule, but also spending time, I know you're not gonna be able to. Spending time with your family. So you can't just be like, go to bed, peace out. But spending quality time with parents and with the only members in the evening has actually been shown to promote better sleep for adolescents at night, being emotionally engaged and emotionally available as a parent. This study was particularly done with infants. My prediction would be it's probably true without childhood and adolescence, just being more emotionally available to certainly infants 'cause that's been clearly shown. And I believe children adolescence helps, too. We might not recognize it, but our kids rely on us as a signal, our kids rely on us as a big safety signal. So when adolescents do spend more time interacting with family members and even friends, they're gonna fall asleep better and it's gonna be better sleep. And that's much different than interacting with people on social media on their phone. It just kind of gets more, it's like more work on us. Now we have to take kids at night. - I love that, I mean, that's wonderful. There's like, I read something terrifying about how if you measure stress and teenage girls, when they get a text message from their mom, their stress goes up. But if they hear their mother's voice, their stress level goes down and so. - I read that study, too, and it's why my daughter's in college now and I'm like, I have to call you 'cause the research says you like my voice. - That's exactly what I'm trying to do. - That's, I mean, it's great, right? But that's biologically and from my own experience, that makes sense. I think it's cool. It's beautiful that the family dynamics can be part of that bedtime routine for even a kid who's self-sufficient, a seven-year-old and eight-year-old, just like getting their body to relax and be comfortable enough to get a good night's sleep. The family dynamics, of course, like to play a part in that, so that makes a lot of sense. - Yeah, and I think for kids, too, that just feeling safe and parents like, whether we like it or not, do a good job of that. - All right, I've got a couple of quick hit, really difficult questions for you as both a mom of twins and a sleep expert, question number one, what is your stance on daylight savings time? Should we, as a standard time? You think that if you were, that was a quick, tell me more about that, why are you so adamant? - I just think, I think if you've talked to mostly researchers, the data are pretty clear on that, that standard time is better for us biologically. So it agrees more with our natural circadian rhythms. No one cares, no one's gonna change it because I want them to, but that's okay. I think I think mostly backspirits would definitely prescribe year-round standard time. - Year-round standard time, all right, question number two. I was in CVS yesterday, and I saw melatonin specifically marketed towards children. What are your thoughts on melatonin supplements for people under the age of 18? - I think melatonin in general is pretty wholesome. That it's a very safe molecule. It's a very old molecule, or it's like three billion years old. I would say that that kids and adolescents and most adults don't need it because it's free. Like you make melatonin free. All you have to do to make melatonin is make sure that you don't have blue short ways like lights, which also includes white lights on at night. So there's really great ways to avoid that gone Amazon. They sell like amber light bulbs on our lamps. We have lamps that we specifically turn on at night and they have like amber light bulbs in them. And that's fine. That's not gonna suppress melatonin. So I wouldn't supplement. Sometimes we want to reach for like the supplement, but you don't need it. I think just that quiet, that time routine and then try it if you're gonna use lights at night, just use like those like warm amber lights. That makes sense. So on the light topic, what do you think about night lights in children's rooms? - Same thing. You can use night lights in children's rooms, but I would just avoid white light just by those reds kind of a scary color. Maybe amber, like an orangey light, might be. - A nice orange light. How about kids in parents' beds? Let's start with infants. What do you feel about letting kids cry it out? Let me put a stamp on this that Dr. Jamie Tartar is not to be replaced, advice from your own pediatrician or your own family dynamics, but in the hypothetically in the stickles house, what are your thoughts generally speaking about kids crying it out? - Well, first of all, I think I know there are people who don't agree with this and I understand that and I respect that area of research. That some researchers, they're pro-coastly being with. I don't think that's my opinion. I think you can read other studies. I don't think you should have a baby in the bed. I think there's too much danger with putting a baby in a bed when they can't roll over. But mattresses are very soft. (laughs) Closely being in the sense of having the baby in the room, that's fine, but you always want to create an environment for babies and kids where there is a wind down pattern where you do something to help that child help that baby to calm their nervous system, to transition from wakefulness to sleep. And so if you're doing that, which is sometimes give the baby the dinner and then give the baby a nice warm bath and then put the pajamas on the baby. And there's very soothing. There's a lot of touch involved. You're using your soothing voice, not your fighter pilot voice, (laughs) and at that point, there's gonna be some crying involved. It's the excessive, because what I wonder about, and this is just me, Jamie wondering, is this idea of learned helplessness? What point does it become learned helplessness where the kid just learns that no one's gonna be there? I think there's a balance to letting the kid cry versus letting him kind of cry to the point where they develop learned helplessness. - Yeah, of course. Obviously, it's like a nuanced question and not clearly as black and white as I'm pretending to be a kid. - I had to do with my son because he was a bad baby. My daughter did the thing that I got six months, she started kind of sleeping through the night and I'm like, great. Like is a good thing about twins is I know I'm not a bad parent because one of them's always doing the thing that they should do. So I always have like a control condition. - That's right, you ran the experiment on both the boy and a girl. - Yeah, well he wanted to eat every few hours and this went on and on and on and he was just a little picky. And then at like nine months, I'm like, I can't do this anymore. I can't, I'm gonna throw the baby out the window, I guess. - We ran a similar experiment where our third child was a horrible sleeper. Literally all the same parents, same house, same night routine, same reading, conalfa bunny and good night moon and bath time. And then he, I would wake up and he would be in the bed with us at three o'clock in the morning. So I can empathize that if you run the experiment, human beings are all very much different and even siblings can have those different patterns for sure. - Yeah, well, we ended up doing that with him. We just went through a period where I would take him. I would lay on the living room floor next to him and we would just lay there and he would cry and he just had to learn that he wanted to do shit. But I was there, I know I was given touch therapy like rums a little back and it took about a week. I think I apologize to all my neighbors. I baked a lot of courage for them. Well, we just had to go through that period where he's body had to learn that it could get through the night without having to wake up and eat every three hours. - One more tactical question. What do you think about bunk beds and kids sharing a room? My son shared a room for a little while and it was great for them as human beings to like recognize they're not the only person on earth. I think it also did impact their sleep. Do you have any recommendations of somebody has the ability to put kids into two different bedrooms by packing two kids into a bunk beds in a little Boston apartment like we did? What are your thoughts on that? - I think that is kind of what we were talking about earlier. I think it really highly depends on the relationship of the kids. I mean, you could probably have two kids in a room and they're gonna sleep great but two different kids aren't gonna sleep so great. There's not really a natural human sleeping pattern. You know, wasn't that long ago that you would have latched a bunch of people sleeping in one bed together. - Yeah, of course. - I have a friend that was worried that his kids are sleeping on mattresses on his floor and he was going through a divorce. I was very stressed the time and he's like, "Oh, I'm so worried my kids are on mattresses on my floor." And you know, the other question I have for him is like, are they sleeping? Is everybody sleeping? He's like, yeah, I'm like, then it's fine. I guarantee you they're not gonna be on your floor when they're 18. Oh, and here they are, teenagers guess what? They're not on his floor anymore. I think that the best answer for family sleep patterns is what pattern works the best so everybody's sleeping. And it's not gonna be the same for every family. - Sure, to include the parents, right? Like to include us and our own REM sleep and that emotional processing that is important for us. Maybe not as important as the 16 year old, but I think it's definitely important as well for the family dynamic. - Right, yeah, exactly, exactly. And that might mean both parents just being in different rooms and might mean. The kids are in one room, the kids are in a different room, but the mechanism that works the best of everybody's sleeping has like the best sleep hygiene. There's even the best possible way that's gonna be the answer. - Well, that's awesome. Last question, if there's one in the spirit of O2X and 1% small improvements that you can sustain over time that can provide a long lasting impact over the course of a life, is there one recommendation that you have for parents either from your own experience with the twins or your own experiments on the rats and the treadmill? - If you could tell parents one thing to focus on during the challenge of parenthood, is there something specific you would say? - Yeah, I'm gonna squeeze in the second one. - That's true, you got two. I'll give you two 1% changes, you got it. - The answer is routine, wind down routine, wind down routine. You can Google it, there's lots of information on the internet. I can't stress enough for everybody, even big, big children, like adults, developing a wind down routine. And then as part of that routine, you got to take away the cell phones. - Yeah. - Some ourselves and from kids for lots of different reasons, but get wind down routine and get put the cell phone to bed, outside of the room with possible. - Awesome. Well, that's, like you said, easier said than done, but-- - Easier said, and I want to say like, I'm a parent, I can know all these things. I'm not always the best as my own kids because I love them so much. - Yeah. - And I do realize before I had kids that that was gonna make things so much harder. - Yeah, yeah, yeah. - So I don't always get it right, I try, but sometimes they win because, you know, they should love it, there's a lot to you. - Yeah, that's just a deal. - I like those two ideas. So like, tactically, the challenge for us, which I didn't realize with that, there's no such thing as alarm clocks anymore. So my kids are using the cell phones as alarm clocks. And so, based on your advice, we stopped doing that. Everybody charges their phone now in the kitchen. They probably sneak down and check it after I go to sleep at about 9.15, but like, that's okay. I support the rebellious attitude, but in our house, I'm trying to, I listen to you teach enough and have enough parents ask you those tough questions on raising little human beings and the importance of sleep that we're trying to impose those 1% changes in our house. So thanks for taking the time today. Look forward to seeing you back in the real world. - Oh, thanks, thanks for having me. (upbeat music)