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The Insomnia Club Drop-out with Dr. Tara Youngblood · Giving Pain Purpose with Lyndsay Soprano

• Lyndsay Soprano (00:01) This is Giving Pain Purpose, where we talk about the game of living in and with chronic pain and trauma. I'm your host, Lindsay Soprano. On this show, I sit with the warriors, loved ones, doctors, holistic practitioners, and those who walked through hell and want their voices heard. You don't have to heal quietly and you don't have to fight alone. I'd like to dedicate this episode to everyone who struggles with their sleep. Whether you suffer from what my family calls busy brain disorder or BBD, where your mind will not shut up, or you are sweating your boobies off all night long from peramenopause or your balls off because we hear you two guys. Or maybe it's massive anxiety and depression that is riddling every ounce of you, or you are living with chronic pain. Whatever your insomnia situation might be, this episode will not be a snorge. Sadly, I am battling with all of those things outside of the sweaty balls part and more. insomnia started at nine years old and has been the most consistent challenge for me in my life. I don't think that my parents had the tools back then to ask the right questions about why their child couldn't sleep and what to do about it. But my grandfather said, give her a hottie tottie. And that was the beginning of a lifelong relationship with alcohol to help me sleep. Right. And we all know that doesn't do shit for helping us sleep. My parents would come into my room at three o'clock in the morning and I would be dragging my desk from one side of the room to another, painting the ceiling, making collages out of flowers that I've cut out of magazines, color coding, alphabetizing everything. And I developed these mountains of OCD tendencies that have been super helpful in my life from a business perspective and from running a household, but it also has been incredibly detrimental. And childhood trauma started it all. I truly believe that the lingering effects of a life filled with trauma is at the heart of my insomnia, on and off depression, and at times debilitating anxiety. And now with living with chronic pain from CRPS, chronic regional pain syndrome, taking center stage. How could 40 years of insomnia not be the root cause of my health issues? My guest today is no stranger to trauma. Pain entered her life in ways she never expected. The loss of her son Benjamin shattered her world. In the aftermath of that loss, she stopped sleeping and found herself navigating depression and anxiety. What had once been the focus of her professional work, the science of sleep, became profoundly personal. So today I'd like to dive into the science of sleep. and how she can help you reprogram your sleep for good while being compassionate about why we struggle with sleep. So without further ado, I would like to introduce you to my beautiful guest, Dr. Tara Youngblood. Dr. Tara Youngblood (02:58) I am thrilled to be here. I think you might have had the very best introduction I have ever had. You totally crushed that. And on very little sleep. Lyndsay Soprano (03:06) Yetches, exactly. I'm like 72 hours of no sleep, and I don't know how I pull it off, but I do. Dr. Youngblood, we're gonna call her Tara for the rest of the episode, is a clinical psychologist, internationally recognized sleep scientist, functional medicine practitioner, entrepreneur in the sleep space, and self-proclaimed sleep geek. And when you read her book, that is absolutely the case, dedicated to helping people sleep better and feel like themselves again. As co-founder and chief science officer of Geli Sleep, which we're gonna get into, she has spent more than 10,000 hours studying sleep and holds over fifty patents in sleep technology. So, my love, I'd like to start with how losing your sweet little boop boop, Benjamin, and its effect on your sleep and mental health. And let's take it from there. Dr. Tara Youngblood (03:54) Yeah, yeah, yeah. It's always a a a tough place to start. you know, losing a child is is absolutely one of those things that you never even want to dream about as a parent. You just can't imagine what it would look like. And the and the loss is is that the complicating factor was, you know, he's six months, so I was nursing, so I was in a huge hole from a hormonal spot. and so the anxiety and depression looked Particularly bad. And you know, as entrepreneurs, it's it's not like you can say, Okay, well, I just not gonna show up at the work for a month. You you have to still show up, you know, shortly after we said goodbye to him. I was back at the office because I had to. as a mom, you can't say, Well, I can't get out of bed, so I can't be my kids. so you you kind of get stuck in kind of what you're doing too. You're like, All right, I'll just on my big girl panties and I guess I'm not sleeping. I'm just gonna gonna have to do this. And it was it was literally almost a year into like, okay, I this is it. And it I describe it of like I was at a trade show and we were selling sleep products. So it was like, okay, you know, this is we give you your best sleep ever. And I'm like, it's not really doing that for me. And I've never been really good at sort of the acting and hypocritical parts. I'm like, there's gotta be another way to do this. There's gotta be a way to solve it. And You know, I think that really is the foundation, I think, about the recipe part. What are the pillars? What are what is something that is consistent across everything from Araic medicine and traditional Chinese medicine? We have been sleeping, sleep is an old part of our brains, this is not new. animals that don't have a prefrontal cortex sleep. So how do we figure out how to do this? And so that is where the hours and hours of like unraveling, what are what are the incremental, maybe that works for someone, but it doesn't work for me. How do we separate those into levers we can pull and to understand the basics of how the mechanism works? Because when we understand how the mechanism works, then we know how to hack it, right? We can get past what's preventing us from doing that. Lyndsay Soprano (05:58) Yeah, because I mean there's so many things that affect our sleep. I mean, I can I can speak to it right now in my life because pain is the number one reason that I don't sleep. But I I didn't live in pain 10 years ago. So what were the other 30 years about? Well, like I've opened up with a lot of it is trauma, a lot of it is anxiety. Some of it's just my personality type. Like I'm wild and I'm crazy and I'm up and I'm like, this is just who I am all of the time. And so it's very hard for me to shut down that busy brain disorder part of me. And my dad has it, my mom has it. It's just like this is just what we do. Alcohol was one of those things that was always modeled as like, well, everybody in my life drinks, so that's it. And my grandpa says it's fine. And so I started down that road. I still lean on it, not like I used to, on which I'm very proud of myself for doing, but it's still there in my world. And we have all of these different habits that we have that we when we're trying to go to sleep. And I feel like no matter what I've tried, it still doesn't work. And you have some recipes for this, and you'd like to call them buckets. So Can we talk about let's get started into talking about your buckets of sleep? Dr. Tara Youngblood (06:59) Yeah, so I think the important part about sleep is that again, I kinda mentioned that we sleep the same way as like a little marine worm that has no prefrontal cortex. The mechanism is the same. It's an old part of the brain. And one of the biggest hacks I found is that our environment, our bodies actually recognize sleep and do sleep completely separate from that prefrontal cortex. So we can actually find a way to isolate and remove everything that's in our minds that are keeping us awake, that busy mind syndrome that you've got. We can separate that and in our modern lives, we've worked to make it consistent and comfortable. And we didn't evolve to have that. If we live outside for a week, everything changes all the time. Our temperature is not the same. It's not wonderfully 70 degrees all the time, or whatever temperature you set your house at. The light doesn't stay on when we want to stay on, it dims. The sounds change throughout the day. The actual vibrations and magnetic fields change. We actually have all of these different perceptions that we actually intake into our bodies and we've kind of discounted them because we've made our homes these entire escapes from all of those other inputs. And because of that, our bodies actually don't know what to do anymore. Even our mattresses, everything about that space is not like it was a hundred years ago where there were natural materials. You lived more like you were ingrained to the earth and the earth is cooler and it has a place for the temperature to go. It got cooler at night. You know, the crazy part is in hunter gatherer studies, and there was a great one out of UCLA years ago, they slept less. They didn't have a word for insomnia, and they didn't always sleep in one segment. And so the takeaways from that for me are of like, okay, but they didn't have sleep problems. They didn't have the anxiety we have. And, you know, you talk about trauma and other things. They probably still had some of those elements. So how did they get past that? How did they heal? How did they work through the things that we are suffering with in our society today, they were much more ingrained to Earth and the planet. And not in a just a woo-hoo, you know, kind of way. But if you've ever, you know, walked on the beach and felt yourself, you know, and grounding, you know, can be magnified into much more woo, but connecting with the planet, feeling that there's actually a pulsing electromagnetic field that our brains will end train to if we let it. And when we can settle down enough, our brain waves actually match that in deep sleep. there's all sorts of things our bodies want to do that we've figured out how to block, ignore, and put bubbles around ourselves. So we can't we can't agree into that anymore. So one of the first parts of the recipe is always to really look at that sleep space. What's in your space? If you've had a traumatic brain injury, if you've had high anxiety, you are much more susceptible to something called electromagnetic fields. And that is anytime you have an electron move, any piece of electricity, you get a magnetic field from it. That's just the law of physics. but what happens is that that field is constant. It never shuts off. And so if you have electricity running in your house and welcome to, you know, any modern home, you've got electricity in there. apartment building, you never you're never gonna escape that, right? So that creates a background interference. So the impact of sound and smell and you know that perception for EMFs, all of those is extremely powerful and we don't get it nearly enough in that sleep recipe usually. Lyndsay Soprano (10:33) not I'm I'm literally just looking in my brain right now. I'm like in my bedroom and I'm also here just in the studio. I'm my I've got my my husband also broadcasts and stuff. And so we've got like multiple boards and all kinds of mics and we've got all our computers and we've got two TVs in here and that's just this. And we've got an a a little mini split for for keeping me cool because I'm hotter than hell every time I do an episode 'cause I put so much into this stuff. And then I'm like my bedroom right now. And then I'm thinking, should we take the T V off the wall? And like last night when I was trying to sleep. And I've you know, I just I finished your book a couple of days ago. And so I was trying to apply some of the things last night. Some of the things I was trying to apply was keeping me awake because I was like, I'm not doing it right. Yes. Dr. Tara Youngblood (11:10) You do have to you do have to I the number one rule is and when you've scrubbed I never slept very well as a kid. I I was reading books while you were, you know, cutting out flowers. I lived Lyndsay Soprano (11:21) So Dr. Tara Youngblood (11:22) across the street from the library and I I think I finished it. Like the library. you know like with the flashlight going, good book, we'll do this one. Like I couldn't I was never a good sleeper. and that's completely different now. It it really is possible. And I think that the number one thing is first believing it's possible because when you believe something's impossible, you will never get there. So you've you've already kind of mentally said, Well, if I'm not gonna be a good sleeper, I can't sleep, you are reinforcing this every time you think that. So the first thing you have to do is it is possible for me to love sleep, because even if it was the age of nine you remember not sleeping, perhaps as a baby you did and maybe it was a different schedule, but it is possible for every single being on the planet. If a dolphin can switch off half their brain and still swim around and still sleep, there's a way for you to sleep. And so first it's believe it's possible. Second, find a way to still love it. And think to that one time, maybe it was one in a billion that you woke up and like, wow, I feel great. I had a great sleep. Like I don't know what happened. The stars align. I'm good. Remember that moment and go back to it because it is possible. And that is that is 100% the first step. Lyndsay Soprano (12:33) Yeah, the dialogue that I have like in the my my husband wakes up super early in the morning because his show that he does, it starts very, very early in the morning. So he's usually up about 3 30 in the morning. So he goes to bed before I do, obviously. Then I have my quiet time at night where I do what I can do. The dogs are sleeping, he's sleeping, I can either have music on or I can read or I can work or whatever I'm doing. And I love that part of my night because it's the quietest that my whole day is. And I'm like, I feel alone right now. And I'm never alone. Even from my own self, I feel like I'm never alone. Right. And so I've I've I've dedicated some time at night to myself. And that's been very helpful. But then I get in upstairs and there's all of my spritzes, my creams, my lotions, my smells, my machines, my little lamps that I use to read books so that I don't wake him up, which he doesn't wake up because he's on Ambient. That's for the later part of the episode. And like all of these things that I do. And I go, I say this to myself every night. Here we go. And I caught myself last night saying that out loud to my out loud well to myself, right? Here we go. And I say it every single night because it is like almost starting a whole new day. And that's what it feels like. It's like, fuck. But it's for lack of a better word, that's exactly how I feel. Dr. Tara Youngblood (13:53) The crazy part of all the rooms in your house, it is called the bedroom, it is not called the sleep room, it is not even called a sex room, it is it is is named for a freaking piece of furniture and not living or not eating or what you do there. And and so we really have to find it back to like what is that sleep space? And so if the stuff, if the cream and all of that is is anxiety, put it in the bathroom, put it somewhere else. Arrive there ready to do the activity. It's like showing up to the gym, getting to the treadmill, and then deciding to put on your workout clothes. You gotta get there with everything ready to go. And if you had, you know, whatever stuff you need to do and you showed up to the treadmill and it was all laid out and you had to put it all together there, you probably wouldn't end up getting on that treadmill anymore. Lyndsay Soprano (14:46) Yeah, that's a good point. Cause yeah, and I'm like, are any of these things even helping me? Because with CRPS, my skin feels like a little sticky all of the time because I'm so hot. So then I'm adding lotions that are for sleep and I'm doing magnesium on this. And now I'm like, this is too sticky. So I can't use that one. I mean, there's just all these things. And in your book, you talk about like stuff that you can put on the bottom of your feet or putting socks on. Well, sheets hurt. So, like the wind hurts. Everything hurts my bloody body. And so at night I can't wear s I can't wear socks. I'm I sleep so hot as it is. And then he's covered up in like down comforters. And then we've got two little wiener dogs that are sleeping with us. And I'm just, I am a mess all night long. This morning, in fact, I said, honey, I think I'm gonna sleep in another room and I'm just gonna give it a try and just see it. Because you mentioned in your book, as after I don't remember if you whether you said 20 or 30 minutes, but if you are not asleep, get up and go do something. And so I was like, I'm gonna start trying that because last night, here I was. Thinking about all I was writing letters to people. I was sending emails in my bra I was doing so much Yeah. Dr. Tara Youngblood (15:48) So it's not the sleep space, it's the bedroom. And and great bedrooms are great. There's lots of things that can happen there. But yes, it is it is it really needs to have a space that is trained for sleep. And it goes back to the treadmill analogy. You wouldn't, you know, when you see people and they hang their clothes on the treadmill, they stop using it as a treadmill. Lyndsay Soprano (16:08) True. Dr. Tara Youngblood (16:08) State of mind really does matter again as that base threshold. If you're not in the mode to sleep, it's gonna be much harder. Lyndsay Soprano (16:19) It is. And it that's part of sleep hygiene too. You know, all of that comes with it. And when you're talking about the bedroom, and it was so interesting that you did say that in your book about how this is the only room that we don't call it the couch room for the living room, right? That was so interesting to me because it's true. It should be called the sleep room. So maybe we should just start calling it that. Just like let's just rename it right now, guys. On the show, we are now calling it the sleep room. And eliminate the things that are getting in the way because I've got just a table of stuff that actually feels like a challenge before I even sat down and it you know and it Dr. Tara Youngblood (16:55) For me, it was piles of laundry with like four boys. We had Lyndsay Soprano (16:58) my god. Dr. Tara Youngblood (16:59) tons of laundry. And I'd be like, you know, I want to keep it out of the living room. I really want to like, I like I like having neat spaces. So I'm like, if there's gonna be clutter, I'll put it right there. And it became this, you know, huge mountain in our bedroom. And I had to stop. I had to like figure out a different strategy because literally then I would go to bed going, God, maybe I should just work through the laundry before I go to bed. And then an hour later I would maybe go to bed, but it it it really wasn't helpful. Again, it that space does does make a difference. And then while doing laundry, I'd think of 10 other things and my mind would get rewound up. And I'm I'm like, ugh, terri terrible. And it it shouldn't be that a pile of laundry is so disruptive. But when you're high anxiety and you've got a lot of things on your mind, even something that seems harmless is no longer that harmless. Lyndsay Soprano (17:47) Yeah. And I want to talk about temperature because and and and and simultaneously talk about mattresses because I have and I think everybody that's listening right now has bought more than one mattress. I certainly hope you have because if you haven't, that's a whole other issue. Maybe you're Dr. Tara Youngblood (18:02) We start there. Lyndsay Soprano (18:04) on spring mattresses from eighth grade. Let's change your tune. But it's so interesting. Dr. Tara Youngblood (18:09) Same pillow because I people like I that is even more sh almost shocking than because you're like your face is right there. But the number of people, you know, and it is not Lyndsay Soprano (18:20) Good. I do not like sleeping in hotels at all. I can't walk barefoot, so thank God because I won't put my feet on the carpet of a hotel room to save my life. But when you get into a hotel bed, you're kind of like, This is so disgusting because I know these pillows were slept on by somebody else and I'm sure they didn't replace them. And it's just like even our own pillows, like when you change your own pillowcases, you know from over the time they change color and you can see like where you're drooling and where you're sweating, and it's like it's so gross. But when we got into you know, what therapeutic you know, when we had all these big foam mattresses were the big deal, right? That came out. I don't know what twenty years ago. You know more more about this than I do, but we did all of those, bought all of those, and those were they just were like heat magnets. Dr. Tara Youngblood (19:02) Yeah, memory foam is the enemy. If if you walk away from this podcast with anything, just know that memory foam is bad for you. It's bad for the environment. It heats up. It's not great. They're filling up landfills. It is the enemy. Like just don't do it. Lyndsay Soprano (19:17) So let's talk about the importance of temperature because I know that like we all have our partners that we sleep next to. Well, you might not have one in luck. Good good for you because it's a pain the ass to have one. Like Cameron Diaz and her husband, who's part of Good Charlotte, the band, they sleep in separate bedrooms and she's just recently brought it to everybody's attention. And I think it's very interesting. and I don't think it's because they don't love each other. but we all sleep very, very different. My guy goes to bed earlier. He sleeps very, very cold. He's freezing all night long. I feel terrible, but I've got the air conditioning blasting. I've got the ceiling fan going and I am like basically naked while I'm sleeping and I can barely have a sheet to cover me mostly from a pain perspective. And I'm also just so damn hot. So temperature, why is it so important for us? Dr. Tara Youngblood (19:59) Okay, so back to the picture of the caveman kind of scenario, but the materials we slept on were natural materials and they were generally, you know, good night sleep tight is about tightening the strings in your bed and the straw and the wool and all that stuff. But it was very breathable, it didn't overheat. Our bodies need to drop two degrees core body temperature in order to achieve deep sleep. And that doesn't sound like a lot until you think, okay, well, when I run a temperature and I have a fever and it's two degrees, that feels pretty crappy. That means I'm two degrees too hot from where I should be. Well, that's the same at night. So your regular temperature is then about two degrees too hot. So if you can't facilitate that back to that memory foam that after forty five minutes is now reflecting heat back to you. And if you have a cover, you have now turned into a nice little bread oven and you are definitely warmer than ninety eight degrees. You are not cooler than that. So, you know, back to those breathable spaces, spur on the ground in the cave, all of those things, we were meant to sleep cooler. We need to get cooler. Otherwise we actually there's, you know Talk about different kinds of sleep to just backtrack. There's REM sleep, which is, you know, your brain waves look a lot like you're awake, you're rapid eye movement. It was one of the first types of sleep that was really recognized. then you have you sort of this in-between layer of light sleep, and then there's deep sleep or non-rem sleep, where your brain waves are the slowest. And so deep sleep is a where a lot of that physical healing happens. We still do dream throughout. Deep sleep they've now discovered, but it is really about physical healing. So deep sleep, your your spinal fluid comes up, washes your brain, pulls the towels out that are often attributed to Alzheimer's or dementia, your lymphatic system drains, your cardiovascular system resets and does that. So that is every single system, every single system resets, heals, does maintenance. So if you imagine your house, you never did any maintenance on it. because you're awake all the time, you never do maintenance. And if you're never doing maintenance, of course the shutters are gonna fall off and the paint's gonna peel and things are gonna get tough. and so if you combine that with stress and all of us have a lot of stress or you've had trauma or anxiety, you're really making this Perfect sauce for autoimmune disease, like I have Hashimoto's. That's kind of the perfect recipe for any of those autoimmune things to pop up. It's a perfect recipe for cancer. You can repeat that almost across every disease vertical. Every mental illness is attached to comorbidity with lack of sleep. Like it is, it's just exponentially bad if we can't get sleep for all of those conditions. And so, like for me, when I hear about you and your your your pain threshold problem or not threshold, but like feelings and and overwhelm of like why you can't sleep, getting to where you can find that balance and getting sleep is part of why I was excited to come on the podcast. I love a good challenge. Lyndsay Soprano (22:47) yeah. Well hey honey, I've been sign me up because it is definitely we've o everybody has always said at some point you're you know, I had a heart attack when I was thirty. If it's related to sleep deprivation, that'd already been what? Dr. Tara Youngblood (23:00) Is there actually the biggest day for s heart attacks is daylight savings time. because it you people lose an hour of sleep and it has the highest incident of cardiovascular events. Lyndsay Soprano (23:12) Wow, crazy. I am so affected by that total sidebar. Like that, I absolutely it takes me forever. It almost feels like the whole six months, I'm just finally there. And then we switch it again and I'm all screwed up again. I'm highly sensitive to it. but probably because I'm so incredibly sleep deprived, but I don't understand why we have it anymore, anyways. But that's for a different show. But yeah, Dr. Tara Youngblood (23:33) Yeah, we we can do a whole show on that. Lyndsay Soprano (23:35) we can. From a politics perspective, too, right now, that we're not gonna go there. Dr. Tara Youngblood (23:40) No, and this goes downhill very fast. Very quick. I will talk about it. I said there's nothing off limits, but maybe that one. Lyndsay Soprano (23:46) I know. I try. Everybody knows how I feel about our current administration. We don't have to talk about it. But yeah, so it's just it's it's it's pretty amazing how our bodies, how delicate and amazing our bodies are when you think about while you're sleeping, the things that your body is trying to do and to heal from. How am I ever gonna be out of pain? How am I ever going to be out of pain if I cannot frickin' Sleep. My nervous system is a disaster all the time. I don't eat very well, so I don't nourish my body because I'm sick to my stomach all the time. Dr. Tara Youngblood (24:18) So that we talk about temperature and I'll take I'll digress because the first physics lesson I always love to teach is that you never tell the age of the universe with just time alone. So time is a bad variable because it can be warped by gravity and all sorts of things. Time is not a very you can measure a different time at your head than your feet. Like it's just a bad variable. And so you always put it with heat. And so entropy is maybe something you've heard of, but entropy is how they measure the age of the universe. And it is the combination of both time and heat that causes everything to decay and break down. And if you look at sort of a time lapse, you did time lapse, Google time lapse of entropy, it'll literally show something decaying. And that's really the impact of what happens with entropy. And so the power, and you can see it in a lot of these cold therapies. So outside of just sleep, if you haven't, especially with your pain profile for you, but anyone that has a high pain profile. Disease, autoimmune, cold is incredibly powerful at resetting that, getting you to sleep. I will say that if you want to sleep no matter what, 20 minutes in that ice bath, about an hour before you need to go to sleep, will be impossible to stay awake. Your body, when it resets with a cold like that, and it is not fun, it is not enjoyable, there's nothing about it that is sexy, cool, whatever. But as a as someone that is struggling with temperature, I would really recommend finding a way to put some cold protocol into your life. Okay. it is incredibly strong. It'll probably really hurt with your brain thing. So I'm not gonna sell you and say that, you know, when that cold stuff starts to hit, that it's not gonna it's not gonna hurt. But I believe it would really reset a lot of things. And it may not need to be 20 minutes. I'd play around with the different ways of doing it, but I believe that there would be a really powerful part for what that does, even just to reset your pain centers beyond the sleep part. But it would be very powerful for you to be able to manage your temperature in relation to sleep and even in relation to your day of warm making sure you're warm in the morning, because that warming up part is a good part about turning off sleep. We actually need a warm up in the morning. that's why cortisol is good in the morning, moving our bodies, warming up. We have a propensity for that warm drink in the morning. All of that is driving towards how do we warm ourselves up? The planet warms up, the sun comes out, and we want we need to be warm. And when you combine that with early light before 9 a.m., you actually that's what turns off something called a sleep switch, which the fact that there's something called a sleep switch when you don't sleep well is really what very, very frustrating. But Clifford Sabier out of Harvard. I'm sure he sleeps great. I've never met him. I've spent time at Harvard Medical and MIT. I've not met him. but He coined something called the sleep switch and it he really did all the work of like how that switch turns on and off in that mechanism. And it does have to do with temperature and the environment. And so turning off sleep in the morning by warming up, getting light, turning on sleep by cooling down, having the lights go dim, that helps release melatonin, that helps get our body ready to it is the natural process. And so And like I said, it's it's not pretty or sexy. No one likes staring down at an ice bath and thinking, Okay, this is what I'm going to do, myself included, but it is it is extremely powerful. Lyndsay Soprano (27:41) Well, I have a freezer next to my bed that has ice booties for my feet because my feet hurt so bad. Well, all day long, 24 hours a day. My whole body hurts, but my feet is where it all started. So that's like where the worst part of my pain is. And at night they are so hot that they're like they almost feel like I have like a tacky glue on the bottom of them. And so I live with my feet in ice booties. Well, there's other people that are in the CRPS community that are trying to warm up their feet because they're so purple. And cold. Well, I have both of those things going on simultaneously. One foot will be purple and the other foot will be super hot and clammy and weird. It's like, what is happening here? And so the cold plunge thing, I would go in and sit in baths that are super cold. And then I'm doing the opposite thing like an hour later, where I'm hopping, hopping in my bathtub and I'm putting Epsom salt in there with magnesium in it because my legs have turned like 90 degrees and they're in a cramp for almost four hours at a time. And it's like, what the hell is happening? It's like something science like out of science fiction, I swear to God. So the cold plunge thing is something that I have definitely attempted to try, but it is something that I feel would benefit me wholeheartedly because I am always trying to cool my body down, even from the moment I wake up. But now you're telling me I need to be warmer in the morning. And so I'm kind of like, gosh, what do I do? And I know we're not all the same. So we have to think about that. That there's no, there's this, there's an arrested for each and every one of us. There's a different one for all of us that we have to Figure out. Dr. Tara Youngblood (29:05) Yeah, I wish I wish there was one like again, super super pill that you Lyndsay Soprano (29:09) Yeah, like Dr. Tara Youngblood (29:12) One thing and you're done. yeah. And but I I do I do think the the interesting part of the Ebs and salt and magnesium, you know, there's another big part of sleep that is magnesium. And you know, it gets mentioned a lot on, you know, my I hate the sort of top ten sleep sleep tip things because it is so generic and like, okay, well if it was all that easy, like like no, like no. Lyndsay Soprano (29:36) Why do we have an entire industry globally about why we can't sleep then? Yeah. So Dr. Tara Youngblood (29:40) Yeah. So it not so easy. but magnesium is something that is is really underserved. Part of it's our diet, part of it's even preservatives and things that go in our food pull magnesium out. It is a s a fairly sensitive mineral because it from bioavailability and how it dissolves if your stomach's highly acidic, like you drink it with coffee in the morning, which a lot of people do, the chances are you're just gonna pee it all out. and so a lot of people are really short, and I when I say a lot, a high percentage, they believe about 70 to 80% of population in the US is probably short on magnesium. And we use it for over 500 different chemical reactions in the body, not just for sleep, for everything. And one of the reasons it's hard to track is we will pull it from our bones because it's so important. And so what happens is if you go to draw blood and you say, okay, well, what is my magnesium level? It's generally says not bad because our bodies will do everything it takes to make sure there's enough magnesium so we function. But it doesn't always mean we have enough magnesium in our batteries to really be able to highly function. And so if you take no other supplement, magnesium is just a good one and and fine one, again, we're all slightly different. So there's going to be slightly different variations. Ideally do take it at night if you can remember to do that to buy your toothbrush is what I recommend because then you can pop it in after you do your toothbrush. It doesn't sit right by your bed. And then you already have water and everything there. but magnesium, you know, and and keep playing around with your doses because there's standard doses, but most people are so chronically deprived that even a standard dose is probably not enough to get you caught up. Lyndsay Soprano (31:19) Yeah. And you t you mention in your book a lot about the h holistic alternatives and Aervedic medicine and so on and so forth. And you talk about valerian root and magnesium and potassium and all these other things. And I know that generic blood testing that we have, you know, is really especially here in the United States, is comparing us against the entire population of the United States of America, which is completely ridiculous. And so that's why I love function. Dr. Tara Youngblood (31:41) Not yeah, not right. Lyndsay Soprano (31:42) And men versus women don't even get that started. Right. And then that's why I love the functional diagnostic part of it because they really get down into more of the root as to why you are lower in magnesium than you should be and why you why your liver might be functioning and why your cholesterol is as high. My cholesterol is 342. Okay. I weigh 112 pounds. So yeah. So something's something's out of whack. My cholesterol's been high for my for a very, very long time. And I just We do, my mom and my grandma. We definitely have the familial aspect of it, but still it's really, really high. But so there's all these things that we can do naturally, but then we've got this. Ugh. And I brought up earlier about Ambient. And we've got all of these sleep aids that are ripping people apart from my perspective. And my husband is one, he lives on Ambient to sleep because he has to get up and he has to be on air and he has to, he has to, he has to. And that's 36 years of doing this. And now he's seventy-five and we're not supposed to be taking it. He shouldn't even be prescribed this. Don't get me started on that doctor situation. Yeah. Can you talk a little bit about why, what the risks are for all of these prescription sleeping pills? And 'cause that kind of goes hand in hand with our opioid crisis to a certain extent, because people that live in pain are taking opioids and that's a whole other can of worms too. But Dr. Tara Youngblood (33:01) It's in the same category, actually. And the story is is not radically different, you know. physicians prior to two thousand really didn't spend any time in sleep in their entire training protocol. So the only thing Lyndsay Soprano (33:13) Just like nutrition. Dr. Tara Youngblood (33:15) Yeah, like so when the when the drugs like Ambient came out and they like, wow, they'll knock people out. I have nothing else to give someone when they come to me. Like, you know, I'm same kind of thing. When I've been sleeping depressed, like, okay, here's an ambient. I'm like Really? That's all you got me? Like terrible stuff. But it is literally a class of drug that's an hallucination drug. So when you think about, you know, even that tie to opioids, we are literally giving them an addictive drug that makes your brain think that it's asleep, but you're really hallucinating. It has nothing to do with sleep. It is it is similar, like you wouldn't go into surgery and wake up from anesthesia going, I feel so rested. This was amazing. Knock me out again. You don't do anesthesia to to feel better and to get a good sleep. It does knock down your level of consciousness and it does knock that out. but that does not mean you're sleeping. Those are the definitions are wrong. And so that is really the problem I have with Ambient is that they're saying this is going to help you sleep. And it is actually it's gonna help you knock yourself out from a consciousness perspective. And it can be a helpful tool, again, in an extreme anxiety case or something like that. But you should not be on it for more than two weeks. and even the guidelines say you should not be on it for more than two weeks. It's a tool, it's a short-term tool, but getting off of it is really like getting off an opioid or other hallucination drug that you would take and you you're like, they have an addiction. It is truly an addiction. And so what happens to get people off Ambient, it really is an addiction protocol that you go through. But it is crazy that we are giving people sleep drugs. That you have to use an addiction protocol to get off of effectively for most people. and no one's talking about that at all. And it is really scary to me that and it and unfortunately now they really there's multiple studies, again, peer-reviewed, great studies that is leading to higher incidences of cancer. it is, you know, it it everything you can imagine with not sleeping over long periods of time, it it ties to all of that. But it is unfortunately it is. It is very similar to the opioid crisis where they, you know, doctors thought they were like, Here, I'll give you a pill, it'll help, and you'll go away and it'll work out. and not really even reading the guidelines on the drug and and how it's supposed to be used and continuing to prescribe after the two weeks when someone comes back, you should have given them some other solution and said, Okay, well now you need something different. Clearly that's that tool isn't the right tool for you. We now need to do something else. And they're not, you know, that bridge between mental health and physical health is is extremely lacking in this country. You know, they've started asking you if you're depressed when you get to the doctor. What is the doctor actually going to do if you say yes to that? you know, like they'll re they'll refer you to somebody else. There's no one that's going to stop and say, Well, even if you walked in and said you were suicidal, they put you in an emergency room and there's no one really equipped to help you in those processes. on the front lines of mental health, there are police officers coming to your house to call, you know, when you have an bipolar episode. It's it's really a very broken system and ambience kind of attached to that in the sense of how we treat sleep. Lyndsay Soprano (36:30) There was something that you wrote in your book as well about that sleeping pills generic j generally speaking are as risky as smoking cigarettes. And that was like, whoa, holy crap. Like if you're listening to this conversation and you smoke cigarettes, a stop. And if you're taking sleeping pills while you're smoking cigarettes, also stop because this is a very scary thing. And it's a personal thing for me from an ambient perspective. And then one of my best friends is a heavy smoker. And so I'm trying to deal with him trying to get off of cigarette smoking. And it's just These things that we're doing to our bodies are not helping us in any way, shape, or form. And we're asking ourselves the question, why aren't we able to sleep and why are we so unhealthy? And why are we fat and why are we this and why are we that? Well, I can give you the right now, this whole episode told you a lot of the reasons why. Not to mention cancer and Alzheimer's. I mean, it the list goes on and on. Dr. Tara Youngblood (37:15) made smoking sexy, so it's you know, like the marketing out there is is not great. That's it is why you have to be your your own advocate. Lyndsay Soprano (37:24) Mm-hmm. I wanna before we go, I want to talk about your company Geli Sleep. This bed that you are part of is so interesting. And I want you to talk about it. And I definitely want you to talk about the big boulders and the gravel that what that stuck with me from our meet and green. You also talked about it in your book. So talk about this mattress because pretty phenomenal. Dr. Tara Youngblood (37:45) Yeah, so long story short, I also invented the chili pad. So if you see that in reference, which is a great it cools and heats the top of your bed. But I wanted to do something that didn't have electricity that really changed the mattress. and I mentioned all the problems with the mattress industry. I wanted to to really look at the science behind what goes into it. most of the time, you know, people put pretty covers on them. I actually there's a there's I won't throw them under the bus. But it they made they actually have a line of mattresses where they took it from dress fabric to make it look really pretty in this showroom. and it they're very proud of the fact that you can pull it off a runway and then put it on a mattress, which has so little to do with sleep. Great for the runway. I love pretty fashion, but it does not need to be part of sleep. And so I wanted to build something from the ground up. I wanted it to to manage temperature, to be thermal neutral, to cool. And one of the only beds that ever needed to be heated was the water bed. and my husband Todd, business partner, his uncle actually invented the waterbeds. So we have been around and played with those over the years. And they were great in the sense that you could get super cold because you'd freeze your tail off if you didn't heat it, because there was 2,000 pounds of water in there. But water is is pretty amazing because it can cool you. If you think about in terms of, you know, if you were to sit in a bathtub of room temperature water, 70 degrees, you'd freeze your tail off. It's cold. No one wants a swimming pool at, you know, 68 degrees. But a room at 68 degrees, well, it's pretty comfortable. And so the difference of having water in the bed is really helpful, but it's messy. And I like the idea of gel. So they use gel a lot in wheelchairs. it's a really great material. the problem with gel is it's 80% water. Well, that turns out to be a good thing if you ship the gel dehydrated. So I actually was with four boys, I digress. We were the invention came from actually shooting little gel pellets. Nerf has a whole brand of guns you can shoot at each other where you hydrate these little gel beads and then you can shoot them at each other. And of course, over Thanksgiving, what do you do with boys in the woods? You shoot each other because nothing says gratitude like shooting. And so I was like, wow, this is really amazing. If you could put this in a bed, how much cooling would you have? What would that surface be like? And so yeah, so it has three inches of gel, these gel beads, it has micro ones and larger ones. And the reason that's important is Know sand at the beach will compress and you'll s be super squishy. We don't want it to be super squishy. We want spinal alignment, but we also want to reduce pressure. And the mattress industry talks about pressure relief and pain relief and all these comfort things. The true measurement is a standardized scale that they use in medical beds for burn victims and pressure ulcers. It's an established standard. It's been around for 20 years. And so a medical bed cannot conclaim. pressure relief unless it's below a threshold of 32 degrees millimeters mercury. The scale is from zero to a hundred, a hundred being flat ground, zero being like floating in gravity and nothing. All of our mattresses, you you can actually Google the Goldilocks purple commercial. They're super proud of their 65, which means you are nowhere close to that threshold. So even though they have a gel matrix, it's actually not dispersing pressure. So when you disperse pressure, you want to think about like being on thin ice You want to spread that weight out as far as possible. You want to spread that impact, that weight, that pressure as far out and as deep as possible. Because when that disappears, that energy, because everything is an energy exchange. So when your your hip or your shoulder hits the bed, you want to disperse that pressure. And that is what relieves pressure on your joints, on your legs, on your body, anywhere that hurts. And so you want to almost have that floating feel. there is no other consumer mattress that does that. So That is what we set out to do is to meet that standard. And so all of our beds meet that standard without electricity. And it really is just this layer of gel that allows you to basically still not sink in, because even the old water beds, your butt would kind of still sink down and you kind of float. And if you've ever floated in the water and just got your, you know, butt sinks down, but this actually allows you to stay on the surface, keep the spinal alignment. But not have that pressure build up. And what it does, even just for a regular person, means that you toss and turn less. for someone my age who was waking up with like hip pain and back pain. And I woke up in more pain after going to bed than I did, you know, when I went to sleep. And you shouldn't wake up in more pain. You should always have less because if you heal all night, you should wake up in the morning better than you were the night before. If you wake up hurting more after being in bed, It's a bed problem. And so that is what we set out to solve with this mattress of your mattress should serve you. It should be, you know, again, that sleep space. It should be somewhere that delivers. I feel better after being in here for eight hours, then I I should not feel worse. I should not feel tired or hot or uncomfortable from the experience of being in your mattress. Lyndsay Soprano (42:45) I literally woke up this morning and what it's like it's my least favorite time of the day was when I wake up because I have to put my feet on the floor and I have to put weight on them and it feels like I'm a hundred and eighty years old. Like I'm like 'cause I think in my brain, in my brain, every day, all day while I'm going through life, I have no idea how I'm gonna feel in ten years from now. If I feel like I did this morning, I'm not gonna be walking in ten years from now. And so this part is like so crucial. I always cry in an episode. It took an hour. And so that is like Dr. Tara Youngblood (43:20) bravery and how courageous you are to be out there. You know, so many people would pull up the covers equivalent and just and just not be there. But your your advocacy, you showing up every day is is just so powerful. It is so inspiring. And so hearing that it I am I am so sorry that you go through that every day. Lyndsay Soprano (43:42) Well, and so many of our listeners do as well. And so that's why this is so important, because we lose so much sleep to pain. You know? it's not linear, it's not the same for everybody. Do women experience it more than men? Unfortunately, yes we do. Do we have bigger sleep problems? Yes we do. Do we have bigger more hormonal problems? Yes we do. Do we have more anxiety? Yes we do. And I wanna blame it all on men, but we can't. Dr. Tara Youngblood (44:07) No, because honestly, men for all the men out there, I will apologize, but our bodies are actually designed stronger. We actually survive pain better. You know, it is it is for all the things we go through more, we are more as well. Unfortunately, the world has not studied us and put the research behind women. When I started studying sleep, finding a a a sleep study that had used women was just almost impossible. And it was all on college age men, which God bless them, I have some. They sleep great. They I'm not worried about like that Lyndsay Soprano (44:43) They're doing great. Dr. Tara Youngblood (44:44) is not me. And it doesn't look anything like me. There's no cohort where I live like a college guy while I'm sleeping. They're not like they're like ever, ever, ever in my life. That's again, I love them. I have some, but you know. Lyndsay Soprano (44:57) Yeah. Well, you also, I am so grateful for you because you are a huge advocate of women and especially in the sleep department, but you've also gone through all of the the grief and the sadness and the loss and the depression and the anxiety and all of that while still raising four boys at the same time and being an entrepreneur and being a scientist and doing TED Talks and getting patents and doing I mean, my gosh, woman, you are amazing. And so right back at ya on the amazing side of things. So so York talk a little bit about how people can find you. and so we can have people find you as soon as possible. Dr. Tara Youngblood (45:33) Yeah, no, I'm on like Facebook, Instagram, all those places as Dr. underscore youngblood. And I do I take questions all the time. I do personally answer, like not if it's like, hey, how you doing? But if have a question, DM me. And I work really hard to to kind of get to the root of what we could do. I I do. I take every person not sleeping personally. At some point the billions is gonna be too much, but I I do. I really don't want anyone to not not be able to sleep. It is is a personal mission. People need to sleep and anything we can do to get you there is important. If you want to find out more about the mattress, it's on gelisleep.com Lyndsay Soprano (46:13) And for gel it's not jelly like jelly that you put on your toast. It's Geli. Dr. Tara Youngblood (46:18) There was a whole cap cut or surah where people were jumping onto jello beds. And so if you Google Geli bed, you get like weird people randomly literally jumping into jello. And it is not that. It is gel like gel. Lyndsay Soprano (46:34) E L I sleep dot com is where you go. Dr. Tara Youngblood (46:37) And maybe if you wanna have a fun TikTok, do the jelly thing and there's tons of people jumping into jello. Lyndsay Soprano (46:46) Yeah. my gosh, that is so funny. my, and there's a quote in your book that you said before we head out of here. It says, if I had to choose one superpower, it would not be wisdom, money, love, or friendships. It would be sleep because a great sleep gives you all of those wrapped in a bow of a happy and peaceful mind. And I love that quote because it is we do need sleep as our superpower because my gosh, the things that we think about what I accomplish in a day. I'm talking to myself, what more could I do for other Women and men that live in the in with chronic pain and chronic illness and what I could do to help this world be a less painful place. If I could sleep, my gosh, talk about a superhero. Dr. Tara Youngblood (47:24) Yeah. Lyndsay Soprano (47:25) We want to be superheroes here for you, my listeners. And my show is not my show. It is our show. And I want to thank you so much for being here today, Tara. you've been wonderful, not just in your personality and everything that you've gone through, but you you're You you explained everything to us on so many levels. So thank you so much for your time today. It's just been a blessing to have you here. Dr. Tara Youngblood (47:43) Thanks. Thanks for having me. Lyndsay Soprano (47:45) Okay, you are exclusively invited to share this. Everybody can sleep VIP pain journey together. Let's get to the heart of how to heal with you by my side and Tara's side. Please follow Giving Pain Purpose wherever you digest your podcast content. We will be there. Visit us at giving painpurpose.com and follow us on all the socials. Thanks for listening, my little VIPs catch you on the other side.