Sleep Is Where You Win: Dr. Kirk Parsley on the Captains & Coaches Podcast

Podcast Transcript

Dr. Kirk Parsley  0:00 

You’re getting stronger while you’re asleep, your endurance is increasing while you’re in sleep. And you’re actually getting smarter, you’re actually learning, and you’re acquiring your skills. And something that’s fascinating. I find this one of the most fascinating things in the world, and I’ve done it with some MMA guys, right? So you get an MMA guy who’s a wrestler, and he’s going to fight a striker. He’s got eight weeks. It’s like, I gotta, I gotta learn how to box in eight weeks, right? I gotta really spun up on it. So what’s the, what’s the best possible thing for him to do? Well, it’s not trained 24 hours a day, right? Because, okay, so he needs to rest. How much does he need to rest? Well, as much as he needs to rest. So what can we – What else can we do? Well, let’s build in a little recovery. Let’s build in a little so you train in the morning, you take a nap, you consolidate memories, you come back, you train an afternoon. If you, if your day is ideal and you’re the right kind of person, you can possibly and your professional athlete, your life laid out that way, you could possibly take two naps a day and get three days of training.

Tex McQuilkin  0:59 

Welcome to the Captains & Coaches podcast, we explore the art and science of leadership through the lens of athletics and beyond. I’m your host, Tex will cook, and today we are joined in studio by Dr Kirk parsley, former Navy SEAL turned physician, sleep specialist and author of the book sleep to win. In today’s conversation, we’ll explore how sleep deprivation hijacks our decision making and compromises the prefrontal cortex, we’ll discover why sleep isn’t just about recovery. It’s where our bodies and our minds integrate the day’s learning into lasting skill acquisition. Get ready to understand why the world’s elite performers prioritize sleep as their secret weapon for cognitive clarity, emotional regulation and accelerated skill development. Now let’s hand it off to Doc parsley, who helps us raise the game. Ready, ready and ready.

Tex McQuilkin  1:56 

We have a lot in common. Dr parsley, welcome to the show. Grateful for you to come out to Dripping Springs. It’s not a far drive for you, yeah, but we went to the same high school, Yeah, same birthday, yeah. So, you had a different experience though. You were a part of a winning Katie Taylor football team. Well, three out of four years, three out of four years, yeah. I believe you were on the last team you actually beat Katie tigers, yeah. And so I had a, I had a high school coach that was on that team as well. Okay, Coach Powell, I don’t know if you know Billy Powell.

Dr. Kirk Parsley  2:27 

Billy Powell, yes, I do know Billy Powell. Well, how about that? Yeah, that’s funny. And he has a sister, like, a year. You’re too young in him, yeah? Dana Powell, yeah. So he, he

Tex McQuilkin  2:37 

was, he was an electrifying personality. Yeah, I can’t repeat some of the quotes that he gave us, yeah, but that that high school ball coach speak, yeah, one of the stories that we tell, like, when me and my guys get together, really, yeah, that’s so cool. I haven’t done it. That’s first time we’ve discussed that, yeah, all the years. Yeah. That just popped in my head. The so from Katie, you jumped right into the military, yeah, so speak to us about that transition from just Small Town Living, yeah, way back when, into All right, what is our next step for you and just that thought process.

Dr. Kirk Parsley  3:13 

So, you know, I wasn’t really much of a student my whole life. You know, had a lot to do with conditions of the home life, you know, kind of a bad, abusive home life. So all my The only time I had any fun was at school. So, like, I wasn’t interested in school. So did really poorly after four years of high school, I was a sophomore, my credits with a 1.1 GPA and none of my friends like that. I’d gone, you know, from third grade to senior with none of none of them knew that I wasn’t on part, on class, in class with them. So when they all graduated, I just drifted away to the military, right, which was always my plan. It wasn’t always my plan to be a seal, because being a seal wasn’t the thing back then. Like, there’s no celebrity status that nobody really knew what seals were. And my the boxing coach in in my town that I trained with was the Marine recruiter. And so it just kind of assumed I was going to go marine recon, because the heartbreak rage movie had come out, and that was cool. And so force recon was like a cool thing. And then this documentary came out about Navy SEAL training. Wasn’t so much about being a seal. It was about Navy SEAL training. It’s about Bloods. And it was a video documentary, like 60 minutes called 48 hours, if you remember that. So they covered the first 48 hours of Hell Week. And and, yeah, he just kept saying, toughest training in the world, toughest training in all times. Like, well, I want to go do the toughest training in the world, right? Because, you know, you know the old adage, if you’re going to be dumb, you better be tough. And so, like, I was pretty sure I was dumb because I’d been getting decent third grade. So, yeah, I was tough. Like, I like, you know, I didn’t I like to do tough, hard things, so I wanted to go do that. And, yeah, I waited for the Marine recruiter to get out of town, and I went and met with the Navy recruiter, and I joined up to be a seal. Really, honestly, not really knowing what a seal was, like it, I just knew the toughest training in the world. I want to go do that. So I fortunate enough to make it through, you know, a lot of guys don’t, a lot of really good dudes don’t, for kind of reasons to be on their control. So there, you know, there’s definitely some fate and chance involved in that. And I was lucky in that respect. And I, you know, and I obviously had the right grit to get through as well. And so made it through that. Then that, you know, they give you this with the color dream sheet, like, list where you would want to go of all the SEAL teams, like, what’s your first choice all the way down to your last choice, right? There’s that moment I realized I didn’t know what a seal was like. Well, I guess I already live in California, so I’ll just choose the ones here in California, not, not really knowing any difference, right? And so, so I chose the ones in California, and I stayed in California. And then, you know, we had the Gulf War breakout, but that was kind of a, you know, really a nothing burger. And then so it was really, like, you know, kind of six years of training, doing the same training trips with different guys and over and over and over and over again. And it was cool, a great place to spend your 20s, you know, getting learning how to, yeah, in Coronado, and then traveling the world. Get to learn how to scuba dive and skydive and shoot machine gun and blow things up and, you know, drive sand rails and, you know, cool stuff. So, but, you know, just decided, yeah, I’d kind of done it like, well, you know, met a girl, started thinking about marriage and kids and all that other stuff. So I said, Well, get out and I’ll go to college. And I really was thinking, you know, like, athletic trainer, strength and conditioning coach, kind of thing, way back then, wow, yeah. And then thinking, like, maybe a stretch goal would be, like a PT because the girl I was marrying was in PT school when I met her, and so that was like, way up there. That was, like, for an academic, right? Yeah, yeah. And I was like, Wow, maybe so so to get into PT school, you need 2000 volunteer hours, okay, which is, like, that’s a year full time work, two years of halftime work, right? That’s a lot of volunteer hours, yeah. So I was like, All right, and I was thinking about, I think it was Fresno State had an entry levels masters. So I was like, I had to go to junior college because I didn’t have a high school diploma. And so I skipped over that. Just I got a GED and to join the Navy, and so started volunteering at San Diego Sports Medicine Center, and within about a week, they hired me to be a PT aide, which meant, you know, I did e stem and ice and massage and stuff like that. And then, you know, kind of decided I didn’t really want to be a PT. After about six months of that, I was really almost doing what the PTS were doing, just kind of supervised. And I was like, I don’t really think that’s it for me. And because of, you know, because I’d been a CEO, you know, that time gap, and then, you know, it’s, you know, whatever year or two in college, like, the doctors that I worked there were with, you know, San Diego Sports Medicine Center had, like, every kind of healthcare practitioner related to sports you could think of. And so I, you know, I got to see everybody’s job, you know. And we had strength and conditioning coaches and trainers and massage therapists and acupuncture, like you kind of, you name it. We had it. And these doctors were about my age, you know, they’re, like, two years older than me, and they’re like, oh, you should go to medical school. Medical School. And I’m like, like, right, yeah, we can pump the brakes there, right? Like, you know, I didn’t graduate high school. And they’re like, they’re like, and, and this guy, Lee Rice, who owns the practice, he overhears this conversation. He says, he says, Kirk, the question isn’t, could you get in? The question is, would you want to go right to get in? I was like, of course, I want to go. And he’s like, Well, I mean, you really got to try, don’t you? So I really kind of got guilted into it. I was like, yeah. I mean, I’m kind of being a coward. You’re right. So I’ll try to get into medical school. So I did well enough to get into medical school, like anything else, there’s a yeah, there’s a scale, you know, there’s a gradation of, like, how, how good of a school you can get into based on your grades and all that. So when I started looking through review books to figure out, like, what schools I was competitive for given my GPA and my MCAT and all that, that’s when I found out the military had their own medical school. And I was already married, I already had a kid, another kid on the way, and they were going to pay me to go to medical school, so the other way around. And I, you know, my wife wouldn’t have to work. And I was like, kind of hard to pass that up, right? So I figured I’d get back to SEAL teams, be able to get back to the community that really probably saved my life. Life, Yeah, completely shaped me as a man, I think that community. And so I thought, yeah, that’d be a great, you know, that’d be a great way to kind of go full circle on all that. And so I did, and I got back there, you know, the way military funding, big bureaucracy, you know, they apply for something, it gets granted. The money comes whenever. So 10 years later, you get the money for the project that you, you know, you started 10 years ago, and so they just gotten the money to build the very first sports medicine facility ever for for the West Coast SEAL teams, right? When I got there as their doctor, and they’re like, Well, given your background, right, right? You should, you should supervise the build out of this and hire all the people. And I was like, perfect. So that’s what I did. But then, of course, you know, we got people from the Olympic Training Center and professional sports teams and d1 colleges and, like, we just got amazing people. So then I was by far the dumbest guy around, right? Because I was, yeah, I didn’t have any of this training, right? I had only done like, one year of residency. Of residency, you know, this way the military kind of breaks up. You do one year, then you go out and you do, like a general practice kind of tour, and then you come back and finish your residency. And so I had one year of residency. And so, you know, I had all these, I had ortho, ortho rounds coming through, and pain rounds coming through. And, you know, we hired pts and athletic training, exercise physiologist, nutritionist, not, right. So, and then they’re like, so, when you’re the dumbest guy around in the military, they say you’re in charge. Okay, you you supervise, right? And so, so now my job was to supervise this clinic, which really gave me no real job to speak of. But it was like, there’s a, there’s like a true physical therapy, rehab and what we call a bridge gym, okay, which is guys who weren’t quite ready to get back to the team, but they were there beyond this, right? So they’d work with their, you know, with their coaches over here. And then between those two were four offices, and mine was one of those offices. And seals are, you know, they’re a lot like professional athletes, and you know, a lot of them, and the worst thing you can do is put it on the bench like by far that’s the worst fate. So when they have to go talk to their doctor, they usually say, I’m great. Everything’s fine. I got no problems whatsoever. But because I’d been a seal recently enough to where there, there’s still a ton of guys there that I trained with and deployed with. I obviously had a good enough reputation. Guys trusted me, and they came in the door, and they come in my office and close the door behind them and go, Hey, man, let me tell you what’s really going on with me, right? And they started complaining. It’s like this confluence of symptoms that’s now in the medical literatures, and I’ve been dubbed the operator syndrome. Okay, I was calling it the seal syndrome because I was working with seals, obviously. And I like alliterations, I guess. So, you know, it was basically what you would think of if, if, you know, if I was sitting across from a 55-65 year old man who’s 30 pounds overweight and really hadn’t, really hadn’t taken care of himself since he quit playing college sports, whatever, right? So, you know, they had poor insulin sensitivity, they had high inflammation. These are things I found lab wise, right? You know, poor insulin sensitivity, high inflammation, high oxidation, low anabolic hormones, low testosterone, low DHA, low, DHA, low, IGF, one like, everything anabolic, low, everything catabolic, high. And they’re complaining of, you know, lack of lack of lack of motivation, lack of concentration, lack of, like, just ability to pay attention. Like, like they’re giving the lecture, and they can’t pay attention to the lecture that they’re giving, right? They leave their house four or five times every morning because they keep forgetting something. Get in the car. I forgot my badge, forgot this, and, you know, walk in a room, can’t figure out why they were there. They get there. They’re working with the strength and condition coach. We hired Josh Everett, right? We had a great nutritionist, like they had great programming, great coaching, and they’re like, I’m working, I’m doing everything. They’re saying. I’m getting fatter, I’m getting weaker, I’m getting slower, and my mood is not there. I’m snappy, I’m moody. I you know, I cry on commercials, I snap at my kids, I’m a prick to my co workers, and I just don’t know what’s going on. And, you know, being a Western trained physician, I knew how to recognize and treat diseases, and they didn’t have any diseases, right, right? And I was like, I don’t really know, but we’ll figure it out, right? We’ll figure it out together. So, so I just said, Hey, go to the hospital and get all these labs drawn. And what I literally did was I sent them to do every lab that I knew how to interpret. Okay, so just like shotgun, there’s 98 lab markers, 17 vials of blood, and they go get this lab set done, came back, and I just look at it, and I just started looking for trends. And so interestingly enough, that the seal community. Already knew that they had a problem with testosterone, and the leadership’s belief was, well, guys abuse steroids when they’re younger, and it interferes with their ability to make testosterone later, right? Well, that’s not exactly true, right? Depending on how long they’d have to abuse them for a really long time for that to be affecting them 15 years later, right? And they’re doing all sorts, you know, so, and that would have been a smart enough population to know how to recover so. And plus, I knew a lot of the guys personally. And like, you know the guys who do this kind of things, right? Like, you know who they are. And there were guys in my office that I know for a fact never took steroids, like I know they never did, and they had the same problems everybody else did. And I was like, I don’t really know there was, you know, we’d all heard of like, shell shock and combat fatigue and stuff from other wars, right? And this was 2009 so they’ve been in war for like, eight years. And I’m like, Well, maybe it’s something like that, right? So I start trying to look at, well, what is combat fatigue and what is shell shock? Nobody ever really figured that out. So I’m like, that doesn’t really help. That’s all, yeah. I’m like, Okay, so let’s see, what else could it be? And so I just said, Well, I’m gonna have to start looking kind of outside of Western medicine and just look, you know, the functional integrative medicine kind of component. And the first thing that kind of struck me is being a possibility, was adrenal fatigue, which was, you know, it’s, that’s, that’s probably misnamed. It should be, you know, called something else, but, but, but, there is a condition that, you know, that that describes, right? And so I was like, Well, let me, let me see, you know what’s going on, what I can do with that. So I started doing things to help guys recover from Adrenal Fatigue, which there’s not a whole lot you can do, but the things I could do, I was doing, and there was some success, maybe 30-40% improvement with maybe 30 or 40% of the guys, not huge. And then, you know, the way the SEAL teams work is, like, if you help a guy word of mouth, and he’s gonna be like, Hey, you should go talk, right? And so within a month, I had, you know, 100 150 guys come in my office, sit there and tell me the exact same story, so similar that I thought they were coaching each other, right? And it wouldn’t be beyond them to do that. That would make sense. They were, they were sharing in confidence, yeah, yeah. And so they’re but they’re telling me, like, this same story over and over again. And at one point, it just kind of occurred to me, was I’m sitting there talking, and it’s embarrassing, how many people it took me to catch on? I mean, it was a lot of people, dozens of people had been in my office before I kind of caught on, like it seems like everybody’s taking ambient. Seems like almost everybody in here seems like it’s taking ambient. So when that dude leaves, I go through my files. Every single guy who’d been in my office was taking Ambien. And I was like, huh, again, Western trained to sleep, or Western trained physician take this. I had not had a single class on sleep in medical school, so I didn’t know anything about sleep that they didn’t know, that anybody else didn’t know. And I took pharmacology, and I knew that I knew what sleep drugs were. I knew that they were GABA analogs, and they worked like GABA. What did GABA do? Hell if I knew. But like, that’s what I knew. I had my bullets memorized, and I was like, All right, well, let’s see what I can find out about that. Now, what I did have going for me was that, you know, like, like I alluded to earlier, the seals had started developing their kind of celebrity status, and so I could talk, you know, I could watch somebody’s TED talk, or see somebody lecture or read their book, and just call them up and be like, Hey, I’m the doctor for the West Coast SEAL teams. I’m having these problems. I you know, I saw you lecture whatever. Could I come train with you? Or could I run patients? Could I consult with you? And so I got to learn a lot, really fast. And so I said, Well, I’m going to learn. I’m going to learn about sleep and and the sleep drugs. I’m going to learn what the sleep drugs might be doing to sleep, but at first, I need to understand what the hell sleep is, right, so that I can understand what sleep drugs you might be doing to them and figure out how that might be playing a part. Well, now I think the general population knows that all your hormones are balanced while you’re asleep. Nobody knew that. Nobody knew that. I remember telling the leadership of the SEAL teams and literally getting laughed out of the laughed out of their office, going, like, only 15 years ago, yeah. And they’re like, Doc, you need to go back to go back to medical school. That’s ridiculous. I’m like, No, really, really, their testosterone is low because of their poor sleep. And they’re like, Yeah, whatever, right? And so, you know, I got to learn a lot about sleep. I learned what sleep drugs actually do. Of course, sleep drugs don’t, don’t cause sleep. They cause unconsciousness. They destroy the actual quality parts of sleep. You know, most people know you have, like, deep sleep, and you have REM sleep, and then you have, like, this intermediate stage to sleep, and there’s supposed to be certain proportions and ratios of that, and there’s a timing of all of that. And we call that sleep architecture, where it looks a certain way follows that, and then we know what’s going on in each one of those stages. Well, if. Take drug like Ambien, which falls into the category of a Z drug, and also benzodiazepines, things like Valium and Xanax, those are also GABA analogs. So if you take drugs like that, what they do is they destroy about 80% of REM sleep and about 20% of deep sleep. And if you drink alcohol, that’s 80% of deep sleep and 20% of REM sleep. So if you do both, oh no, every seal that I sent for a sleep study came back 99.9% stage two sleep, no deep sleep, no REM sleep, wow. Now, as true to the medical literature, they should be dead, and that shouldn’t have worked, right? If you, if you read what’s supposed to happen when your sleep like well, you couldn’t survive that. Okay? Survive that. Like, well, they’ve been surviving it for eight years or whatever. So you can survive it. Let’s figure out what we’re going to do about it, right? So, so I said, Well, let’s get off of Ambien. See, let’s just see what happens, right? And of course, they were taking Ambien because they couldn’t sleep, right? So I had to come up with something to give them instead. I couldn’t just say, I’m going to take your Ambien away and go sleep anyway. So I went to, like, really traditional, like, PubMed, Cochrane Database, kind of just very traditional, meta medical things like, what supplements actually help with sleep? And at that point, I knew enough about sleep to understand why a supplement would help. And so I came up with, like, six different supplements, and then I worked with, you know, probably 100 seals, helping me figure it out. And I just told them, I fled, like, we’re going to figure out a combination of this that works. I don’t know what that combination is. I don’t know how much to give you. We’re going to figure it out. So over the course of a few months. I mean, it’s great because they they’re super motivated. They would journal. They would, you know, wearables were starting to come around and and, you know, they were, they were tracking their sleep, and they were coming in every day, and they were telling me what they’re experiencing, and they were giving me feedback. And so we figured out kind of the right combination, and then we figured out the brands that seemed to work the best. And then I just gave them a handout, man, a piece of paper, like, hey, go buy this, this pre Amazon Prime. So guys had to drive around to the various health food stores, and they’d go get all this. And then they started sleeping without drugs and minimizing their alcohol, taking alcohol further and further away from bed, and trying to drink less alcohol, and just really prioritizing their sleep and that. And the biggest component of them was that I educated them, you know that their testosterone and growth hormone and like all this stuff that they know is going to make them perform better, all that’s happening while you’re asleep. And so if you don’t do this, you aren’t going to get that. And so that was enough motivation for them. And of course, they’re in they’re in miserable pain because it’s not a real job. And they tried everything, yeah, and they’ve tried everything, and so, so we started doing that, and it was huge. I mean, it was like an 80% solution for probably 80% of the guys. I mean, literally, I had guys, you know, total and free testosterone, like triple and quadruple, right? Go from a, you know, go from an HSC or pm marker for inflammation, to go from like 34 which is ridiculously high. It’s like, you know, do you have some kind of disease that we don’t know about? Like, 34 is a high number. They go from 34 to like, to unmeasurable just in the course of, you know, six weeks, eight weeks, something like that. Testosterone, triple, quadruple, IGF, one, triple, quadruple, oxidation was going down, like, and then I was giving them some supplements during the day, like DHEA, giving them some zinc citrate to kind of prevent conversion of testosterone into estrogen, and giving them pregnenolone, which is another precursor to sex hormones and cortisol And and I I had guys just like, PR, like, I had guys in their 40s coming and telling me, like, Hey, I PR, this, this workout, this, o course, this cross fit workout. Like, raised, whatever they did, whatever they’re into and, like, and I don’t mean I P art, it for my 40s, like, I P, order, I P, R, this for my life. Like, this is the fastest and strongest I’ve ever been. And I was like, Wow, that’s impressive. That wasn’t everybody, but, you know, but there were some cases of that. So I was like, Wow, that really worked. And then what I figured out, maybe my last year there, was that that other 20% of the solution that I didn’t have was TB eyes, because when I went to medical school, traumatic brain traumatic brain injury, right? So when I went to medical school, the definition of a traumatic brain injury was that you had to be physically hit in the head with something, and you had to lose consciousness. If those two things didn’t happen, you didn’t have a TBI. But what we subsequently learned over the years, and actually the biggest breakthrough with this, unfortunately, was one of our seals committed suicide. Oh, man, and he was medic, and just like the NFL guys, he was like, I’m shooting myself through the chest. Left a note like, I want my brain studied. And probably a lot of people have heard of, like, beta amyloid plaques in the brain. And. their markers for, like, neurological disease, they grow as you, as you age. And if you have neurological disease, you have a lot more of them. It’s kind of you think about, like calcium in your arteries. When you have chronic inflammation, your body tries to wall it off. And your arteries, they put calcium up, and then you have a calcified plaque in your brain, they put up this beta amyloid plaques, like, so you have inflammation in your brain and your brain like, let’s just put a protein Waller on it, and then we don’t have to mess with it anymore. Well, it’s interfering with your brain function, obviously, right? And so this guy had shot himself through the chest to have his brain studied. And unlike NFLs and boxers like, who tend to have like, spots up here in spots, back here from their coo counter coup, his entire brain was riddled with these things, and like, multiple layers of his brain. And they’re like, Wow, that’s strange. What caused that? And then the succession of this, they started doing autopsies and taking and looking at other people’s brain slides and finding this over and over again. And then somebody’s like, well, let’s see if we can figure this out. So they built this completely transparent skull out of a plastic that had a density approximating bone, and then they built a brain underneath that, layer by layer with materials that was close to matching that density, so like the DERA layer, and then you have blood vessels under that, and you have gray matter, which had a different density than the white matter, and you had fluid vesicles in there. And they built a very, very realistic brain. And then with high speed photography there, they would film this thing, they put off a blast wave in the room next to it. And so just like when you’ve seen a blast wave in a movie or whatever you see, everything. Everything moves right the all the wind blows, dust, trash, cars, rock, trees. Well, everything moves at a different rate depending on how heavy it is, how dense it is. That’s what happens in your brain. So we’d watch this brainwave, and it would come through when you watch the whole brain wiggle, but the dura moves at a different rate than the blood vessels underneath that, then they look great. And so it sheared, and it caused things to tear off of each other. And so that’s why we had this brain, like, completely covered everywhere there was an interface between two different densities. You’re full of these beta amyloid plaques. Like, okay, well, that’s probably a really big problem. So now, so now we just assume that TB, like all seals have, TB, eyes, right? Because what we found through the research that it only takes about 1.1 Gs of force to cause them very, very mild. TB, I think nothing you would never, nothing you’d ever pick up on, but you can get that from the acceleration changes on a roller coaster, right? That’s, that’s how little that insult is. But that’s a very, very minor one. Well, if you’re in a room, a concrete room, and you’re shooting in m4 every every round, is 35 G’s, wow. And then you got three other guys in the room doing that. You’re doing that 1000s of times a day, right? And we have, you know, whatever you have hard parachute openings, three or four G’s. You have, you know, 50, I think a 50 Cal in the back of a Humvee is 65 G’s, wow, for every round. Uh, our anti tank weapon, the Carl gusoff, okay? 200 GS for the guy shooting it. 300 G’s for the guy spotting it, right? And we have 50 Cal sniper rifles and all, I go, all this stuff, yeah, and so it’s just okay. Everybody has 10,000 TV eyes. As also you do competitive and you do fast roping, and you fall off the stuff, and you hit, like, and it’s like, okay, every seal has multiple TV eyes, just like every football player and every pugilist, yeah, and so. So when I, when I finally got out of that, that work, I retired for the military, went into private practice. I kind of left this void for and the seals were like, well, what are we going to do now? Because, like, they’re not replacing you with you, they’re replacing you with Joe Blow Doctor Who doesn’t know anything you know, to mentor or no people. It’s just, like, a turn. No, it just, it’s just the nature of the military. It’s like, your time’s up. You’re one of a million employees. It’s like, stamp, you’re gone, right? And so I just said, Well, you guys just keep calling me and I’ll, I’ll figure it out. So, so in the beginning, I was just, I, my deal with the seals was I like, I will do everything that I’ve always done for you, but you’re just gonna have to pay for your labs, you’re gonna have to pay for your medications, you have to pay for your supplements. I can’t, I can’t prescribe within that system anywhere. And and then I just never charged them for my time. And then over the years, lots of foundations have come up, and now the foundations will actually pay for all those guys to get all that treatment. And I still don’t charge for my time, and I and I let them, you know, I do everything, like everything they need, and I work with all the tools now, and so now, as seals are getting out, they spend a year with me, and we work on their TB eyes and their hormones and their chronic pain and all this stuff and and I’m doing everything, doing the, you know, hormones and peptides and supplementation and nutrition and sleep and hyperbarics and psychedelics that they need, and like you know, all of the. All this stuff, and we’re getting them ready for the next career. Because guys are, you know, guys are retiring at 4042, 43 years old. And you know, up until 1010, years ago, they just assumed, you know, they’re going to be living in the fifth wheel somewhere, drinking a bottle of whiskey a day. And, you know, making it another 10 years, maybe, you know, and no real plans to go into another career, because they were so broken, so beaten down. Yeah, you know. And the average seal, who, who spends a full who does a full 20 years, I want to say the average seal is like 13 surgeries. And then how many TB eyes on top of that, and how many other injuries that weren’t surgical, tons of chronic sleep deprivation and chaotic sleep and all this other stuff and and really hard to go out and compete with 25 year olds in some new field that you don’t know much about. And so that, yeah, so that’s, that’s what I spend about 70% of my time doing. And then, and then I treat private clients that I charge a lot of money, right? Like, high net worth people. I’m like, Hey, you’re, you’re paying for me to treat all these seals too, because they can’t afford me. So, like, you’ve, like, I take five private clients, you know, give them probably 100 hours a year, and then do big health makeovers for those guys. Those are guys who traded their health for wealth for 30 or 40 years, and now they have, you know, hundreds of millions of dollars. They don’t care about the money, and they just want to be like a division one athlete again. Division one athlete again or something. And you say, Well, you know, well, we’ll move in that direction, yeah, yeah. Well, we’ll get you that healthier, yeah. And so that that’s sort of the story.

Tex McQuilkin  31:33 

Time out. Every so often I receive messages that remind me why we created the old bull program. Today, I want to share Kevin’s story with you, not just because it showcases physical transformation, but because it represents what’s possible when training evolves beyond just sets and reps. Kevin recently reached out with a message that captures the essence of what we’re building. Here we go. Hey, text. This is Kevin from old bull. Just want to shoot you a quick text to say, I’m really digging the program and seeing great results. Made a few dietary tweaks, up my protein for one but through the training, I’ve been seeing more muscle and strength gain with infinitely less pain in the process than probably any other point in my lifting career. I recently got together with some friends I hadn’t seen in a couple years, and every one of them made a comment about how they’d never seen me looking bigger or stronger than I do now. Appreciate the program and what you’re doing to make it excellent. Here’s what really matters. This isn’t about quick fixes or unsustainable programs old bulls engineered for the experienced lifter who values longevity as much as they do intensity. We’re talking about intelligent progression that respects your body signal while constantly pushing your boundaries if you’re ready to transform your training into something more sustainable, more intelligent, and ultimately more impactful. The old bull program is your path forward. Click the link in the show notes and take control of your strength journey today. Awesome. I learned a few things here and now, the people you’re working with, they they are leaders. They know what they know, yeah, and they’re very confident and respectful of that. But you now have to step in and make some behavioral changes, right, right. So how do you assess them, behavior wise? Yeah, I outside the labs to determine, Okay, here’s behavior 123, we’re gonna have to wrestle on that one, right, to get them in a direction to truly accomplish what they want, right?

Dr. Kirk Parsley  33:35 

So the seals are easy, because, like, you know, part of the Brotherhood. They trust me. I trust them. They’re obviously very motivated guys. Or they wouldn’t be, they wouldn’t be seals, yeah? So those guys, yeah, there’s a little resistance to a few things here and there, especially things like mindfulness. You like, when you start trying to get them to control their stress, like, Yeah, we’re gonna have to change some behaviors around this. You got to start them off slow. You can’t, you can’t start them out with crystal bowls and chanting and things like that, right? They’re gonna have to, they’re gonna have to ease into that. But the seals are pretty easy. They’re pretty motivated. They’re at this point, they’re pretty educated by like, if they’re coming to see me, they’ve, they’ve probably known they’re ready. They know who I am. They’ve known, they’ve known about me for probably five or 10 years, if they’re coming to see me. So that’s not a tough one. Now the other guys, yeah, that’s that’s a big problem, especially there seems to be this trend, and like, the wealthier you are, the more certain you are that you know more than everybody else and that you’re better than everybody else and what you do, and therefore you’re probably better what they do. And so there’s a lot of there’s a lot of humble pie in there. I I have a very, very elaborate screening process. I don’t I like, I don’t got to work with you, just because you have the money like, you have to prove to me that you’re willing to change and that you’re ready to change. I. Um, and I have an extensive questionnaire on that, and then I do, like, about an hour long zoom call with them to figure out if there’s somebody I can work with. And my very first criteria is, if you’re not willing to spend eight hours a night in a bed, we aren’t working together, like, period. And that, surprisingly, half the people will say, No. I’m like, Wow. I was like, No, I don’t have time for that. I’ll say, okay, and this, and I say this as a joke. It’s a bit high, it’s a bit of hyperbole, but I’ve tested it to almost this extent where I could say, Okay, I want you to eat nothing but kale for a month, and I want you to exercise for three hours a day, and I want you to meditate for an hour a day. And I want alright, and just list out this ridiculous. Check, check, check, check, check out is, and I say, No, want you to sleep eight hours nine they’ll be, whoa, whoa. No, I don’t have time for that. I’m like, All right, well, I’d rather sleep. Don’t exercise three hours a day, then exercise 30 minutes a day, put those extra two and a half hours into your sleep, right? Nice and and they’ll all, they’ll all do that, right? And what it is, it’s getting better over time, like when I first started. So, you know, 15 years ago, when I first started doing this, not nearly, not nearly as many people knew nearly as much about sleep as they do now, they didn’t understand the importance of it. And you know, America has this idea that if, if you’re a hard charger and a go getter and a successful person, then you’re somebody who pushes past this luxury of sleep, right? Like you don’t really need to sleep, like you can. You can push it. You can do five hours and get up earlier and work harder than everybody else, and like, that’s how you’re going to succeed. And so programming people out of that is tough, but it’s, like I said, it’s getting less tough now, but like, over the last 15 years, more people come to me already realizing that how important sleep is. And so now it’s pretty much a motivation like most. For some reason, the magical number seems to be about seven. They’re like, I’m willing to spend seven hours in bed. Not eight, but not eight. I’m like, Okay, well, we’re gonna, we’re gonna do seven, and if you don’t get to age, then we’re gonna be done, right? So, so there, the contract is breakable on either side, right? If they aren’t happy if I’m not happy with them, if they’re happy with me, we can, we can break the contract, but that, that is the toughest one. What I’ve found the key, and you know this for me to coach like, the key to it is education, right? So once people understand why they need to do things, and you attach it to their goals, right? So the first thing I have them do is I say, I want you to put I want you to go to Google Scholar or PubMed, like something credible, put in sleep and whatever else you care about. I don’t care. Like fitness, strength, making money, leadership, relationships, communication, whatever, sleep and that and read until you’re convinced that sleep is the most important thing that you that you can do for yourself. And then once guys get there, then it’s really just a matter of, like, coaching a little bit of behavior. The biggest thing is getting stress out of people’s sleep and then convincing I do get a subset of the population who have continued to work out they’re age groupers, they do triathlons, they do ultra marathons, they maybe compete in CrossFit Games or kind of things, or Jiu Jitsu or something like that. So they are people who are competitive, but they still think that they can push past their need for sleep and go train. And so the next biggest hurdle is, like, if you aren’t recovering from your workout, there’s no point in working out. So if you aren’t sleeping enough, you shouldn’t be working out. You should be active because there’s some metabolic benefits to being active during the day, but you shouldn’t be so active. Like, I define exercise as like, I’m engaging in the level of activity that is designed to improve my performance. It’s something, right? So I’m pushing past my current capabilities in order to get better, or something that’s exercise. Being active is just like, I’m just going out there and being active, moving, I’m walking, I’m taking the stairs, I’m washing my own car. I’m moving my own lawn, right? I’m being active. But like, and even, like, light working out, you know, sitting on a, you know, 20 minutes of Zone Two cardio that’s active, right? That’s not exercise. But, like, I want to go get better at something that’s exercise, and you’re not going to get better, right? Because you get better while you sleep. You get worse while you’re training. I, and I have to, have to convince someone, you know, convince them this. But you say, when you if you go to the gym and you do anything worth doing in the gym, do you come under the gym? Weaker or stronger? Weaker, weaker, right? So you’re weaker. When are you going to get stronger? When you sleep? So if you aren’t sleeping, why are you going to the gym? Again? That doesn’t make any sense. You’re you’re already weaker from yesterday’s workout, and now. You didn’t sleep enough to recover from that, you’re gonna go work out again. Like, how’s that gonna work? Now you’re gonna recover Two Days and One Night. Like, how’s that gonna work? So that’s the next biggest hurdle. And then the nutrition. Really, I don’t have a whole lot of problem with that, because I, I just think nutrition is very, very simple. Like, I don’t get into nuances. And I’m like, you know, eat single ingredient food, eat the food that your grandparents called food, you know, eat meat, fruit, nuts, vegetables, seed. Like, I’m not, like, I’m not gonna get into all the little nuances. If you think, like, if you have some issues, break it down to, like, the most basic food first, like, eat meat, yeah. And then start adding some things, or figure out if that’s a problem. You know dairy, if you have dairy is a problem, see if certain nuts are a problem, whatever. But for the most part, it’s just like, I tell them, I don’t care how many calories you eat if you’re eating steak and vegetables and you know, whatever, fruits, vegetables, nuts, seeds and grains, even I don’t care like I don’t think grains are necessarily evil. They should be controlled. If you’re eating like that, eat as much as you want. I don’t care how much you’re gonna eat. And nobody’s gonna get obese on that. And everybody’s gonna lose weight if they wanna lose weight, right? And then, you know, the final piece I find, I’d say, in the last five years, pretty much everybody I come to is already doing some kind of mindfulness practice. And I and I think stress is the most important component of health, right? Okay, one of the primary benefits of sleep is decreasing stress. The lowest stress hormones you will ever have in any 24 hour period is during deep sleep, by far right, or just magnitude, lower than any other time. And if you don’t get enough sleep, like, the whole point of going to sleep tonight is to repair my body from everything I’ve damaged and overused today, and then to repair, right? I’m going to repair, and then I’m going to prepare, right? So I’m going to prepare by restocking neurotransmitters and glycogen stores and vitamins and minerals, whatever in my like, I’m going to I’m going to repair 100% and prepare 100% if I could do that, I would wake up exactly the same every day. I’d never age, right? Because I’d be 100% prepared. And 100% prepared, that’s not possible. So it’s 99.999% whatever. But all right, and so if I do that, and I do that really well, then I’m pretty damn ready for tomorrow. And in fact, if I go to the gym today and I say, I do more bench press than my muscles are capable of doing. My brain and my body tonight are going to use that as a template to say, Well, what do we need to be able to do tomorrow? And they’re going to make those muscles stronger so that the next time I do that, I’m going to damage myself less, right? And that’s how I’m going to get progressively stronger. So I’m going to I’m going to repair and prepare to be able to do that again tomorrow. So if I’m doing that, I can actually, technically get a little better, I can get a little stronger, a little more endurance, a little more fit. I’m still aging a little bit, but like I said, if I could do it 100% I wouldn’t age at all. So if I choose to sleep six hours instead of eight hours, I’m choosing to age 25% faster, and I’m choosing to repair 25% less, and I’m choosing to prepare 25% less. And how does my body compensate for it? Right? Tomorrow still comes. If I sleep six hours or eight hours, sun comes up exactly the same time. All my responsibilities are still the same, still there. How does my body how do i Compensate I really stress hormones. Ah, yeah. And stress hormones are catabolic. Stress hormones break you down. Stress hormones age you stress. Stress hormones like people know, if you drive around in traffic, you have more heart attacks. Why stress hormones, right? People are stress cases. They have heart attacks. They know. Have you ever seen that video? Have you ever seen that picture that has probably like a 19-20 year old kid who went to World War World War Two is like 1940s there’s like 1941 and then like 1944 and like he looked presidents to 30 years older. I mean, he looked, you look at me like, Oh, that guy’s about 35 you see him, like, three years earlier, he looked like a 19 year old kid. And so stress ages you. And so a lot of people are catching up on that. So, like the mindfulness training doesn’t seem to be nearly as hard to get people to do. But I say stress best mitigator or sleep, best mitigator or stress, right? Because, like I said, my stress hormones are the lowest, and then to the extent I can completely prepare myself, I should wake up with relatively low stress hormones. The more stressful my day is, the more the stress moments are going to be, right? So I want to get some exercise in there. There’s some physiologic benefits exercise that will reduce my stress. I don’t want to stress my GI system out my body by eating crappy foods, so that will control my stress. And then I do some sort of mindfulness training, which, like I said, you know, seals, their seal, a lot of seals, a lot of, you know, big, tough, hairy, chested frog man. They aren’t going to want to do meditation or something like that. So you start them off simple, and you say, you can’t tell them why, but you know, you start them off simple. You go, hey, you know, for the next week, I want you to do everything you can with your non dominant hand, right? Brush your teeth, eat, open doors, do everything you can with your non dominant hand. Them. And then, you know, the next week, I want you to, every time you stand up, I want you to think about, do you have more weight on the balls of your feet or the heels your feet, and as you walk, are you hitting your heel more or your toe more? Which is going first? I want you to keep them journal this and let me know. And then I do depending on how they respond, I can, I mean, I can do six weeks of that. I can just keep adding things to it, and then at the end of that, I say, so now what you’ve done is mindfulness training, because all I did is make you think about the moment. If you’re thinking about right now, you can’t be worrying about the future, and you can’t be dreading about the past. And be thinking about the past is depressing. Thinking about the future causes anxiety. So mindfulness is really like focusing on the now. If I focus on the now, I’m focusing on what I have control over, and that lowers my overall stress hormones. Yeah, and stress hormone is, it is a 24 hour load that matters. So if I don’t, if I don’t get good, if I sleep six hours instead of eight hours, and I wake up with 25% higher stress hormones, I’m starting my day with 25% higher stress hormones. I’m also starting my day with a less prepared body and a less more importantly, a less prepared brain, because this prefrontal cortex where I get all my willpower, decision making, problem solving, all of that in my prefrontal cortex, that area is the most impaired by stress. So I’m starting out with a poor functioning brain, which is going to lead to anxiety, which is going to make me more stressed out just doing my normal things, because I know this isn’t functioning as well, right? I’m aware of it. I’m aware that my decision making isn’t that great. Why can’t I think of this? Why can’t I remember this? Why can’t I solve this? Why am I feeling stressed? Why am I thinking about being stressed is stressful like, why am I stressed? I’m going to be stressed about, why am I stressed? And now my stress hormones are going to progressively go higher and higher. Now, when I go to sleep, my stress hormones need to be lower than the level of stress hormones that wake me up in the morning. But if I started with 25% more, and I had a stressful day, and then maybe I went and said, I’m going to go do some really high intensity training, because I’m going to push past this tiredness I have, and now I’m going to put even more stress on now I’m going to go to that I’m going to try to go to bed with three times the stress hormones I should have, and I’m even if I stay in bed for eight hours, my stress hormones never got low enough for me to get the high quality restorative sleep that I need. Yeah, so it’s all about stress.

Tex McQuilkin  47:13 

Man, it is all about stress. So two notes on that, I like the the mindfulness. So I’ve been working through processing how to teach teenagers to become more self-aware, right? So if it works on a seal,

Dr. Kirk Parsley  47:26 

Yeah, it’s gonna work, yeah? Same type of thing, same type of thing, yeah.

Tex McQuilkin  47:29 

So I do like those little things. And as from a coaching perspective, leading teenagers is stressful, for sure, now, helping them become more mindful. It’s less I told you that 15 times right now we put in a position, and then, plus,

Dr. Kirk Parsley  47:48 

It’s so damn important. I mean, you’re teaching a teenager like this could be a lesson that will carry them the rest of their life, like there’s one moment, right?

Tex McQuilkin  47:56 

And the importance of you can’t lose your cool, because now we got the risk of leaving coaching scar right, and if, if it’s not going well at home, right, Coach, you’re that opportunity to be a respected leader. And then we just betrayed that trust,

Dr. Kirk Parsley  48:13 

The only positive male role models I had my entire life were my coaches.

Tex McQuilkin  48:17 

Exactly. So then, when they and what they said, It stuck good, bad, yep, in between. So those moments are important. So now, within the the stressful mind of a coach, we’re curving behaviors. It’s seasons or long grinds, right? And then we get high, intense moments and games where we gotta make decisions on the fly, right? So speak to us on how sleep deprivation impacts that cognitive function, right? You said it’s all upfront. So now how? How does it affect it and what we can prepare for during the sleep before?

Dr. Kirk Parsley  48:53 

Yeah, so the easiest way to think about it is to think in extremes, right? So like I said, when you’re in deep sleep, you’re not paying any attention to your environment there everything. Like, all your senses still work, right? Your eyes and ears and nose and, like, everything’s still working. It’s just your brain’s not paying attention to it. So you’ve kind of taken yourself out of the world, and you don’t have to worry about any of that stuff out there. So lowest stress hormones, highest anabolic hormones, right? That’s when your body’s repairing and fighting off infection, repairing, you know, repairing the muscles you’ve damaged, repairing the tendons and ligaments you’ve strained, whatever, rebalancing of your other hormones, partitioning your fuel, all that stuff. So all that great stuff happening during deep sleep. The opposite of deep sleep is fight or flight, right? So fight or you have the autonomic nervous system. You think of it automatic. It’s controlling the things that you aren’t thinking about, your heart rate, your blood pressure, you know, skin temperature, body temperature, digestion, all of all things you don’t have any physical control over, really, right? And when we maximize that system, we maximize that. System for survival, right? And so if you think it’s easy again, easy to think in extremes, you try to think of like 1000 years ago, some little hunter gatherer going down to wash their clothes at the river, and they catch an orange, black and white stripe pattern in the periphery of their eyes, right? That’s a Tiger Man, right? What matters at that moment is getting away from the tiger. Nothing else matters. Your laundry doesn’t matter. That doesn’t matter like nothing matters. Can you digest the food in your stomach? Who cares? Right? Can you fight off the infection you have going, who cares? Right? Nothing matters. And in fact, higher level thought will slow you down. So your prefrontal cortex, this part that makes us the smartest animal on the planet completely shuts off. So if you like you, everybody’s been in some sort of fight or flight. Just imagine you, you get in a car crash, getting a fist fight, you’re getting a gun fight. And then somebody asks you, Hey, can you quote a passage from the Bible? Do you know your phone number. I mean, like you, like you cannot think because thinking is too slow, so you need to be able to react. So once you go into fight or flight, your body marshals 100% of your resources to get away from that threat. That’s all that matters. So digestion stops, like any, any, anything, immune system function, all of that’s decreasing, reproduction. Nothing matters. All that matters is getting away from that. So blood pressure goes up, get more blood everywhere. Blood glucose goes up, give me more energy. Pain threshold goes up. My brain. As my brain shuts off, my reflexes get faster. I get more reflexive, like like an animal that doesn’t have higher level thoughts, I’m reacting so I can tolerate more pain, I have more endurance, I have more strength. I’m thinking faster. Well, I’m reacting faster, I’m moving faster, and I’m essentially a superhuman version of myself, right? For that purpose, right? And you’ve seen it on cop shows where dudes scale eight foot barbed wire fences and flip over and run and, like, do these amazing feats of things. How are they doing? They are the superhuman version of themselves. So why don’t we run around like that all the time? Because you’re eating yourself, right? You are. You are burning yourself down to get away from that. And like, you’re using 100% of your resources to get out of that threat. Because, like I said, nothing else matters apart from getting away from getting away from that threat. So this part of your brain is just not working, so dial that down and say, Okay, I got 25% less sleep than I need. I need 25% more stress hormones to get through tomorrow. Well, I’m 25% closer to fight or flight, right? So I’ve impaired my prefrontal cortex, and now, because my prefrontal cortex is impaired, I know that somebody’s presenting me with a challenge that I probably deal with every day, but today I don’t really feel like capable of dealing with it, and why is that? And now I’m going to get self conscious about that, and I’m going to start thinking about why, and now I’m taking myself out of the moment, and I’m worried about what’s the future consequences of me making a bad decision right now, instead of thinking about the decision I need to make right now, and I’ve injected more stress hormones, and now I have a worse a worse function prefrontal cortex. We call it the executive functioning. You can just think of that like, what would an executive of business do? But it, you know, it’s like, it’s higher level, it’s problem solving. Robert Sapolsky calls it the simulator, the which I think is a great phrase for it. We’re the only animal on the planet that we know can do this. And what the simulated simulator means, just like a flight simulator would be for a pilot, is you and I can both sit here, and we can think of five or six different solutions to a problem, and we can simulate them in our brain. Go, Well, if I did this, what would be the neck would be likely outcome. And I can think through that, and I can jot down some notes. And now, you know, give me three, four minutes, I can consider that pathway, consider that pathway. And then I, out of those five pathways, I say, you know, this one seems to be the most optimal. That’s an that’s an executive level functioning, that’s things you don’t do well when you’re stressed out. And so whether or not you let that epithet flow, whether or not you say that harsh thing to that kid, whether or not you cuss at the coach, or you cuss at the ref, or you throw your clipboard, or like all of that is actually an executive functioning thing, right? Because you take this out. In fact, the reason we know what sleep drugs do is a little aside. When, when pharmaceutical industry applies for a patent for a drug, they do the research, and then they give the FDA the research they want them to have, want them to have, and they hold on to the research they don’t want the FDA data. And they say, You know what? We pinky swear it’s all the same. Now, once they get sued, they have to show all of it, and once they show all of it, then we usually find out, well, one quite as gross, easy Pelling it. So that had happened with the Z drugs right around the same time I was working with the seals, so I found out, like, what they actually do. And one of the, one of the big things that they do is they dissociate your brain. So. So GABA actually slows your brain down. Right part of the normal functions you decrease. Most people know this. You decrease the blue light in your eyes. That leads to a trigger of melatonin. Melatonin is an initiator. Starts a bunch of things going one of the things that it does is it releases this neuropeptide called GABA, which slows the brain down and makes your senses pay less attention to your environment, like we said. And at some point you’re you quit paying attention to your environment altogether. And that’s really what being asleep is, and your body temperature comes down a little bit. So GABA analogs act like GABA. Well, the way the pharmaceutical industry works is they’re like, Well, hey, if, if there’s this, there’s this receptor here, and this GABA molecule goes in there, and then it pulls it in the cell and has this effect, and that’s say, oh, an effect of one. We’ll just call that the baseline. That’s a one effect. What if we do this molecule and it has 10 times the effect, or 100 times the effect, or 1000 times the effect, then that works better, right? Now we have a super GABA, and that’s the way the pharmaceutical industry thinks, right? So it’s a trick, and that’s what the Z drugs do. So a benzo like Valium or Xanax, 100 times more powerful than GABA, a Z drug 1000 times more powerful than GABA. And so what is it that completely shuts down your neocortex? And so what was happening were Guys, guys, were guys and gals, but more guys taking ambient and going out and doing primal behavior, right, which is fighting, fleeing, fornicating like risky behavior. So they would like people who lived in Vegas as legendary there’s 1000s of people in Vegas go to the casino, gamble away their entire life savings, go home and go to bed, get up the next morning, have no recollection of everyone to the casino and they’ve lost everything, or they go pick up a prostitute, or they go to an all you can eat buffet, and they eat 25,000 calories, right? And it’s primal behavior. It’s like you think about like, what would a caveman act like if you didn’t have a higher order, if there was no social responsibility and you were just taking what you wanted. What would you be? You’d be having sex, you’d be eating food, you’d be doing things that are fun and risky, right and exciting and and that’s essentially what we’re doing. And when we shut down this prefrontal cortex, and so the more impaired your brain is with stress, the more likely you are to do stupid things like that. And in fact, like dieting, calorie restriction, that’s a stressor that leads to increased stress hormones. And there’s, there’s legions of research that shows you will do dumber, more, riskier things when you’re on a diet. You’re 10 times more likely to have an affair if you’re on a diet, wow, just because of stress hormones. And if you’re tempted to flip your boss off or tell him what you really think of him. Stress hormones are your enemy, right? And so you’re because you’re impairing this prefrontal cortex so in your position being a coach, and that damn kid is doing that again after you’ve told him 15 times, and you want to grab him by the scruff of the neck and yell at him, right? You’re much more likely to do that. And even if you don’t do that, you’re still thinking that way. You’re still not thinking clearly, right?

Tex McQuilkin  58:05 

Yes, yeah, that. I like that. And even just being aware that this could happen right state keeps you, helps keep you in that frontal cortex. Or just think of it as a yellow light. So different ways that I’ve approached that, because it’s been an interesting season for us. And then in La Crosse, if you get a penalty, you go, man down. So it’s not like football where they keep 11 guys on the field. Now it’s going to be five versus six. So disadvantage, I coach defense, so if one guy makes a mistake early, I would go try to coach the behavior, yeah, while he’s in the penalty box, like hockey, and then I was neglecting five dudes, right? So now it’s like, Okay, I’m gonna let this situation cool off, keep my attention on the five guys that are doing their job, yeah? And then revisit this conversation before they go back into the game, right? So this creates some space for me personally, and the the high, you know, intensity temper, whatever the kid. So now we can get some space between that before a coaching moment.

Dr. Kirk Parsley  59:15 

Yeah, well, and the best thing for him is to know, is, you know, for you to coach him, to know how to settle himself down while he’s doing that, when he’s over there, settling himself down, he’s getting in a much better position to be playing and a much better position to be coached, right? And like something we coined in the SEAL team was box breathing. Yep, everybody, everybody knows about it. Now, some people call it four by four. That’s just four seconds. But when I was talking about the the balance of the autonomic and autonomic. So you have the parasympathetic and the sympathetic. We talked about. The sympathetic is the fight or flight parasympathetic. We call the rest and digest, just because it’s simple and it rhymes. But, you know, just saying that basically, there’s like, that’s anabolic, that’s recovery, that’s relaxation. You know, your parasympathetic. When you’re sleeping, you’re parasympathetic when you’re laying around, your parasympathetic while you’re digesting your food, your parasympathetic while you’re sexually aroused, right? You know, like pleasant times in your life, that’s parasympathetic. And most people know about heart rate variability, right? So all heart rate variability is is, you know, without without your nervous system at all, without your hormones at all, your heart would fire, right? As long as you had a blood supply, there’s a node in your heart that’ll fire about 40 beats a minute, right? You don’t need any external input, which is why you can replace people’s hearts. And you know, you’re cutting all sorts of nerves and stuff that affect their heart, and they can still get their heart rate up. Well, how they doing that? Right? So, so when, when the sympathetic gets involved. You get a little, what we call tone, right? Just thinking, like musical tone, like you turn up the tone, it’s louder. You get a little sympathetic tone in there. Let’s speed your heart rate up. So, like, if, if, if I, if I check your pulse, and I really check it for 60 seconds, and I right, and I and your pulse is 60. Your heart didn’t beat on the second every second. And sometimes it sometimes it went a little before the second, sometimes went a little after the second. And that’s heart rate variability, right? So pulse of 60 is just like, well, you know, anywhere from seven tenths of a second to 1.3 seconds, my heart’s beating in there, and that’s averaging out to 60 over a minute. Well, the sympathetic if you have a lot of sympathetic tone, well, then sympathetic tone is pushing on it. So not only is it faster, but it’s more regular, because the sympathetic tone is causing it to fire. If I take sympathetic completely out of it, my parasympathetic tone can put a little bit of beat in there. And if I take that completely out of it, and then just the nodes beating it. So the fact that there’s variability just means, well, there’s a balance between these three things going on. And so what we figured out in the SEAL teams, and we did it with, we’re doing it with what they call CQC close quarter combats, like what you think of the shooter trains going through the houses, clearing all the rooms. And right, most stressful thing you do because, I mean, you’re in close proximity, you’re shooting real bullets. And obviously, if you’re in war, people shooting back at you, and so it’s a very dangerous thing to do, and accurate, like, you know, the difference between, you know, this matters all of a sudden with a bullet, you know, it’s like, accuracy is super, super important. Efficiency. You if you go to the wrong place, you might get shot by your guy, right? Yeah, or you might get shot by the bad guy, because the guy who was going to shoot them can’t shoot because you went there, right? So you have to, it’s very choreographed. It’s a very technical skill, and it causes the most stress. And young seals, because when you go into a seal platoon, there’s, like, four new guys, and then everybody else has been there for, you know, multiple, multiple deployments, and team dynamics are fascinating. And so you got all these young guys, and they’re like, they’re trying to live up to the expectations of these guys, and they’re going through and they’re training side by side with guys who’ve done this 50 times, and they’ve never done it once in their life, and they’re expected to keep up, right? And so that’s a stressful thing. And what Eric Potter had actually, was the psychologist we’re working with who figured it out, and I think you’ve met him before, yeah, and he and he tested out, and he did, and he was, you know, seals are fit, and water people. So I think, I think he was doing six, six by six, you know, six second but six, six second inhalation. There’s some theories that if you do it through your nostril. It can, it can activate the vagus, vagus nerve more, which is parasympathetic. I don’t know if that’s true or not. I feel that it’s kind of wishy washy, but doesn’t hurt. Might as well. So you inhale for six seconds, you hold for six seconds, you exhale for six seconds, you hold for six seconds. And that’s a box two minutes of that increased heart rate variability by 30% Wow, and decreased heart rate by 10 beats per minute on average. And you could predict roughly a 30% improvement in performance with that decrease of heart rate variability. Because you’re clearing out this, you’re getting the stress hormones out of the brain they’re allowed to think, right? And, well, I’m gonna install that. Yeah? So I’d say when you get in your penalty box, your job is to box breathe. And I don’t care what you hell you think about I don’t care what else you’re doing. All you’re gonna do is box breathe while you’re in there, yeah? And we’ll talk about everything. Once you get out, they’re gonna come out of there a calmer, you know, more ready to function kid.

Tex McQuilkin  1:04:19 

Yeah, that’s, I mean, why I like the teenage population, teach them these lessons and then hand them off to military or college athletics? Yeah, when we went and visited damn neck, Luke and I got to be in the back of the kill room. Oh, okay, at night, it was all dark, and we got the knowledge on Yeah, and yeah, it was awesome, because they were using live rounds, and we were just the two guys in the back going through it, yeah. You could hear a pin drop. Yeah. Dudes were on it was Yeah. It was amazing experience. I was stressed, and I was.

Dr. Kirk Parsley  1:04:51 

Yeah, exactly, yeah. And imagine those being your peers, and you being a new guy, and like, yeah, oh yeah. Because if you’re unsafe, it’s like, hey, you know what? You made it through BUDs. Good on you, but we can’t, we can’t work with you anymore. You’re, damaged, you got the super SEALs and all.

Tex McQuilkin  1:05:07 

So the coolest part was they watched the film, the breakdown, and so we just got to observe them coaching each other, right? And, like, you couldn’t tell who was, like, higher up or more experienced, because the way they were interacting.

Dr. Kirk Parsley  1:05:21 

Yeah, that is a great thing about the SEAL teams, is that it is, it is the highest form of meritocracy I’ve ever seen. Because you can be, you can be relatively new and just be exceptionally good, and people will listen to you, and your opinion matters as much as the guy who’s been around three times as long as you but you’re, like, your own par performance wise, your own par, right? I mean, there’s, obviously, there’s a hierarchy for certain things, but like, you know, people listen to guys who do, well, yeah, yeah, it’s, it’s cool.

Tex McQuilkin  1:05:55 

I’ve heard you speak on this, and I just thought of it for learning new skills during sleep. And I think it’s important for coaches to understand middle school, high school, college, whatnot, because it’s the expectation if I, if I teach you something, you’re going to learn it because I told you it right now, right? That’s not how skill development works. Could so introduce this world of learning skills through sleep.

Dr. Kirk Parsley  1:06:20 

Yeah, yeah. So just like when you go to the gym, you get weaker. When you go to sleep, you can get stronger. Same thing with acquiring new skills. So you can study, learn all day, be taught lessons, and it’s in your, what we call your working memory, or your short term memory, the longer you’re awake, the more that decays. So if you learn something at 6am and you go to bed at 10am you’ve forgotten a lot between 6am and 10am so what you’re going to be able to consolidate that night is not nearly as good as if you were to learn that at 9pm right? Which is why they tell you when you’re in school, whatever, do your work and then review your notes right before you go to bed, right? Not in a stressful way. Don’t build up a whole bunch of stress around for you to bed. But like, try to do your work, give yourself a break, some time to relax, and then just like, review it quickly before you go to bed, so that you remind yourself of everything you learned in that day. So what the first stage of sleep is the deep sleep. You go from stage one. It’s like the pre sleep stage two. We call it the transitional sleep. Stage two has something called spindles and K complexes in there. And basically these are just like kind of big blast of electrical activity which are causing a transition, right? So it’s transitioning you from, you know, the stage two down into deep it’s transitioning you from Stage Two up into REM, right? And really, what we’re, why I’m saying up and down, is it’s brainwave speed. So the slower the brainwave, the deeper sleep. REM sleep is actually a higher brainwave frequency than being awake right now, right? So it’s and you have to go through these phases. There’s other stuff that’s involved in that, but you go into deep sleep, and, like I said, that’s when people, probably most people, have heard of glymphatics now, which is discovered, like one year before I went and started doing this with the seals. And that’s basically when the structural neurons of your brain retract, and they allow the cerebral spinal fluid to flow through, and it gets rid of waste products. Waste products, and you flush out that. And then your brain starts measuring through your bloodstream and starts measuring all of your hormones. And then your brain responds to how many hormones you have, and say, oh, we need more of that. So then your pituitary will secrete a pro hormone or pre hormone, and then your endocrine organ will produce that hormone until your brain’s like, okay, that’s, that’s where we want it. And then, and then we’re cool, and then we and all right now we move on to REM sleep. Now, when I go through REM sleep, I’m going to rehearse and think about everything that I’ve thought about and done that day. So if I’m playing lacrosse, I’m going to think every I’m going to think everything that coach told me is going to go through my head during REM sleep, and multiple times as I go through REM, and then during that REM sleep, I’m going to actually decide whether or not that’s important or not. And if it’s important, when I come back down into stage two, I’ll get this little spindle, this little pop of energy, and that will convert that into my long term memory. And once something’s in my long term memory. I take it back through rim again. Now I get to go, Well, what else do I know about that? Right? Because I put this in a certain place in my brain that makes sense to me, where that is that’s beyond anybody’s understanding. This one makes sense to me. But now the more I think about it, he said, You know what? That’s kind of like this, and you know, it kind of seems like it’s related to that. And then the more, the more times I consolidate, the more times I think about something and decide I’m going to hold on to it. We it forms, what we call it, more durable connection. So you think it was like you have a rodent trail across your backyard, but your dogs follow that rodent, and then you follow your dog, and maybe you got a horse and you and then you can take your side. By side, down right, and you eventually have a super highway, and it’s all going the same place. So that’s what we call a super durable connection. And then that’s a way that you’re most likely to think, and you’re gonna and you’re gonna be able to access that, that information really quickly, as opposed to some things, like, we’ve all done this, where you’re like, Oh, I know. I know. I know. I know that. And you think in like, this circuitous, this total labyrinth of, you can’t even explain where your brain goes and and you come up with it, but you did this around your brain. Said this, like, this super high it was like, bam, it’s right there, right? Like, you can, you can get from here to California without ever being on highway. Gonna take, wow, there’s a lot of turns right? So it’s kind of the same thing. So you form this really durable pathway, and then you start connecting it to other information, and now you really know it. So this happens a lot with language courses and higher level math. So you’ll study and you’ll be working on a problem. You just can’t get it like, I just can’t figure out how to say that. I just can’t figure out how to solve that problem. And then you go to sleep, and you wake up in some obvious thing in the world. Oh, geez. Why couldn’t I think of that? Now, part of that could be, you’re retired, your brain was fatigued, right? You didn’t have it, right? But there’s also a big component of that. It’s like, you actually put that into a more durable pathway, and you connect it to other things, you know? And now it’s actually quite simple thing, and quite obvious thing too. If you don’t sleep well, if you don’t get REM sleep. You don’t get high quality sleep. That doesn’t happen nearly to the same degree, and potentially it doesn’t happen at all. And what’s even worse is like, when I’m rehearsing something in REM, my emotional conditioning of like my emotion, like my emotions, I went to bed with my emotions during the day while I was learning it, they’re going to impact whether or not I think that’s important or not. And if I, if I don’t, if I decide that it’s not important, we do what we call pruning. So you think about the spring, when you have all the little buds start to come off of the stem. It’s exactly what it looks like under an electron microscopy. You look at a neuron and there’d be this little bud coming off. And you, you know, I don’t need that now that that’s not even possible. You’re not getting that back until you get taught that again. Now you have to go back to that whole lesson again. Whereas, if you go, Well, maybe it’s kind of important, and you can, you know, kind of, kind of Futch around with her. You go, No, that’s really important. And then every rim cycle, you’re doing that. And then, actually, you know, over time. I mean, that’s what makes people expert in their field, right? They’re thinking, they’re thinking about the same things all the time as they’re thinking about it from different like me as a doctor, like, Yeah, I mean, I can talk to you about, say, like testosterone, but I have like, 16,000 different examples of different ideas I’ve had and different impacts I’ve seen in different ways to manage it, because I think about it all the time, and then I go to bed at night and I rehearse it. And now and now, probably every thought in my head is somehow related to dustosterone or sleep really, right? Like sleep is the most like I can relate anything in the world to sleep, right? And that’s and that’s where true learning is actually happening while you’re asleep. Just like you’re getting stronger while you’re asleep, your endurance is increasing while you’re in sleep, and you’re actually getting smarter, you’re actually learning, and you’re acquiring your skills. And something that’s fascinating. I find this one of the most fascinating thing in the world, and I’ve done it with some MMA guys, right? So you get an MMA guy who’s a wrestler and he’s going to fight a striker. He’s got eight weeks. It’s like, I gotta, I gotta learn how to box in eight weeks, right? I gotta really spun up on it. So what’s the, what’s the best possible thing for him to do? Well, it’s not trained 24 hours a day, right? Because, okay, so he needs to rest. How much does he need to rest? Well, as much as he needs to rest. So what can we what? What else can we do? Well, let’s build in and over cover it. Let’s build in a little. So you train in the morning, you take a nap, you consolidate memories, you come back, you train an afternoon. If you if your day is ideal and you’re the right kind of person, you can possibly and your professional athlete, your life laid out that way, you could possibly take two naps a day and get three days of training. Wow. So here’s this research exists, and it’s very robust. So if I teach you a skill, if I say, hey, come over to my house more, I’m gonna 6am I gonna teach you a skill, and then seven o’clock at night, I want you to come back and I’m gonna test you on the skill. So we’re gonna, like, learn how to type with your left hand, or something, just something you’ve never done before. It’s just something random, and teach you how to do it. You’re gonna practice it for an hour. So 6am to 7am you’re gonna practice it 7am I’ll test you. Right? We give you a score like 30% efficiency, proficiency. You come back at 7pm you’re not 30% anymore. No, you’re worse. You’re like 20% here’s something really interesting, no more training, even if you don’t come back and test, go home and go to sleep, come back tomorrow. 35% Wow, right. Take a nap. This has been proven. Train six to seven, take a nap at noon, come back and train. 40% go home and go to sleep, come back the next morning. 45% right, and you actually get better. Without the additional training, because you’re rehearsing it in your mind and you’re consolidating things. So if you can build that in, and that’s that’s not, it doesn’t have to be a very long nap. The more more creative it is. So actually interesting you’ll have fighting falls into this because it creates the creativity of movement. It can be a pretty short nap, like 20 minutes, 15 to 25 minutes, kind of you’ll get, you’ll get some good consolidation. If it’s something complex, like math memorization, like something super structural, you’re more like a 40 is more like a 30 or 45 minute than that. But if you can do a full sleep cycle, so you go from stage one sleep down into deep sleep, travel across time. Come from deep sleep, back up to do a little REM sleep, come back down to stage two. Again. That’s one sleep cycle. That’s 90 to 120 minutes. If you get a nap that long, you get the full benefit of sleep, right? So you get muscle repair, all right? Higher anabolic hormones, lower catabolic hormones, flushing out toxins, waste products, and you get the memory, and you get the creativity, so you get the benefit. And you can actually, if you if you can design your life that way. And if you train hard enough and you’re young enough, it gets harder and harder as you get older to do this. But if you’re young enough and you train hard enough, you could realistically get to 90 minute naps in a day, and you could get, essentially four days of training in a day, where you’re actually not only getting smarter, more and better and craftier at what you’re doing, but physically stronger. Because we do actually store, you know, a lot of our movement doesn’t actually go to the brain like we thought it, like we used to think it did, you know? And we, ironically enough, we learned this from horses, because horses have, like, a walnut sized brain, but they’re incredibly smart animals because they’re their brains all over their body, yeah, and their fascial right in between their facilitators. And we as surgeons used to, well, that’s just something you dissect to get through to get to where you’re going. That’s meaningless stuff. And then when imaging got good enough to be able to see the fascial planes in a human turned out to be the exact shape of the meridian system that the Chinese figured out 1000s of years ago, then where they put their acupuncture needles and they’re stimulating the facial planes, because there’s neurons in there, and so you actually hold some muscle memory in there, and some a lot of your movement does actually occur down there. The memory of that movement does occur down there. Yeah, that’s what animals are shaking off when they get attacked. And whatever they’re trying to shake out that that they’re moving the fascial plane to trying to defuse the energy of those nerves, to keep the trauma from being stored in them.

Tex McQuilkin  1:17:39 

Can we get humans to shake it off? Is there any research on…

Dr. Kirk Parsley  1:17:42 

Rolfing. Yep, if you do, like, really deep tissue massage, you’ll get big, badass Navy SEALs break down crying, or crack up laughing, or, like, just these huge emotional releases for reasons they do not understand. Have no, like, I have no idea what just happened, but I just had, like, this huge emotional release. So we can do it. It’s not, I wouldn’t call it like a scientific level at this point, like it’s a that’s a very intuitive skill. It’s more online with, say, like an acupuncture, guided they made a guided meditation, more like a, kind of a psychedelic type of thing. It’s like, there’s, there’s some internal intelligence going on, and they’re, they’re definitely going to take somebody really intuitive to kind of help you do that, yeah, yeah, I did, but it does work.

Tex McQuilkin  1:18:36 

Yeah? I had an experience for John’s charity. I volunteered to raise $20,000 and get my chest waxed like the 40 year old virgin. We filmed and captured it, and I was just overwhelmed with emotion, like, oh my gosh, uncontrollable,

Dr. Kirk Parsley  1:18:53 

Yeah, so you’re probably about as hairy as that guy.

Tex McQuilkin  1:18:57 

Yeah. That’s why they came up with that idea for me.

Dr. Kirk Parsley  1:19:00 

If we did me, it would have raised a nickel. You’re gonna pluck both of those hairs?

Tex McQuilkin  1:19:06 

So in the name of charity, I had my facial release. You know, it was painful.

Dr. Kirk Parsley  1:19:12 

You also, you also got tased for

Tex McQuilkin  1:19:14 

That was, we had to one up the waxing. So then it was Tazed Tex, so I had the Wax Tex, and then the next year, it’s like, let’s raise $25,000

Dr. Kirk Parsley  1:19:27 

We know why men don’t live as long as women. We’re dumber. We are really trying, like we do this stupid shit.

Tex McQuilkin  1:19:34 

I would take the taze. I’ll take 10 tazers over the wax. Oh, I imagine. So, yeah, man, that was a lot of release. So we’ve touched on a lot of the cool factors I want to get into, and the importance and then how even just bringing awareness to our negative sleep can then help us make better decisions, because we know we’re not going to be in the best place. But then that skill development. Development. I think that’s huge for coaches to walk away from. So now, in line with that, and you’ve got three kids, how do you now, even though it’s coming from dad, right? Like, how are you helping frame to a teenage kid at the importance of sleep? Yeah, because the draw from phones, video games right? Or just, you know, chirping, hanging out.

Dr. Kirk Parsley  1:20:24 

Yeah, it’s just, well fortunately, like my, my kids are all adults now and now that they actually listen to me like, it’s amazing how much smarter I’ve gotten in the last five years, or something, right? Like I was such an idiot they could hardly stand me five years ago. Now, I’ve learned a lot. But, you know, when they were young, it was, it was purely just a very unpopular discipline thing. And I just said, like the rules of my house was, you know, none of my kids had any electronics in their rooms. They could take their notebook computer, phone or whatever in their room to do homework. But any other time, like, if you’re on your phone, if you’re on your computer, you’re out in the living room, you’re in the kitchen, you’re in dining room, you’re sitting on the back porch, whatever, and then all electronics went into the kitchen. At, I want to say 9pm was our rule. Your phone went on a charger, your computer went on a charge, or whatever. And there was, there was no access to that. Very unpopular. However, my boys will tell you, and I know they’ll tell you this because, because I’ve actually, I’ve actually heard them say this, and one of my sons actually did some writing, did some ad copy for us once, and he wrote an email about it, and he’s like, you know, a lot of people would think that having a Navy SEAL dad, I would have been low crawling and, you know, doing 4am runs and on. They said what I really heard the most about was sleep and it just, I mean, it just worked out. I mean, by chance, coincidence, perhaps, but it just worked out that the most formidable years of my kids was the years that I was learning that. And then, of course, you know, Cole, and Cole wanted to be big and tough and strong, and he wanted to be a division one football player, and so he was going to listen anyway, my older son, not so much. He wasn’t so much into that, that type of stuff, but he did listen, because he did want to do academic and very, very academic, intellectual kid. And he did. He had some goals in that area, and I could tell, you know, and I could just coach him on that and say, like, hey, this, this is why, this is how you learn, and this is how you get stronger in this, and I built it around sleep. Now, unfortunately, the school systems are set up to where kids can’t get enough sleep, like they just can’t the most sleep deprived people in the entire world, or in the Western world, because we we deprive ourselves to make money, right? Because time is money. That kind of came on with Henry Ford and the invention of the light bulb. Right? One? Once time became money, people started short changing themselves in that and then once we had rural electrification and all these capabilities to do things at night, when the rest of the world sleeping, I could just it added on, like I’m going to, I mean, you get ahead. I’m going to get my work done. I’m going to do better. I’m going to start my side hustle, whatever. And so we deprive ourselves as a culture, but then we had this ridiculous system. You know, we’re going forever about the perils of the education system we’ve built, but we have this ridiculous system that’s like, well, that needs to start before the parents go to work. That’s the only way the system works, right? Because otherwise we can’t get the kids. We got the busses, we got there. So kids need to get up even earlier, and parents need to get up even earlier to get the kids to school. Well, what happens during adolescence? It’s not that teenagers are lazy. Once you start getting around adolescence, you actually get a phase shift, right? So, you know, there’s, there’s a circadian rhythm of like, when you feel like, when the cells in your body think you should be awake, and when the cells your body feel like you should be asleep. And that’s basically, which roughly a 24 hour cycle. We use the sun to fine tune that. And you know, you have owls and larks. You have people that just perform better at night, and they just need to go to bed a little later, and they wake up a little later. And you have people that really fall asleep early, and they like to get up early and grind and evolutionarily, you know, you could never prove this, you know, it’s a post hoc analysis, but it kind of makes sense. But you know, being asleep would be the most vulnerable time for a human. So if you lived in a clan or a tribe, and you had these guys who stayed up two hours later, and these guys who woke up two hours earlier, well now there’s really only four hours where everybody’s kind of at risk. Obviously, if we could have evolved to sleep, less evolution would have favored that. So probably eight hours is as low as we could get it right. And that’s just the way it is. I mean 16 hours of wakefulness for. Requires eight hours to recover from. That’s just the way it goes. So what happens in adolescence, unfortunately, is that you get a face shift towards the owl, right? And so kids need to, like, once when, like, it’s really kind of right around when puberty starts, right? It’s a brain and endocrine thing, and which is just an acceleration of growth. And that acceleration of growth coincides with this night night out kind of phase. And so now you have teenagers that put them in bed at nine o’clock, if you want to, but they aren’t going to sleep till midnight, like it doesn’t matter, like that’s what’s going to happen. And then if they got to catch a 730 bus, well then they got to be so, no wait, your kid’s getting six hours, six hours, six and a half hours sleep, and how much sleep do teenagers need? Two to three hours more than the adults. So the most sleep deprived people in the entire world are teenagers and Western, westernized teenagers in the schools. Unfortunately, the prefrontal cortex that we talked about, our simulator, our decision maker, our executive skills, like the thing that makes us who we are shapes our personality, how we communicate, how we understand the world, how we think about the world. That area of our brain is accelerating its growth then, and males, is not fully formed up until, like, maybe 25 years late. It’s 25 years old. Women, it’s a few years younger, but you’re talking about from like 13 to your early to mid 20s, where you’re really forming who you are, and that’s the most sleep deprived. And we are sleep depriving kids, causing them to have more stress hormones. Then we’re giving them these little impulse seeking devices, right, which is stressful, right? Because people think of stress hormones as like anxiety, no stress. Stress hormones keep you alert in proportion to your environment. Okay, when the tiger comes out, man, you need a lot of stress hormones, right? Because you need to be as alert as you can possibly be. But you know, you’re laying around on your couch reading a book. You don’t need so many stress hormones, but you want to pay attention to something, you want to read. You really want to concentrate on something. You need to be more alert, and so your stress hormones go up. So they there’s actually benefit to having a little control over your stress hormones, and being able to increase my focus on something I want and then relax and let my stress hormones come back a little, come back down, a little bit like this, right? Well, I’m depriving myself of that capability as a teenager, because I’m waking up with stress hormones. Out of this world. I’m in a world I really don’t understand. I’m trying to figure out where I fit in the world. High School stressful enough. Now I’m going to add some sports and activities and competition in that, and I’m probably eating crappy food, which is also stressful for my body, or whatever, and we are just we’re malforming These kids brains, and those stress hormones being high while the kids are trying to sleep are affecting the hormones as well. And I think this is another reason we kind of have this masculinization of women and feminization of boys. I mean, it’s like the, I mean, we all know, like the 20, the 20 year old boy now is not the same as the 20 year old boy when we were 20 years old, right? Like, it’s, it’s gotten different. And that’s, it is food and its environment. It’s light saturation, and it’s computers and it’s, but it’s sleep is a big component of it too, right? Yeah, yeah. So it, it’s, unfortunately, our kids are suffering the most from our choices. This has been proven, I mean unequivocally, and I hope that RFK does something about this. There is an organization called start school later. It’s a nonprofit. It’s been around for about 15 years, and they’ve been funding research for decades, and they took private schools where they had control, right? And they said, Hey, can we start school later? And it wasn’t here, just like, 45 minutes an hour. I think maybe they went out to an hour and a half once, and they would take five or six schools all all over. Not these schools don’t communicate all over the country, but private schools start school 45 minutes later, an hour later, something like that, lowest truancy the schools ever had, lowest disciplinary problems, the schools that’s ever had, highest GPA. The average student had ever had fewer sports injuries than they’ve ever had. And every single school who did this, every single team, they had had the best record they had ever had. And you can and this has been presented to Congress many times, and the argument is, well, the bussing bus system, like we gotta have the busses come at this time, and there’s some funding and rules and regulations and things and this, this is the only time we can do it. It’s like, okay, so we’re, we’re just going to destroy the next generation of kids for bussing. That’s what we’re doing. Wow. But I have heard, I have heard that, that that organization. I don’t know this people well, but I’m friendly with it. People who who run that organization, and I have heard that they they’ve already got rfks here, and they’re talking about, then they’re talking about abolishing the Department of Education, which would take a lot of that pressure off. And we might actually see some of that. And I guarantee you, if our kids started school at nine o’clock and got out at four o’clock, I mean, because there’s so much slop in school, we know we could make the school day. We could make this school day short. I could probably still get out at three and start at nine o’clock if we really wanted to do it, right? I guarantee you we’ll, we’ll see, we’ll see a huge transition in kids disciplinary but also just the level of functioning, the level of functioning the kid will come out of school with, right? Because he had, I mean, we’re causing him stress by sleep depriving him. We’re causing him stress by their food quality. We’re causing him stress because of the socialization of being a teenager in the school system. And then we’re giving them these social media, which is a form of stress, like, comes home, yeah, and you’re paying attention to it, like I said, that’s raising your stress hormones, even if it’s not negative, right? And, you know, people talk about dopamine rushes and oxytocin, and it’s like, yeah, okay, there’s all the neuro hormones. Yeah, all that’s involved. But anytime I’m paying attention, anytime I’m enhancing my intention, now enhancing my focus, I’m increasing my stress hormones, and that’s really the biggest reason not to do social media before bed. There’s not so much light in your phone, right? Like, that’s a component, but a teenager is still gonna be able to sleep just fine getting that much blue light in their eyes. But the mental games that are going on with the social media, comparing themselves to people they don’t know, seeing some girl kiss the boy they like, whatever, like, whatever, social games are going on in their head, that’s the real problem. And now they’re going to go to bed with that, and that’s still available. And if that phone’s in their room, and they’re going to be like, you know, let me make sure, you know, I just gonna put this one thing out there, right? And, you know, and my like my oldest son, I mean, he is. He’s just a very, very intellectual, really well behaved kid. And during the summer, I let him have his phone in his room. I let all my kids have their phone in the room. And I would, and back when we used to look at our phone bills, and I looked, and I was looking at my phone bill for something. I couldn’t remember what it was, and I saw him texting at 3am. And I would have, I mean, you could knock me over the feather. I mean, I wasn’t upset with him in the slightest bit like because, you know, whatever it was summer and the rules were off, and he could do what he wanted to. But I just would have never expected that. And I just talked to him about it, and I was like. I was like, Hey, I’m not upset at all, but I like, what were you doing up at 3am he’s like, Well, I wasn’t, but I woke up and I was thinking about this, and I just wanted, you know, and I I’d kind of had this argument with my girlfriend. I just wanted to see if she was awake and right. And I was like, Wow, all right, that’s real, yeah.

Tex McQuilkin  1:33:05 

Yeah, no electronics in my room. Blackout, shades, yeah, yeah, we do a 6:30am practice, but when I don’t have practice, then it’s just right, no alarm. Sleep till I need.

Dr. Kirk Parsley  1:33:20 

Now. And the beautiful thing about kids is, like, you know, we’ve all been kids, and we know, I mean, I mean, I went through SEAL training, right? I went a week without sleep, and I physical all day, running around the boats on my head, running miles, climbing, doing obstacle courses, like, you know, doing all kinds of physical things you can do a lot when you’re young. Doesn’t make it a good idea, but you but you know, you can compensate. And so it’s not, I think the sort of metabolic physiologic stress, because, you know, a kid can actually go to sleep and wake up better, right? Like we talked about, the ideal for an adult would be, we could wake up the same every day and not age. Well, a kid actually goes to sleep. You know, a teenager needs like 10 hours of sleep. Younger kids need even more. So you take like a 10 year old, they go sleep for 12 hours. They wake up taller and smarter and faster and stronger, right? Happy, right? It’s like you’re actually improving while you’re asleep. So if you, if you dimmed that, it’s like, well, they’re just not improving as much, right? Whereas, like, you do that to us, and it’s like we’re decaying a lot faster, right, right? Like you said in presidents or, you know, the guys, guys, you go to war, people have stressful jobs. You see it like people do look older, you know, I just had actually my my buds, class reunion, 35 years all right. Man, that made me feel old. I you know, I went through training at 19. Sounds like 35 years ago, man, you know, and most of the guys in my class retired from the SEAL teams. Yeah, and they look a lot older than I do, right? Because, you know, I only did six years as a seal, and then I, you know, then I did medical school and whatever. So it’s like, just not, nowhere near as hard and taxing of a life as those guys and and, you know, these are guys who are just like me, like they’re just as they’re just as disciplined, or more disciplined, they still work out, they still try to live, right. And they, they look very old for their age.

Tex McQuilkin  1:35:27 

Yeah, yeah. So well, you’ve done amazing things for the SEAL community, and I’ve heard your mission before, just doing everything you can to give back. So where can people continue to learn from you, and then check out what you’re doing with Doc Parsley Sleep Remedy. So if they need a solution there.

Dr. Kirk Parsley  1:35:47 

So, yeah. So the combination of supplements that I came up with with those guys, really, they just her ranked me into making a product out of it, because it was a pain in the ass for them. Now we have to go buy six different things and travel with it. And so I made that into a product, really, with the intention of selling it to the to the SEAL teams and just, you know, being a little side business, I didn’t really care to make any money with it. And then got hooked up with Rob Wolf, and it turned out to be a decent little civilian business. And I still don’t have a contract with the SEAL team. It’s been 11 years, 12 years, and I’m at this one, but yeah, no tricks in there. It’s just like I said, it’s the it’s truly a nutritional supplement. It’s things that you might be deficient in that could be interfering with your ability to sleep well. And that’s Sleep Remedy. Is the name of the product, and that’s the URL as well. Sleep remedy.com or if you do, go to doc, doc, doc, parsley.com, do that sleep room and are kind of the same. They share technical things I don’t understand, but there, it’s basically the same kind of site there, yeah. And if you want, if you want to, if you want to help out with the mission, with the SEAL teams. I’m involved in a lot of foundations, but the one I’m the most involved with is called the SEAL Future Foundation. And so if, if you want to go there, there’s, you know, there’s opportunities in there to donate. There’s opportunities in there to go to events. You know, you can, you can pay to go to hunting events with SEALs, and do golf tournaments, and do kind of cool, cool guy things, and they have fundraisers and galas, and you can donate equipment or time or expertise mentorship. We’re going to whatever if you want to help out. We’re always looking for help.

Tex McQuilkin  1:37:33 

Boom. There you go. Thanks for coming out the trip. Yeah, man, another episode preach. Thank you for joining us for another episode The Captains & Coaches podcast. If you like what you heard here today, be sure to like, subscribe, rate and review. If you want to learn more from Doc Parsley, be sure to click the link in the show notes for a free sleep guide download. There’s also a percentage off of Sleep Remedy. You can find it in there, click that link in the show notes, thank you again for tuning in and helping us raise the game. Bye.