The Science of a Better Daily Routine
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Summary
Dr. Stuart Fairmont talks about his journey from a medical doctor to a science writer, and why he thinks you should have a science-based daily routine. He talks about the importance of a daily routine, why you shouldn t drink coffee first thing in the morning, the ideal length of an afternoon nap, and how to improve your commute.
Transcript
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We're at McKay here and welcome to another edition of the art of manliness podcast.
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There's plenty of advice out there about how to have a better daily routine, but what's
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just bunk and what actually works to improve the quality of your day and your overall life.
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My guest medical doctor turned science educator, Stuart Fairmont took a deep dive into the
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research to find the authoritative answers to that question.
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And he shares them in his book, live your best life, 219 science-based reasons to rethink
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Today on the show, we walk through a daily routine from morning to night.
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And Dr. Fairmont shares some best practices to make the most of it.
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We discuss why waking up to an alarm clock feels so terrible, why you shouldn't drink coffee
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first thing in the morning, the ideal length of an afternoon nap, how to improve your commute,
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After the show's over, check out our show notes at awim.is slash daily routine.
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All right, Dr. Stuart Fairmont, welcome to the show.
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So you started off your career in medicine, but then you made the jump to science writing,
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particularly writing about health and science for a lay audience.
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I was working in a UK hospital, so I'm based in the UK.
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And we're talking about 15 or so years ago, I was diagnosed with a brain tumor.
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So it was just kind of completely out of the blue, unexpected.
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It was discovered and I actually had the scan and the result whilst I was at work one day.
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And essentially it was a cancerous and malignant brain tumor that I had to have surgery on
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So I had the surgery, it went well, but it left me with epilepsy afterwards.
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And because of the epilepsy, it basically meant that I couldn't carry on with medicine
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because part of the, as I'm sure you appreciate, part of the job of being a hospital doctor
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is that you've got to do hours of hours, on calls, night shifts, things like that.
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And basically I couldn't really do that and not risk having a seizure in my profession.
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So that led to me having to step down from medicine, sort of take basically long-term sick.
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They always sort of say, well, keep the job up.
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But basically I don't really, how can, my epilepsy is never going to go away.
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To be fair though, I don't miss it because after I left medicine, I got a job in teaching
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and I taught for three years in a further education college in the UK and further education colleges.
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They're like a halfway house between school and university.
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And I ended up teaching science themed topics to young people who were interested in going
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And I just really fell in love with teaching and then busting people's ideas of what science is.
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Because I don't know about you, but at school for many of us, science was this really dull
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And actually for me now, I find that science is a thing that helps us understand the world.
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And actually it makes me more amazed about the world around me, how my body works.
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And I discovered the joy of doing that when I was doing this teaching job.
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And then it kind of evolved into doing things more broadly.
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And I realized that actually these 16, 17, 18 year olds, they don't really appreciate,
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But they reflect pretty much what the average Joe on the street appreciates.
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And so I realized, actually, if I can reach more people, then I can touch their lives in
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ways that help them actually appreciate the world more and appreciate how science can inform
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So I write books about lots of different themes.
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I do quite a bit on the science of food and cooking, as well as this book that we're going
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to talk about today, which is about health and well-being, about pretty much every area
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And what's the state of your brain cancer today?
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So my brain tumor is that it was a low-grade glioma.
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A glioma is basically the name for these tumors, probably the most common types of these malignant
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Although that said, all brain cancers are quite rare.
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It came back and it's now more aggressive than it was.
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It's gone from what's called a grade two to a grade three.
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And I've had to have more surgery and chemotherapy and radiotherapy, which happened, I guess,
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And I finished off my chemotherapy during the COVID lockdown.
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That's when I sort of finished the treatment of most recently.
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And I just have three monthly scans for the tumor.
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And thus far since then, it's not been growing, which is pretty good.
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So every three months, I go through the mill of, is it growing back?
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Is my life going to, you know, just turn upside down with one day, one results?
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So just sort of always living under that cloud.
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But it does make you really appreciate every day.
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And so when I write my books, when I do talking, when I'm on this podcast with you, you know,
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it matters because I may or may not be here for, well, nobody's going to be here forever.
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But I appreciate, you know, that life is very, very temporary and very fleeting.
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And you mentioned in the forward of this book, we're going to talk about live your best life.
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You were finishing this while it was during COVID and you were doing your treatments.
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And you said that, you know, the questions you ask, you answer or seek to answer in this book,
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What's the best way to not be stressed out at work?
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A lot of people think, well, that's kind of mundane and trite.
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But, you know, for you, you mentioned like, well, no, actually this stuff's really important.
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Like I, ever since your diagnosis, like you said, you have an appreciation for these really
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These little small things add up to make a life well-lived.
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So your book, Live Your Best Life, it's organized around questions, but then you organize
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You start off in the morning, work your way to the afternoon and then to the night.
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Take a look at some of these questions you answered.
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One question I think some people might have had is, why is it that sometimes when we wake
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up, we feel refreshed, ready to take on the day, you just feel awesome.
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But other mornings, you just feel super groggy and it takes, you know, like an hour to fully
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So that groggy sensation that you get in the morning when you sort of feel half drunk,
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We have a name for that and that's called sleep inertia.
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And basically what's going on in your brain is it's not fully switched on yet because
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waking up in the morning, you're going from this comatose, unconscious state into the land
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And it takes a while for your brain to switch on for all those cogs to get going.
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You know, like getting a car stung on a cold morning, that sort of thing.
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Whether you get sleep inertia varies on how well rested you are and also, interestingly,
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So when we sleep, we go through different stages of sleep.
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We cycle between going through deep sleep and light sleep.
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During deep sleep is when we're snoring and that's when all the restorative work goes on.
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That's when if you were to lift somebody's eyelids up, you'd see their eyes darting left
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And sometimes that's when we speak, when words sort of escape from our dreams.
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And if you wake up from the deepest sleep, from the deep sleep, then you will wake up quite
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Whereas if you wake up from the light sleep, from the dreaming sleep, which is the natural
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way for you to do it in the early hours, you dream more and then you naturally come out
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But if you wake up from the deep sleep, you will generally wake up with that grogginess.
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So several factors, one of which is if you're poorly rested, you're more likely to have it.
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If you're stressed, you're more likely to have disturbed sleep and you're more likely to
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A lot of us, though, do just get sleep inertia in the morning.
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And so I would always say, and part of what I put in the book is that don't check your
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smartphone first thing in the morning, because regardless of how well you slept that first
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30 minutes, you will be experiencing some sleep inertia.
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When you look at people's brain scans during that time, your brain actually looks like
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So you're only actually half awake, which is why, you know, you shouldn't really make any
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You should just get yourself up, get yourself going, get yourself in the shower, whatever
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your morning routine is, and then hold off checking emails, all the other stuff, all
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And interestingly, I think that is why, because we can't make decisions very well first thing
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in the morning, why I think we tend to have the same thing for breakfast every day, because
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we can't cope with making difficult decisions first thing in the morning.
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So sleep inertia lasts about half an hour, can last up to two or three hours, depending
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on all those different factors that I've mentioned.
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You've just got to ride it out, but just be aware of it.
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You've got to be very wary about jumping in the car straight after waking up, because you
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And so you will be at higher risk of making mistakes when you're in the car during that time.
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Well, the other thing you point out too is the sleep inertia that's caused by
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waking up during a deep sleep is one of the reasons why you don't want to hit the snooze
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button on your alarm, because you'll fall back to sleep and you might fall back into
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that deep sleep, and then you wake up and you're all groggy.
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So alarms, ideally, you know, in an ideal world, you would wake up naturally, and that is when
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You'll find this out is that when you're on vacation and there's no pressure, you'll find
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out what your natural waking time is, and that will give you a good gauge.
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And if you have a job that lets you, and if you can have any capacity to change your job
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so that you can have it so that you wake up at your natural waking time, that is the ideal.
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Unfortunately, many of us have to have alarms, because alarms aren't very good ways of waking
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up, because they basically stimulate our primitive, vital flight response.
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We wake up as if a panther or a tiger has just walked into our room.
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It's that there's this part of our brain called the amygdala, which is alert to threats all
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And so when you have a loud noise, it fires off the amygdala, gets adrenaline going, gets
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You wake up with a jolt, basically, because your primal brain thinks there's a threat.
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So you're not in a great place when you wake up.
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You're not waking up relaxed, calm, ready for the day.
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You hit the snooze button, and you're quite right.
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10 minutes or so on the snooze button is just about the right time to start slipping into
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And actually, all those sort of rude awakenings, they kind of add up.
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And so they will increase your stress levels in the morning.
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And furthermore, if you wake up naturally, or you just wake up, you just get up when you
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wake up naturally, you've got a natural chemical boost from a hormone called cortisol, which
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is a stress hormone that is released when you wake up.
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It's been building up slowly in the early hours, getting you ready for waking up.
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When you wake up, you get this surge, like a jab in the arm of this hormone called cortisol.
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If you stay in bed, if you keep hitting the snooze button, that will fade away.
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And so you'll lose your natural get up and go hormone.
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Okay, so we wake up, we might have that sleep inertia, feeling groggy.
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I think the first thing a lot of people do to counteract that as well is have my morning
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caffeine, whether that's coffee or tea or some other type of caffeinated beverage.
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But you've found research that suggests drinking coffee or caffeine first thing in the morning,
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Why shouldn't you drink your caffeine right when you get out of bed?
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Yeah, answering this question, if I'm going to give an answer to the best time to drink
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coffee, if it's different to what you do, most people don't like to hear it because everybody
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thinks their way of drinking coffee is the right way of doing it because they find that
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helps them. In reality, when you look at the science, if you find out how caffeine works,
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then you can understand when the best time should be to have coffee. Caffeine works by blocking a
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naturally sedative, relaxing chemical in the brain called adenosine. And this is a substance that is
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produced naturally throughout the day. When you wake up in the morning, it's very low. Throughout the
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day, it builds up and it builds up. It's sort of like a waste product of your brain throughout the
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day. When you sleep at night, your brain gets rid of it all. And it's adenosine that makes you sleepy,
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not the sleep hormone called melatonin that people so often know about when people take melatonin
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supplements because they think it's going to help them sleep. Most of the time, it doesn't do anything
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at all. The thing that makes you sleepy is this brain hormone called adenosine. And caffeine works
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by blocking that substance, that adenosine. And that's great because in an evening or if you're
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driving in an evening and you need to sort of a pick-me-up to keep yourself going, then having
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some coffee, that will keep you going. That will keep you on the road because it knocks the edge
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of this adenosine that is making you feel sleepy, wanting to make you to go to sleep. But first thing
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in the morning, that is the time when you have your lowest levels of adenosine. So you have your coffee
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first thing in the morning and actually it's not going to be doing much. It's like you've already
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got this get-up-and-go hormone called cortisol getting you going first in the morning. Having coffee
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on top of that is basically like throwing a couple of matches onto an already raging bonfire. It's not
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going to do very much. And actually, first thing in the morning, strong coffee is more likely to make
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you jittery and give you the side effects of caffeine, make you more uptight, make you a bit more
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anxious, rather than when actually if you're going to have coffee, you're going to have a caffeine, you
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want to have it so that it picks you up and it gets you going. So a sort of a nice way of doing it
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is to wait an hour, hour and a half, maybe a couple of hours into the morning so the cortisol shot in the
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arm has started to fade and adenosine has started to come up. So that mid-morning when you're starting
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to feel a bit sluggish, that will be a time when to have your coffee that it will actually get much more
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bang for your buck if you have your coffee then. Okay, so shift to two hours or wait an hour to
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two hours. Let's talk about breakfast. Is there an ideal breakfast that will help us get going in
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the morning? Now breakfast is an interesting one because it's a meal for which we have breakfast
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foods for. And we don't really have lunch foods or evening meal foods, but we have breakfast foods,
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which is kind of a curious thing. Across the world, there will be breakfast foods. And you tend to find
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that if you take a step back and you look across cultures, that breakfast tends to be based on
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starches, on carbohydrates or what you call carbs. They're the things that provide the, and I know
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that they're sort of, they're seen as a bad thing these days, carbs are, but actually they're the
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main fuel for your brain. They're the main fuel for your muscles. So if, especially if you've got an
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active job, if you're a kid, then breakfast is really important. And ideally it should be based
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on carbohydrates because they're the main fuel that your body and your brain likes to use.
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You can get by without it. And interestingly, if your body, if you're not a morning lark,
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if you wake up in the morning and actually you don't want breakfast, you doesn't feel
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right for you, your body isn't asking for it, then there is no benefit in forcing yourself to have a
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breakfast. Skipping breakfast does not make you put on weight. There is no evidence for that. And
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actually when they've done the studies and they've got people to skip breakfast, they actually lost
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weight compared to putting it on. So it's a myth that the breakfast is the most important meal of
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the day. Many people will need a breakfast because of their lifestyle, because of their body clock,
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but it's not the thing that it's made out to be.
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You know, it's, it's interesting, your observation about there being special breakfast foods across
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cultures and that they're usually carby foods. There's been some research coming out that our
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bodies metabolize carbohydrates and just, you know, just food in general better in the morning.
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And we get less efficient at it as the day wears on. And so maybe there's like some wisdom into how
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people used to schedule their meals, right? Like today, our biggest meal for most people in the West,
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it's dinner. And we eat that late, but a couple centuries back, the biggest meal of the
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day was, well, they called it dinner, but it was like at mid, midday, right? So they had a really
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big, what we would call lunch. And then they just have a, you know, like a very light supper in the
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evening. So it might be better for you to eat more of your carbs and calories earlier in the day.
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And, you know, and there is some evidence for that. I think eating big and late at night,
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that is linked with poor sleep. There is definitely evidence for that because at nighttime,
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everything shuts down. The whole intestinal system goes into sleep much like the rest of you. So if
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you have a big meal at night, it'll just be sitting there largely overnight. And actually that's not
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very good for you really, because, you know, it's going to more likely to give you indigestion. It's
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going to disturb your sleep. As you process the food, your intestines generate quite a lot of heat
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in that process of digesting the food. So especially, you know, protein, that's something that generates a
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lot of heat. Your body has to work quite hard to process that, to digest it, which is why you get
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meat sweats at nighttime if you had a big meal at an evening. So whether it's bad for putting on
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weight, that's a controversial thing. But generally speaking, you're probably best avoiding a large
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meal at an evening. That said, in the Mediterranean, they eat really late. And people only sit down for
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their evening meal about eight o'clock in the evening oftentimes. And I don't know how they do it.
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Typically, you'd have like a pastry and a coffee first thing in the morning is your breakfast.
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Then you'd have a lunch and then you'd have a big thing in the evening meal. And that's the way
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they've always done it. I don't know how they do it because generally, you know, the evidence would
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say that's not the ideal way of doing things. So yeah, you're quite right. It's that a big meal
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in the evening is probably not ideal for most people. Okay. So you're eating breakfast in the
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morning, maybe. You don't have to eat breakfast necessarily, but you're probably, hopefully,
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definitely brushing your teeth. So what's the best time to brush your teeth? Is it before you eat
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breakfast or after? It depends what you have for your breakfast. If you have anything citrus
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for breakfast, there's pros and cons of each of them. If you have anything citrus for breakfast,
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then avoid brushing afterwards because citrus and indeed carbonated drinks, you know, carbonated
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drinks are quite acidic. And if you have something acidic, then you brush your teeth. There is a risk
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that you start to brush off the enamel, which is the super hard, very white protective coating
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that's on the covering of your teeth. So I would say typically it's better before because it means
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that you can get rid of the detritus from overnight. You know, we often wake up with
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very bad breath in the morning and that's because there's been an overgrowth of bacteria in the night
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because we produce less saliva over the night and saliva has antibacterial properties in it.
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And so overnight we've had this overgrowth of bacteria. So it's good to, I mean, you could brush
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before and afterwards, that would even be better providing that you haven't had anything citrus
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for breakfast. We're going to take a quick break for your words from our sponsors.
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And now back to the show. So let's move on to our commute. A lot of people commutes like the worst
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part of their day. Why does our commute make us so miserable? And then anything we can do to improve
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it? Yeah, yeah. And research shows that an extra 20 minutes onto your morning commute can impact job
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satisfaction as much as a 20% pay cut. And what happens is that we associate our commute with our
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job. Psychologically, we see it as one and the same thing. So if we don't enjoy our commutes, it means
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that our job satisfaction overall will be lessened. So likewise, if you can improve your commute, then you can
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improve the quality of your job experience. 90 minutes of total commuting time a day seems to
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be the turning point for when it starts to impact our health. So if you're commuting 45 minutes each
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way, then that's a point at which you've got to be very careful that it may be impacting your health
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because people have a total commute of more than 90 minutes every day. They tend to be, they weigh more,
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they're more likely to have diabetes, more likely to have higher blood pressure, all the things that we
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associate with the ills of the day. They are linked with longer commutes. And that's largely if you,
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because most people commute, they do it sedentary, they do it in a car or they do it on some kind of
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public transport. To improve your commute in any way you can, make it as active as possible. So
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walking, cycling, anything that moves your legs, and that will improve your commute or make you
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healthier and also put you in a better place when you get to work. So that's one thing that you can do.
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So if you've got a journey that has multiple stops, try and simplify your morning commute, because
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a lot of the thing that makes the commute bad and stressful is stress on the journey. It's holdups in
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the traffic, it's delays, it's somebody cutting you off in the traffic, it's something getting in your
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way, it's roadworks. These are the things that, and if you add to that, if you've got to drop the kids
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off at school and you've got to do another, another errand on the way to work, that makes it all the
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more stressful. And so that will negatively impact your commute. So make your journeys as simple as
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possible, try and make them active. And yeah, I guess the thing is, is to try and see if there are
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ways in which you can make it less stressful and possibly shorter, especially if you have a
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And what's counterintuitive though, is you found the research that suggests that some people,
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they need a commute for their job to make that transition, right? The commute itself can act as a
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transition from home life to work life and work life to home life.
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Oh, absolutely. Yeah. And we've always discovered this now. We're working from home and some people's
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mental health has worsened as a result of this. And because we have commuted since Neanderthal time,
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since Stone Age, there's good evidence to show that we've always moved away from where we live and
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where we sleep to go and do our daily work. And there's something really important in that.
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And it seems to be the ideal commute is about 15 minutes. And that gives you just enough time to
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mentally move yourself away from home life and into work life. And conversely, when you're coming
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back, it's really important that we switch off from work and we re-engage to what's going on at home.
00:23:08.360
You know, you start thinking about our family, our spouse, so that when we get home, we're interested
00:23:12.860
in them and we're not preoccupied by our work. And so having that physical distance helps mentally
00:23:19.280
with having that mental distance. And so it is good for our mental health to have a commute
00:23:23.860
and 15 minutes research points are being the optimal length of time.
00:23:28.100
Let's take a look at our work life. We're at the office. Is there anything to the idea that
00:23:31.660
there's certain types of work we should do in the morning or the afternoon?
00:23:36.120
Yeah. And this comes back to your body clock. And what you find is that there are differences
00:23:40.860
because obviously night owls, it's flipped a little bit and they work better in the evening. But for
00:23:45.720
most of us, something like 75% of us, the first two or three hours of our working day, and when I
00:23:52.640
say a working day, that's from nine o'clock in the morning. I'm assuming that that's the sort of
00:23:56.260
the standard time of the working day. Those first, that morning is our brain's prime time. That is when
00:24:02.980
we need to prioritize the most important tasks. So I don't know about you, Brett, but sometimes I sit
00:24:07.760
down at my workstation first thing and I start work and I go, all right, I'm going to clear out my
00:24:12.980
emails or I'm going to, I'm going to do something on social media. But in reality, that's probably
00:24:18.680
not that you really shouldn't be doing that because those first two or three hours until you
00:24:22.900
get to about 11 midday, that is when your brain is the computing and the thinking powers of your
00:24:29.340
brain are at their maximum. So you should first thing prioritize that thing that you've been putting
00:24:34.840
off, that project, that assignment, whatever it is, that work, sort of bite the bullet and get on
00:24:40.220
with it. Because after that time, after those first two or three hours, after lunchtime,
00:24:44.400
whatever you do, no matter how much coffee you have, you're not getting that back again.
00:24:47.960
It's a one hit deal. You've got to make the best of it in the first thing in the morning.
00:24:52.240
You know, some people say they work, you know, especially in stateside. I know people like to
00:24:56.080
boast about how many hours they work and how they got so early in the morning and they stayed at work
00:25:00.160
till, you know, gone dark. But actually people who do that, they're not productive as they think
00:25:05.520
they are. And it's about understanding how your body works and you can actually work smarter and
00:25:12.060
not harder. So that is one way of doing it is realizing, you know, my most productive time,
00:25:17.980
my mentally, my most productive time is going to be in the morning before 12 o'clock, before 11 or 12
00:25:23.800
o'clock when things will naturally start to slow down. So that would be what the science would point
00:25:28.720
towards. Well, let's talk about just being at the office of the day. Most people have jobs where
00:25:32.560
they're sitting down, uh, sedentary, anything we can do to alleviate some of the, I don't know,
00:25:39.140
it's, it hurts. Like it doesn't feel good to sit down all day. And then also I think it's a mental
00:25:43.020
stressor. Anything we can do throughout the day to maintain our health and mental sharpness.
00:25:47.420
Yeah. I mean, it was once fashionable to have standing workstations, which some people get on
00:25:53.500
with and they've not really taken off in the way that it was once imagined. You know, it's often said
00:25:58.060
that sitting is the new smoking. It's nothing as bad as smoking, but yeah, there are high correlation
00:26:04.040
between sitting a long time and poor health, weight gain and all these things associated with
00:26:09.080
Western lifestyle. So a good way to do it is to try to make yourself stand up and do something. If you,
00:26:14.660
if you work from home, then make yourself a cup of tea every, or whatever it is, or a cup of coffee,
00:26:19.460
maybe not coffee, but get yourself a glass of water or something, you know, regularly,
00:26:23.100
may even set yourself a timer just to get up, walk around and yeah. And that will help. I mean,
00:26:30.220
the thing is, is that you can't concentrate for very long periods of time. Anyway, between 60 and
00:26:35.080
90 minutes is the maximum capacity in which you can focus on a task with complete concentration and
00:26:43.000
actually be performing well. So when your concentration starts to fade on any given task,
00:26:49.780
swapping to something else is good. Taking a break is even better and using that as an opportunity to
00:26:55.800
stand up and walk around. Another thing that I heard, which I thought was quite a smart thing is
00:26:59.880
get yourself some dumbbells or a dumbbell and put it somewhere, maybe by your kettle or by your fridge,
00:27:06.040
somewhere that you will often go to in the daytime. It's maybe a little bit more difficult to do it in
00:27:09.980
an office space at work, but you can, you can do it. You can put a little dumbbell somewhere and
00:27:14.360
whenever you go there, you can do a few sort of arm curls with it and you're not going to become,
00:27:19.460
you know, you're not going to become really muscular, not become Arnold Schwarzenegger from it,
00:27:23.920
but it will just help. Any kind of physical exercise will help combat the overall fatigue because
00:27:30.380
fatigue will worsen as we're lots of times sedentary. So any of these things, take the stairs if you can,
00:27:36.940
anything that you can, and it will be specific for you, it will be for your working environment.
00:27:41.500
You will know things that you can do. If it involves setting a timer on your phone,
00:27:46.200
you know, every 45 minutes to an hour saying, stand up now, that will help.
00:27:51.400
Let's shift to the afternoon and evening. Some people get sleepy, naturally sleepy,
00:27:57.100
like one o'clock, two o'clock. Is it okay to take a nap in the afternoon? And if so,
00:28:02.140
how can you do it in a way so it doesn't disrupt your sleep in the evening?
00:28:05.840
Yeah, again, it's something that's become quite trendy is having an afternoon nap, having this,
00:28:09.840
and the siesta is, as you probably appreciate, is very much ingrained in Mediterranean culture and
00:28:18.700
in Chinese culture. There used to be a law in China that meant that workers were entitled to
00:28:24.400
an afternoon nap. It was a right that they could have their, I think, 90 minutes or something like
00:28:29.020
that in the early afternoon where they could have a sleep. And actually having an early afternoon nap
00:28:34.580
is something that seems to be a part of our biology because we evolved in the savannah.
00:28:41.380
And if you've ever been to equatorial regions, you will know that the middle of the day after,
00:28:46.360
after about one or two o'clock in the afternoon, it's absolutely, I did my medical elective in West
00:28:51.840
Africa. And those hours of the day, you had to retreat inside. You couldn't do anything.
00:28:57.220
It's utterly, utterly stifling. I mean, people in the States who live in the southern regions,
00:29:01.840
you will know this very well, that you need, you can't do very much. And so our body is geared to
00:29:07.380
actually taking, is just lying down and resting during that time. So even now it's in our genes
00:29:13.060
that during that time we naturally get sluggish. We have the post-lunch slump that isn't actually
00:29:19.660
entirely to do with the lunch itself. It just happens to be that our body clock is geared towards
00:29:25.440
slowing down, actually having a nap at that time. So yeah, it's a difficult thing to get your head
00:29:30.540
around because we have this whole thing. I've got to work nine to five, having a sleep is lazy.
00:29:35.120
But I know that, you know, a lot of the tech companies are now getting onto this idea or they
00:29:38.780
have been in recent years of having your sleep pods where you can go and have a nap. And if you can
00:29:43.420
work that into your day, you may well find that energy, mood, learning and productivity are boosted
00:29:49.180
by a 10 to 20 minute nap in the early afternoon. If you go longer than that, if you go to about 60
00:29:56.000
minutes, then that's the time where you will, over more than about 20 minutes to 60 minutes,
00:30:00.260
you may well find that when you wake up, you have that groggy thing again, that sleep inertia. So
00:30:04.760
you wake up and you feel worse than before and you think, oh, I'm never going to, why do people do
00:30:09.100
this nap thing? I just feel wasted for the rest of the day. So, and that's because you've gone into
00:30:13.760
deep sleep. If you're going to do longer than half an hour, then you should do 90 minutes because
00:30:19.060
90 minutes is enough time to go into deep sleep and out again, and you'll come out feeling refreshed.
00:30:23.480
The problem is that if you go much longer than an hour and a half, it obviously eats into your day
00:30:27.700
and it can affect your nighttime sleep. So ideally 10 to 20 minutes. And another way that I've heard
00:30:33.820
people do is to have a coffee before you have your nap. And it takes about 15, 20 minutes for
00:30:40.620
the full effect of the caffeine to kick in. So that will, when you wake up again, you'll have the
00:30:45.540
combination of the feeling refreshed from the nap and the sort of the, the extra boost from the
00:30:51.020
caffeine. Personally, I don't do that one because I, I find that the caffeine will affect me before
00:30:58.440
I get to sleep, but that's a tried and tested thing that many people do. All right, let's talk about
00:31:03.420
exercise. When's the best time to exercise or does it matter?
00:31:08.960
Any exercise is good, but when you look at people's physical performance, you find that it is best
00:31:14.920
eight to nine hours after waking. So that we're talking early mid afternoon for most people.
00:31:21.260
It's geared towards your body clock as well. So you tend to find that people who are in their early
00:31:26.060
twenties and teens, because their body clock is shifted forward by a couple of hours, they will
00:31:30.480
tend to be in their prime in the early evening time, which I've, my theory behind this is that most
00:31:36.300
world records are broken in the early evening time. And I, some of that is going to be because
00:31:42.620
things are televised in the evening time. Uh, that's when they put on events. But I think that
00:31:47.540
a large part of that is the world records are broken in that time. Olympic world records are
00:31:51.200
broken that time is because the people who are athletes, they're in generally in their early
00:31:56.680
twenties. So they have a body clock that peaks later in the day. And so their prime physical
00:32:02.260
time for exercise is in that early evening time when they're performing at their best.
00:32:07.140
But it's the same for you and me, Brett is that best exercise time will be in the mid early to
00:32:12.260
mid afternoon. You can try this. I don't know if you do much exercise, Brett, but if you
00:32:15.980
go for a run first thing in the morning, and then you do another run at five or six in the
00:32:20.080
evening, you will find that the one in the afternoon evening time will be easier. And
00:32:25.940
you'll probably find that you can do better times than you did first thing in the morning.
00:32:29.560
And that's just the nature of the fact that our body takes a while to warm up. It's like
00:32:33.280
a, it's like a locomotive. It just sort of takes a while. Everything, all our muscles,
00:32:37.020
all the chemical processes and the enzymes that power our muscles, which are just the
00:32:42.140
chemicals that work within, within our muscles to get them going. They take a while to get
00:32:46.640
going throughout the day. You know, I think they warm up throughout the day, but that said
00:32:51.220
any kind of exercise is good. And you know, more than exercise is still good for you, but
00:32:55.980
generally speaking, it's better to do the most vigorous exercise later in the day because
00:33:02.520
going at it too hard in the morning, you're much more likely to have a risk injury.
00:33:06.560
Yeah, I've noticed that. So I do powerlifting and when I first started, I trained first thing
00:33:13.640
in the morning. So I had like the sleep inertia thing going on. I was really groggy. So I didn't
00:33:18.660
perform as well. I think the other issue too, was I didn't have time to eat before I trained.
00:33:23.740
So I was training in a fasted state and that's not good if you're doing like explosive strength
00:33:28.600
stuff. And then when I shifted to training later in the afternoon, things got better. My performance
00:33:36.060
started improving. And I still noticed the difference today, right? Like sometimes I can't
00:33:41.020
train in the afternoon for whatever reason. So I have to train in the morning and there's
00:33:45.620
a big difference between afternoon training and morning training. And you know, it's interesting
00:33:51.000
that given people perform better or do better later in the day that, you know, competitions,
00:33:57.700
you know, things like 5k races, I've done, you know, weightlifting competitions, amateur
00:34:03.340
ones, like they're usually in the morning. And you know, like my wife, she's a runner and
0.99
00:34:09.260
I think she'd do more running races if they were later in the day, because, you know, she
1.00
00:34:15.220
likes to run, but she doesn't like to run at, you know, seven or eight o'clock in the morning.
00:34:21.080
She'd much prefer to run late in the afternoon or early evening. Yes. I think it's interesting.
00:34:28.020
We need more competitions later in the day, I think. Okay. So we've covered waking up,
00:34:33.100
commuting, working, exercise, and then comes nighttime, right? It's time to sleep. And in
00:34:40.420
the book you suggest, you know, the kind of sleep hygiene tips that I think most people
00:34:44.540
are familiar with if you want to get better sleep. But what about snoring? Snoring can disrupt
00:34:49.940
your sleep and possibly other people's sleep. So what can we do to stop snoring?
00:34:55.800
Yeah. Four in 10 blokes snore. It's one of those things like you never know you do it until
00:35:00.200
somebody tells you. But yeah, it is a problem. I know a couple that they can't sleep in the
00:35:04.760
same bedroom anymore because he snores so loudly and he doesn't like being woken up to be told.
00:35:10.140
I mean, I snore sometimes when I roll onto my back, but yeah, it can be really problematic.
00:35:14.540
How can we stop it? The reason why we snore, you can either have nasal snoring, which is
00:35:19.460
because of the configuration of your nasal cavity, or you can have mouth snoring or throat snoring,
00:35:25.120
which is probably the most common type of snoring. And that is because at nighttime,
00:35:29.300
when we go into this deepest sleep, the deep restorative stage of sleep, we become very floppy.
00:35:36.080
The tone of the muscles drops a lot, so everything becomes relaxed. And unfortunately, that means that
00:35:41.040
the muscles at the back of the throat that keep our windpipe open, they can relax so much that it
00:35:47.540
starts to close our airways. And it becomes like a flapping door in a breeze as it vibrates and you
00:35:52.680
have this snoring sound. It's more likely to happen in people who are bigger, people who are
00:35:57.640
overweight. So people often find if you lose some weight, then the snoring will stop. Lying on your
00:36:02.940
back is also more likely to cause snoring. Something that people have done with great success is in
00:36:08.480
their nightwear, in their pajama top, they'll sew in a tennis ball into the middle of the back so that
00:36:13.280
it's impossible for them to lie on their back. And they find that that is quite a drastic thing
00:36:18.240
to do, but they find that that is enough to stop them snoring because it stops them rolling onto
00:36:21.740
the back. There's lots of different things, lots of different aids that you can buy. There's like
00:36:25.200
nasal strips, things that you can put into your nose. There's chin straps. There's pillows.
00:36:30.480
There's some evidence that pillows, anti-snoring pillows can help because they align your neck in a
00:36:36.120
certain way so that you keep the airways open more and you're much less likely to snore.
00:36:41.340
The thing is that if you snore and you're very, very sleepy in the daytime,
00:36:46.940
then you could be experiencing, could be suffering from a record obstructive sleep apnea or OSA.
00:36:53.040
That's very, very common, more common than I think we appreciate. And that is actually very
00:36:58.440
harmful for your health, not least because your sleep is so unrestorative that you will drift off
00:37:04.840
in the daytime and your risk of having a car accident while driving are very, very magnified hugely
00:37:10.920
because you're not getting restorative sleep. What happens with people with OSA is they're
00:37:16.900
snoring and as the muscles relax even more and more, eventually it blocks off their airways.
00:37:22.720
So you start to suffocate. You then wake up with a jolt, but it's so brief that you don't realize
00:37:28.480
that you're awake. Because interestingly, in those very lightest layers of sleep between awake and being
00:37:33.300
asleep, you have no memory of it. You may have noticed this, Brett. If you're sat on the sofa,
00:37:38.380
you're watching a movie or something, your partner drifts off, falls asleep, and you wake up and say,
00:37:43.960
you fell asleep, they will swear blind, I was not asleep. And that is because in those periods,
00:37:49.220
there's very light stages of sleep, you have no memory of it. So when people wake up with a start
00:37:54.340
very briefly, they'll have no memory that they've had a very disturbed sleep. Every time they go into
00:37:58.900
that deep restorative sleep, they're being woken up at the very deepest part of it. So they're not
00:38:04.620
getting the benefits of sleep. So throughout the daytime, they're constantly fatigued.
00:38:09.700
And that has long-term impacts, much like doing night shifts. Actually, unfortunately,
00:38:15.400
no matter what we do, it seems to, when you're working against your body clock, it has negative
00:38:19.960
effects, causes your arteries more likely to fur up a process called atherosclerosis, increases
00:38:25.400
the likelihood of having diabetes and other such conditions by having long-term disturbances to
00:38:30.620
sleep. And this is also the case with OSA, obstructive sleep apnea. So if you feel exhausted,
00:38:36.420
if you find yourself falling asleep when you're waiting for the lights to go from red to green,
00:38:41.300
or you're woken up because somebody's sounding the horn behind you, and especially if your partner
00:38:45.780
says that you snore, then it's worthwhile getting an assessment for that because it's something that's
00:38:52.380
Well, Stuart, this has been a great conversation. Where can people go to learn more about the book
00:38:55.820
Yeah, sure. I mean, the book is called Live Your Best Life. If you're outside of North America,
00:39:01.500
it's called The Science of Living. So The Science of Living or Live Your Best Life. You can find out
00:39:06.620
more about me on all the socials. My name is Dr. Stuart Farman or Dr. Stu Farman. My handle is
00:39:13.300
realdrstu, all one word, R-E-A-L-D-O-C-T-O-R-S-T-U. And that's what I'm on, on Twitter and Instagram
00:39:19.240
and all those things. I'm not a big social media user, but I will do updates of books and things.
00:39:24.720
I've got a book out recently, which is all about gardening, believe it or not. So it's a completely
00:39:29.640
left field thing for me, but that's selling very well as well. It's just another one of my missions
00:39:35.020
of using science in the everyday in ways in which you wouldn't have thought.
00:39:40.360
All right. Well, Dr. Stuart Farman, thanks for your time. It's been a pleasure.
00:39:44.460
My guest today was Dr. Stuart Farman. He's the author of the book, Live Your Best Life. It's
00:39:48.300
available on amazon.com. You can find more information about his work at his website,
00:39:51.960
stuartfairman.com. Also check out our show notes at aom.is slash daily routine,
00:39:57.220
where you can find links to resources, where you can delve deeper into this topic.
00:40:06.960
Well, that wraps up another edition of the AOM podcast. Make sure to check out our website
00:40:10.960
at artofmanliness.com, where you can find our podcast archives, as well as thousands of articles
00:40:15.060
that we've written over the years about pretty much anything you'd think of. And if you'd like to
00:40:18.920
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00:40:34.580
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00:40:38.040
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00:40:41.920
would get something out of it. As always, thank you for the continued support. Until next time,
00:40:45.660
is Brett McKay. Remind you to want to listen to the AOM podcast, but put what you've heard into action.