With Dr Pedram Shojai
NY Times Best Selling author and film maker. Taoist Abbot and Qigong master. Husband and dad. I’m here to help you find your way and be healthy and happy. I don’t want to be your guru…just someone who’ll help point the way. If you’re looking for a real person who’s done the work, I’m your guy. I can light the path and walk along it with you but can’t walk for you.
Welcome to another episode of the Urban Monk Podcast! In this solo episode, I delve deep into a crucial topic that affects us all: sleep. This focused, in-depth exploration is part of a new format we’re introducing, where we’ll be dedicating entire episodes to key areas of health and wellness.
In the coming weeks and months, you can expect more of these solo deep dives, each concentrating on a specific subject that’s vital to your overall well-being. These episodes are designed to provide you with comprehensive insights and practical strategies you can implement in your daily life.
So sit back, relax, and get ready to gain valuable knowledge on how to prep for deep, restorative sleep.
Listen to the episode on Spotify here or on your favorite podcast platform.
Check out the Urban Monk Academy here and if you’re having trouble sleeping, see this VIDEO about how to fix it.
Podcast transcript:
Welcome to the urban monk podcast. Dr. Pedram, Shojai here with one of the new formats, mid form solo. This is me. Uh, an excerpt of a conversation I was having with urban monk academy students. , talking about sleep. And basically this is just a weekly type of content that I am communicating with my students all the time and then taking questions and going, I want it to take some tidbits of that and bring it out to the podcast to help my community at large.
And also let you understand kind of how we roll over there and how, you know, constantly teaching and helping people go. So we’d love to have you on that bus. Urban monk academy is awesome. Um, take a new members now. And a live interaction, like the call you’re about to listen to, uh, but then questions what’s going on.
What’s keeping you up at night. Uh, helping my folks get the sleep that they need in this particular context, have a listen.
Dr Pedram Shojai: today I want to talk about the topic at hand, um, prepping for deep sleep.
Dr Pedram Shojai: How to shut it down. How to shut what down? How to shut down the arousal system. We have a few people here who have been complaining about sleep and not getting it, but not familiar with that curriculum. So I’m gonna go high level.
Dr Pedram Shojai: And then we’ll go granular and leave time for questions because overall thesis, let’s start with that the overall kind of science of sleep is that. It’s a function of arousal, and if your system’s arousal can go under the line of sleep, You will be asleep.
Dr Pedram Shojai: And if you, uh, have too much arousal and, you know, and I’m not talking about sexual arousal, I’m talking about nervous system arousal, too much arousal, you will not be able to shut the windows down enough in order to get sleep. So, what are the things that bring your arousal up? There’s the kind of the conventional wisdom, which, you know, all these, you know, Podcast talk about is like, Oh, you, you know, block the blue light.
Dr Pedram Shojai: Right? Um, yes. And right. Block the stressors in the media. Yes. And, um, basic sleep hygiene requires somewhere between 68 and 72 degrees Fahrenheit is kind of the mean for where most humans, most humans, this might not be you, but most humans do best, um, in terms of temperature regulation. Um, make it dark, if you’re going to have lights, have red lights or amber lights, ? Or star lights. , because for hundreds of thousands of years, we actually slept under those and those didn’t wake us up. Uh, harder to do nowadays. Um, Starlink, I guess. Um, but that’s also a part of the, the overall ecosystem is dark, Cool.
Dr Pedram Shojai: Quiet, but it doesn’t have to be like crickets quiet because guess what? Your ancestors slept with crickets. Your ancestors slept with jungle noises. So the question is, what sounds are calming and soothing and what sounds stimulate your arousal system? If I’m camping and I hear a bunch of scuffling outside my tent, I’m up thinking, Oh my God, there’s a bear.
Dr Pedram Shojai: Good luck sleeping through that. Right? So now most of you aren’t camping tonight, but you’re sleeping in a house that probably has a front door. And if you heard someone jostling your front door, you’re thinking, Oh my God, am I safe? Right? If you heard helicopters. going over your house and sirens going off, you’re thinking, Oh my God, am I safe?
Dr Pedram Shojai: So all these sounds will trigger the arousal system if it is indeed a situation that requires you to say, get up, you’re not safe. Okay. And again, sorry to belabor this for people that have already done the sleep program, but I’m gonna, um, is think about what sleep is.
Dr Pedram Shojai: We’re in a small tribe. We decide it’s time to hunker down. I pick Kathleen and Faith to say, Alright, you all are trustworthy. Hold the spears and be vigilant and keep guard while the rest of us sleep. So then I’m out in the wild, trusting that I can lay this body down, close my eyes and doze into an unconscious state.
Dr Pedram Shojai: And not be worried about a lion eating me. Not be worried about a bum walking into my house and taking my stuff. Not be worried about the sky is falling. Right? So, it is the ultimate vulnerable state, falling asleep. It is one of the most ultimate, powerful, almost paradoxical things we can do is to sleep.
Dr Pedram Shojai: Because you don’t do sleep, you fall asleep, you allow sleep, you let go for sleep to happen. So then the question are, the questions are, what are your personal preconditions? As an animal that needs to feel safe
Dr Pedram Shojai: to allow for sleep to happen. Now, if I’m thinking to myself, Oh man, that Kathleen, last time she, she stood guard, she fell asleep. I can’t trust her to protect me. Then I’m like, dammit, the night watch is not trustworthy. I’m sleeping with one eye open, right? Or every time we put them on guard, Kathleen and Faith are drinking whiskey.
Dr Pedram Shojai: Right? Of course that’s what they do. So, I don’t feel safe. And that is The other part of it is, what am I bringing to the altar of sleep? And that’s the hard part. I got my fears, I got my dramas, I got my traumas, I got my worries, I got my leftover to do list, which grows longer than shorter by the end of the day if I’m not good at this.
Dr Pedram Shojai: And then you kind of stumble through the day and you’re like, Oh man, it’s dinnertime. Oh man, look at that. Look, you know, time for bed. And you know, my wife’s really guilty of this is then she’s like got 30 things that she like has undone that she, you know, is now suddenly trying to do in bed on a laptop or something.
Dr Pedram Shojai: And I’m like, oh hell no, don’t bring that into the bed, right? Because it’s a blue light, it’s stimulating, it’s all of it, right? And so what are your habits and how are you decelerating into the evening? And let’s just say, you know, I come into my office early. I come into the office early because after the dogs I get a little bit of time before the kids stir.
Dr Pedram Shojai: And I I put in my password and this thing turns on, right? And as this thing turns on, I’m opening a tab, opening an email, opening another tab, opening a window. And so in my day, I start to open all of these kind of active areas where my brain is getting focused in and, you know, focused out of and working on stuff.
Dr Pedram Shojai: But by the end of the day, if I’m not shutting down those tabs, If I’m not shutting down those windows, if I’m not shutting down all these open applications, and I’m sit staring at the desktop of my, my mind when the lights go out, and all this stuff is still open and engaged and actively like in my face, How the hell am I going to sleep?
Dr Pedram Shojai: Right? And so it’s something that Swami Kriyananda taught me 30 years ago that I think is incredibly applicable to all of my sleep students. It’s called the ritual of the moon. And the ritual of the moon is very specifically you consciously
Dr Pedram Shojai: turning the corner and saying, okay, enough. I want to be asleep 90 minutes, two hours, two and a half hours from now, depending on when you kind of need to engage based on, you know, how activated and stimulated you are. I personally begin the ritual of the moon around 8 p. m. I like to be in bed by 9 30. And My wife complains that there’s about 60 seconds between that and me snoring because I get long days.
Dr Pedram Shojai: I’m out, right? Like, I’m out. You know, my biggest complaint is I don’t, I want to read in bed, but it’s too late. Um, so I got to read during the day. But at 8 o’clock, I’m suddenly saying, okay. Nothing stimulating, obviously, alcohol being a big bad. Caffeine’s an absolute no no. Caffeine after 2 is the absolute red line.
Dr Pedram Shojai: Caffeine after noon if you’re, uh, sensitive, right? And you’re already kind of having challenges with sleep. But what else is stimulating? Like, I’m not paying bills. I’m not checking the news, you know what I mean? Like, unless something tragic has happened, I don’t want to hear about it until tomorrow morning.
Dr Pedram Shojai: Um, so, I start shutting my windows down, preparing for a good night’s sleep at 8pm. The real trick to this game is if you’re having trouble sleeping, you begin prepping for a good night’s sleep The moment you wake up for the following night. Which means, when are you getting your exercise? When are you burning your cortisol off?
Dr Pedram Shojai: When are you eating in preparation for your calories to be used and not necessarily sitting on your digestive tract before you go to bed? When are you taking, um, if you can, high efficiency, high calorie carbohydrates? Great. For when your body needs them and is moving and when are you taking more protein and fat so that the digestive, uh, process is slower.
Dr Pedram Shojai: A lot of my sleep patients over the years would wake up for, you know, obviously a variety of reasons. Um, blood sugar being a very big one. If your adrenals are tired, if you’re wired and tired and pooped, what happens effectively is that your Your body, when it is in a stasis, when it’s trying to sleep, goes into kind of offline mode and says, You know what?
Dr Pedram Shojai: Leave Lucy alone. She’s had a long day. And when the brain says, Hey, I’m running out of sugar, doing all the really important, highly effective detoxification work the brain does at night, the brain says, I need more sugar. There’s only two ways to get sugar, really. One is to wake you up and say go eat it and two is let’s go pull it out of reserves and the reserves that the body uses at night are the glycogen reserves stored in the liver and they are specifically a very quick easy currency form of sugar that the brain could break down and utilize without waking up the boss.
Dr Pedram Shojai: Now when you have insulin issues, insulin Going into your 30s, 40s, and 50s and beyond, living, you know, the Western world and eating the stupid foods we’ve been exposed to. The inability to call on glycogen reserves starts to become very kind of stark because the way we tap into that alt currency is the use of our adrenals and cortisol.
Dr Pedram Shojai: Hey, she’s asleep. Let some cortisol go. Grab some out of the bank. It’ll be alright. Tomorrow we’ll make up for it. And tomorrow’s more stressful, tomorrow you’re more beat up, tomorrow you’re more tired. The cortisol that is supposed to release Um, is already a compromised, uh, system and so there’s two things that happen.
Dr Pedram Shojai: One is, there’s not enough cortisol, the adrenals are saying, uh, hey, I still, you know, hey, I don’t, I got it, brain, wake him up. So you just wake up and you’re agitated, um, and you, you know, then you’re like, well, I’m up, I should pee, right? All these other signals come up and then you kind of get stimulated and you go and you start ruminating.
Dr Pedram Shojai: We talk about the different forms of insomnia. Yeah. Or. It’s so stark that you wake up with your heart pounding because when cortisol is completely depleted, you go to adrenaline. And then you wake up just like, holy crap, what was that? And people complain of nightmares and all that, but a lot of times it’s just the system that’s gone awry.
Dr Pedram Shojai: And so, preparing for a good night’s sleep, in my experience, and my experience is A lot. I’ve, you know, I’ve been around sleep a long time now. Um, is that managing your blood sugar throughout the day is the best long term solution to solving sleep problems because blood sugar is kind of like the, the real big swinging, uh, indicator that will then drive cortisol, that would then drive insulin, that would then drive adrenaline and all the kind of stuff starts to go awry.
Dr Pedram Shojai: But it starts with blood sugar. Once you manage your blood sugar, then it’s like, Okay, well listen, your estrogen might be off, your progesterone might be off. There’s a lot of things. But what happens is, in the Western world, in particular, because we’re so damn solutions oriented, we’ll take a short fix, right?
Dr Pedram Shojai: We’ll put the little foam in your flat tires so you could finish the road trip and tell you, you should change this tire when you get there, but do you, right? And so what’ll happen is you go to a doctor and they’re like, Oh, well, look, look here, your progesterone’s low. So they’ll give you. prescriptive hormones to make up for an underlying deficiency that came from blood sugar imbalance, cortisol disharmony, and all these things.
Dr Pedram Shojai: And so effectively people And I’ve seen hundreds of them are like, Hey, uh, yeah, I was taking melatonin. I was taking X. I was taking Y. When I first started, the, the progesterone was amazing and that didn’t work anymore. Because the band aid isn’t solving the problem. The problem tends to be underlying stress, blood sugar insufficiency, not feeling safe.
Dr Pedram Shojai: And if we don’t take an active role for In petting the baby, and I’ll explain what I mean in a second. We’re constantly looking for some other magic formula we haven’t heard of to solve this problem for us when we are the problem. What’s the baby? Your body, and, and look, I’ve, I’ve said this in many ways, and I will say it again, um, here in a different context.
Dr Pedram Shojai: Your gut lining doesn’t speak English. Your liver doesn’t speak English. Your arousal system doesn’t speak to you in French or English. It speaks to you in this odd sub language of mild anxiety, dis ease, insomnia, associative memories leading to uncomfortable feelings, and you’re like, Oh, I’m up, right? Why am I up?
Dr Pedram Shojai: Why am I up? And so the real question I want you all to kind of reorient on, right? And I’m not going to suggest an answer because y’all have different history and, you know, different upbringing, right? Is what is, when the baby is crying, does a good mother or father walk in there, Alongside the crib and go, Hey, shut up.
Dr Pedram Shojai: Or do you say, what is it, baby? Pick it up, cuckoo it, kiss it, check its diaper, see if it’s hungry, right? Why is the baby crying and how can you lovingly pet the baby into comfort? All of the interventions on the sleep side. That have kind of taken the media world or all the, you know, Hey, shut up! Varieties of, of silencing the baby.
Dr Pedram Shojai: And then the baby gets cancer. And then the baby pulls a knife on it, on you, right? Like the baby is not going to be silenced because the baby is telling you something is wrong. You could silence the baby for a couple weeks here, a couple months there. But the baby is telling you something is wrong. What is it, baby?
Dr Pedram Shojai: I love you.
Dr Pedram Shojai: So what is it? Is it the dinner you ate? Is it the glass of wine you thought was okay? Is it your childhood trauma that gets louder when the lights go down and the world gets silent?
Dr Pedram Shojai: Is it the mold in your room? Is it the person you’re sleeping next to who’s mean to you or snores like a busted chainsaw? Right? There are so many things that can bring up the arousal system. There are so many triggers and so what I invite you to look at is when the lights go down, the world gets silent and you are left without all the distractions with your own scary
Dr Pedram Shojai: what’s left, right? And that’s where the best healing can happen. That is where your body is talking to you. Your mind is talking to you. The fallout of your day to day decisions is on top of you. And you’re trying to reconcile your day. So how do you reconcile your day? That’s the Ritual of the Moon. Oh my god, I have four things I didn’t finish and what am I gonna Okay, make a to do list for tomorrow.
Dr Pedram Shojai: Move those four things there. And tomorrow, by hook or by crook, do them. Or stop giving yourself too many tasks. Are you unreasonably Are you giving yourself more than you can take on or are you loitering at the water cooler and not doing the things that you say you’re going to do, but honor your contracts with yourself so that you don’t bring any more to do’s to bed.
Dr Pedram Shojai: Bed is for sleep and making love.
Dr Pedram Shojai: It’s not for TV, it’s not for bills, it’s not for thinking through your to dos for tomorrow. Don’t bring that to the altar of sleep. So your homework for the ritual of the moon is to really think through what is it that you are bringing into the sacred space of sleep that needs to be left out of the bedroom and what is it, and this isn’t like a ooh, aha, right?
Dr Pedram Shojai: What is it that Your body is trying to tell you that you need to hear
Dr Pedram Shojai: nine times out of 10, not 10 times, but nine times out of 10. It has a lot to do with the inputs, right? Something you ate, something you drink, drank right? Something you rubbed on your skin, something you brought into your bedroom that smells or lets off electricity, right? So look at the external inputs that make you feel unsafe.
Dr Pedram Shojai: And then Turn inward because we all have internal inputs. Mom said this. Dad did that. My sister’s an asshole, right? Like we all have stuff so but that stuff gets louder When our alarm system is already being rung. If something wakes me up in the middle of the night, then I’m thinking about the problem I had with my stupid email server or whatever it is, right?
Dr Pedram Shojai: The, the, the problem du jour. But if I can bring down the number of things that stimulate me, and I can stack more and more calming rituals and more and more soothing self love into my evening, that will overwhelm the amount of signals sending me into panic, disarray, disharmonious sleep. Does that make sense?
Dr Pedram Shojai: It is an effort that you make every single day to prepare yourself for the beautiful, beautiful ritual called sleep.
Dr Pedram Shojai: It’s not inevitable that you’re gonna fall asleep. I mean, it is. You’ll fall asleep because you’re damn exhausted and you need it. But if you make space for sleep and you ask what sleep needs of you, it’ll start to change your lifestyle for the better and it’ll start to reorient the way you frame your days so that they’re less assembled around hectic, crazy, crazy, stupid shit, and more around a harvest and a planting season, right?
Dr Pedram Shojai: The, the more around natural cycles that come up and come down naturally. So, all right, I gotta jump to another room. Sleep. We’ll see you.
All right. Hope you enjoyed that. That is kind of standard fare weekly conversation I have with my students. Uh, that one went a little long. I usually do about 10, 15 minutes of question answer after each session and we go. Into whatever right. Just keeping people up. So if that served you. Look at the urban monk academy.
Look at the deep sleep solution. Look at all the stuff that I’m putting forth for you to help you get yourself out of whatever rut you’re in the urban monk academy. Subscription-based come and go as you, please cancel any time. Loving it loving being there, loving, serving my folks. And for people that are having really bad issues with sleep, my deep sleep solution also has higher tiers with my coaches that can help you. Unravel and get out of whatever mess you’re in.
If you’ve gotten your sleep really messed up and knotted up. So go to the urban monk.com. You’ll see it all there. Um, again, I’m not taking sponsors for this. Um, but what pays for the party is people joining the urban monk academy, learning to help themselves, uh, supporting their health, their family, their own vitality, and also supporting this business back.
So we can keep doing the work that you’re witnessing here. I’ll see you in the next podcast.