mental health, Podcast, self-care

310: Riley Jarvis—Finding Sleep Making You Sleepless? Learn How To Enjoy Sleep Again

Posted on by Andrea Simon

Hear how sleep affects every aspect of your work and your life

I had the pleasure of meeting Riley Jarvis and learning all about his sleep program. Sleep doesn’t come easily to me—or to lots of people. And staying asleep is often a challenge. Riley struggled with his own health and well-being, then discovered that sleep was the answer to his health issues. As you listen to his story, you are going to want to know more. Definitely listen in enjoy!

Watch and listen to our conversation here

riley video
The way you live every day is closely connected to how you sleep every night.

These two things are not separate or disconnected. How you prepare for sleep, quiet your mind and body, and move into a restful period is of critical importance to how well you will sleep. Listen to our discussion and learn more. Perhaps you too can find a solution to your well-being in Riley’s approach to sleep. You can get in touch with Riley via LinkedIn, his blog and his website The Sleep Consultant, or email him at riley@thesleepconsultant.com.

Need some help taking better care of yourself? Here are some suggestions 

Additional resources for you

Read the transcript of our podcast here

Andi Simon: Welcome to On the Brink with Andi Simon. I’m Andi Simon, I’m your host and your guide and I go looking for people who are going to help you get off the brink. Remember, our job is to help you see and feel and think about things through a fresh lens. So I’m an anthropologist. I help people change, whether it’s as an executive coach or consultant in your business. I help you see what’s all around you that your mind might be fighting because it doesn’t quite fit into the story that’s there.

Today, I have Riley Jarvis with us from Ottawa. People come from across the world to be on our podcast. It’s so much fun. In fact, you’ve taken our podcast to the top 5% of global podcasts. I’m proud of it. We’ve also published our 300th podcast. That means four years of doing lots of good stuff. I know Riley has his own podcast, and I was on his. But today we’re going to talk about Riley.

So let me tell you a little bit about him and then he will tell you his own journey. We’re going to talk today about something you’re not going to do today, which is sleep, which is really important. Riley is the founder and CEO of TheSleepConsultant.com. It’s an organization that helps CEOs, entrepreneurs, and high performance business people transform their sleep to significantly improve their day, their life. You don’t realize that the two are connected but they’re actually all one and you are alone both at night and in person.

He started this through his own health journey. And he discovered that sleep was the missing link that brought everything together. It’s an interesting story. After hacking his own biology by learning from top doctors in the field, and furthering his own education on the subject, he developed the state of the art approach. He will tell you about his 10 tips and tricks to help you, as well as that get at the root of the issue.

Now we all know that as we have matured, at times, sleep isn’t easy. And at times at two in the morning, we’re wandering around the house wondering, how do I get back to sleep? I’m sorry, but it is hard. Riley had a background in the finance industry. He’s been seeing firsthand the consequences of sleep deprivation. And that means that you can listen today and know he’s got something to get you off the brink. I want you to soar. So by the time we’re done with our time together, you’re going to say, oh, Riley, how do you help me sleep? And why should I? I have a hunch you know why. Riley, thank you for joining me today.

Riley Jarvis: Thank you so much, Andrea. It’s a pleasure to be here.

Andi Simon: Tell the listeners your story. It’s a great story. But I also know that until they hear it, they’re not quite sure who is Riley and why should I listen to him. So credential yourself. Who are you?

Riley Jarvis: Oh, thank you so much. I really appreciate the kind intro. So a little bit about me. I’m the CEO of The Sleep Consultant. And yeah, like Andrea said, I help CEOs, entrepreneurs, high performers, really optimize your sleep, get more done in the day, by optimizing the time that they do sleep into deeper wave sleep patterns. Sleep translates into every single thing that we do. How we feel, the relationships we have, our focus, productivity, and if you’re really able to get your sleep down, opposed to hustling to get more done, you can actually retain better focus, better memory, make better decisions, and you can just see it all through your personal and professional lives as I’ve done with many clients.

But starting with my story, well we’ll get back to this. It all started many many years ago when I was working in the finance industry and that’s what I went to school for. I was working at private equity and kind of the investment banking world and I mean the hours as anybody knows are very arduous, waking up, getting to work at about 7am and working till 10pm until the deal was closed. It was just day in, day out, grinding sometimes 12 to 18 hours a day. And it’s kind of only the top 1% survive and you have to be on your mental and physical peak in order to maintain that. But, I just couldn’t do it anymore and I was in my early 20s at the time. That’s usually when we think as a young healthy male, when you have the energy to do all that.

But, there was something happening with me where I was making clumsy mistakes. I didn’t have the energy. I just had constant brain fog and it just went on and on. Long story short, I ended up having to be let go because I didn’t know what was going on. I felt like a shell of my former self. I was pretty good in school and I was a good worker and everything was going good up until that point. So I was forced to leave. I was forced to drop the classes and my health started to deteriorate pretty quickly. When I went to the doctor specialist, they really couldn’t give me an answer. The general practitioner referred me to all these different doctors.

Anyway, months later I went to the gastroenterologist and it turns out I had Crohn’s disease, which is inflammation of the bowels and all throughout your body. It was pretty bad to me. It was causing me to lose weight, lose muscle and energy, have brain fog and all these things that were going on. And the inflammation that was inside my bowels was actually quite bad at the time and the side effects of the medication that they were giving me were actually making me feel worse.

To put that in perspective, for me to write down a paragraph that actually made coherent sense, it took me about 5 to 10 minutes. And I just remember looking back and thinking I don’t know how I function or operate in the world at the time. I was bedridden, essentially, collecting massive piles of debt. So I basically had to take my health into my own hands with my back against the wall. And the way I did that was studying. I didn’t really know what was the answer yet, but studying health, all the systems inside of my biology, like how does it work on a deep, deep level.

Then I started investing in a lot of private, natural doctors, functional medicine doctors around the world. I spent tens of thousands of dollars. And then sure enough, it was kind of month by month, year by year, I slowly started to see improvements. And everything started to get better. My brain fog lifted, my energy lifted. And then I remember getting to the topic of sleep. I’m like, let’s give this a shot. So I started sleeping a little bit better. And I had a sleep tracker at the time. And sure enough, I felt amazing the next day, and I was tracking all this. I was kind of a nerd with all the data and put into my book and then on an Excel sheet. I mean, as a finance guy, I’m a numbers guy. So of course, I’m going to have to do that. And yeah, sleep was the one thing that really transformed everything. And then sure enough, so the last five years.

Andi Simon: So, did you discover that on your own or was there a physician that helped you with it, or shaman? You got a lot of self reflection on your part.

Riley Jarvis: I think it was just a lot of self reflection on my part because I grouped it. I was looking at my hormones, my brain neurotransmitters, my gut and all these different things. And eventually I knew it was like, okay, on this month, I’m going to focus on sleep. And then you track what those improvements would be. And those were higher than any other thing that I was doing before. And it turned out because my body wasn’t sleeping, restoring itself. And because the inflammation that was inside of me, better sleep really helped repair and recover that.

So as a result, fast forward to today, for the last five years, the Crohn’s has been in 100%, complete remission. Doctors don’t know why, when I go to see them, they don’t know how to make sense of it. So it’s kind of a joke that I have with myself. But now I mean, that’s my story. And that’s where I had a disease state. And I hope to inspire other people through my story. People won’t be on the extreme, but I want to show them that even if they feel tired, even if they’re looking to improve their performance, they can absolutely do it with their sleep.

Sleep is one part that is so neglected. As a society, we’re always talking about how it’s a hustle culture. Why would we sleep when we can sleep less and get more done. Drink coffee, get on with it, if we feel wired at nighttime, drink alcohol or sleeping pills. It’s just a lot of these things to mask a deeper problem that’s going on. But in an ideal world, we wouldn’t need any of this if our body was operating as it should. I mean, if you kind of go to the root of what was actually coming from it for every person, it’s a little bit different. So that’s where I help people now through my story.

And I take people’s results pretty personally because it’s just so interesting to see different people from walks of life. Sleep is that one thing that everybody needs, that nobody can escape from. It’s one of the things that you have to do. Like you have to pay taxes, you have to sleep. And eventually, one day, you’ll be in the grave, right? Those are the three things you can guarantee within your life. So why not optimize sleep, something you can do anyway.

And what’s amazing with sleep, it’s not a drastic change to your existing lifestyle. I mean, if you look at your diet, like changing your diet drastically to lose all these pounds, if that’s your goal, that’s a lot of work. Going to the gym is a lot of work. But sleep is something you’re doing already anyway. And I’ve had people who have lost like 60 pounds just from fixing their sleep alone, without changing any other routines, just because metabolism goes up. And that’s just one example of many, but it’s just amazing the power of sleep.

Andi Simon: Pause for a second Riley because I’m reflecting as you’re talking. I want the listeners or the audience to think about things that they have seen or heard so they can make this extremely relevant beyond themselves. We’re involved in Washington University in St. Louis. We donated a room in the new athletic facility and the athletic director, Anthony, changed it from a study room to a resting room. He gave it a good name, better than I call it. What he found was that many of the athletes were proud of how little sleep they had. And so what he did was he changed the whole story, the whole narrative. So that rest was good. And sleep was good. And he didn’t want to hear about how little they had because it impacted their performance.

He also put in yoga, meditation, mindfulness, mind body balance, and their performances all rose as they began to sleep. So just to add a little to your story about us in very awful ways, because they were proud of it and celebrated how little they could get by with. This was stoic and wonderful. This was killing them. So your program as it evolved, did it just come aboard? How much science is there here? And how much Riley is there here?

Riley Jarvis: That’s a really good question. So yes, it did evolve over time. It’s kind of a work in progress over the last five years, because it started out helping people with sleep. It was just sort of local friends and then it was their parents, and then friends of friends. I kind of got a local name for myself, but then it expanded nationally. And now it’s worldwide helping people virtually, in group settings, or in 1-on-1-based settings. It is a science. It’s really nice that I don’t do all the work myself and I can lean on science a little bit. So that’s one piece of it. But a lot of it is with myself too. And on an applicable level because yes, science will tell you what you should do, but it’s not always applicable to people’s lives.

And this is where you have to make it very easy for people to have bite sized pieces, and make it fit into their model of the way they live their day-to-day life. Maybe they’re so busy in the daytime with work, and afterwards, they just don’t have any hours in the day. And so it’s like, okay, we’ll just make the most amount of time that you have, like for any 5, 10 minute pockets during your day, but other people will have more time. And sometimes those people get fast results. And that’s okay, too. It just all depends where people are at. So you have to meet them where they’re at, and then guide them along the way.

Andi Simon: When you’re working with them, is each person unique or are there similarities and patterns that you begin to uncover? Or is it in their story? Is it about the habits before you go to sleep that we read about: take that hot bath, don’t get in front of the screen, you don’t want to see all kinds of how you use it. I love to meditate before sleep. I find it really puts me into a deep sleep. And my Sleep Number bed tells me my heart rate variability goes way up and I’m healthy. I meditate before I sleep. What kinds of passive practices do you use? What kind of processes and what kind of recommendations? How do you find it? Is it unique? Are there patterns?

Riley Jarvis: Yeah, that’s a really good question. So it’s both actually. So there’s a lot of overlap in between. So there are patterns and processes I do with everybody. But it all starts with the initial call with them telling me what they’re going through and what their background is. And based on what they tell me, I’m sort of looking at everything under the hood of their biology. Seeing things like what’s going on at a hormone level, what’s happening inside of their brain, what’s happening here, and then based on that I’m going to custom tailor their protocol.

Accordingly, I would say usually, about 50% of the program, regardless when it comes to sleep, is common across the board. And then you know, the next 50%, we’re going to custom tailor based on what somebody needs. How long have they been suffering for? Somebody who’s in their 20s and they’re looking to really improve their productivity, maybe they want to build a business so they can travel the world versus somebody who’s in their 60’s or 70’s, their goal is longevity. And they want to live as long as they can with the goal being that that they can achieve for years to come. And that goal is a little bit different. So that’s where we’ll adjust things accordingly.

Andi Simon: As you and I had talked about even my own situation, you were really interesting to me in terms of the way the brain needs sleep and what it does during sleep and the ritual of what time you go to bed and when you wake up. You’re going to talk to us a little bit more about what’s going on in your brain during that sleep. Sleep time.

Riley Jarvis: Yeah, that’s another very good question. So our brain is a very complex machine, especially when it comes to sleep. And the science really points to knowing what’s going on with our diet, what’s happening inside of our body and with the movement exercise. We really have that down. But, sleep,to be honest, really in the infancy stages. And it’s so interesting every day there’s new science coming out about it. It’s a really cool domain to be within.

But in layman’s terms, if I could simplify for people, our brains run in 90-minute sleep cycles. And our brain will start from a light sleep. You can think of it as we go into something known as alpha, then we go into delta theta brainwave, so we go deeper and deeper. And that’s kind of like where you feel that meditative state. And then we go to light sleep where somebody could wake us up, but we’re still sleeping. Then we go into deep sleep and then REM sleep. And this is where we’re getting the most amount of rejuvenation for our body and for our mind.

Now usually the first half of our sleep is repairing. It’s majority deep sleep, so that’s repairing our body. The second half of sleep is repairing our mind because it’s more REM sleep dominant. And during REM sleep we’re doing a lot of things, our brain is consolidating memories from the day before, trying to make sense of our world and reality. That’s why we dream so much. Even though it makes no sense. It’s just trying to make sense of how we navigate to the next day in the best way possible. It’s got a lot of evolutionary adaptations as well, and stuff like that.

And what happens is, when a lot of people wake up in the middle of night, they don’t get that full REM sleep. Sure their bodies repaired, but if somebody goes to bed at 10pm, they wake up at 2 or 3am and they can’t get to sleep, they’re not going to get that quality REM sleep that they need for the next day for their mind to fully operate. And then they’re tired the next day, and they need to go for coffee to compensate for that. Well, now it’s hard to get to sleep because you’re stimulated and it’s just the ongoing cycle for a lot of people too.

The other thing to keep in mind is because our sleep cycles are 90 minutes, we usually want to wake up every 90 minutes. So we don’t wake up in the middle of a deep sleep, let’s say for example, 90 minutes, three hours, four and a half, six hours, seven and a half hours. A lot of people think eight hours is a sweet spot. It’s very good if we can get over five hours. But the sleep usually seven and a half is better than eight for most people. But it depends. I mean, this is where self experimentation comes in. But from a simplistic point of view, that’s what I’d say.

Andi Simon: What’s interesting about what you’re saying is what do we do to control it. It’s hard enough to control a new diet, or a new exercise plan, but a new sleep pattern, where every 90 minutes, and then I want to go seven and a half hours. Is it in my control or out of my control? What’s the methodology for giving us more control over it to help us?

Riley Jarvis: There’s many things you can do. So what that really comes down to is all about the evening routine. A lot of the time when we wake up in the middle of the night, it’s because of a few things. One is our cortisol spikes. So our stress hormones will start to come up. The root cause of this could be a nightmare that we’re having, it could be something inside of us. There’s a lot of inflammation, or brain neurotransmitters are just firing, we’re thinking too much, could be a myriad of things. And that’s where working with somebody getting to the root cause of what that might be. But just general low hanging fruit, I think it would be a good time to run through some of the top 10 things that people can start to implement to have better sleep throughout the night. So they can minimize those interruptions and get to sleep faster and we get more rejuvenated. Sound good?

Andi Simon: Tell us about the top 10 things. I’m looking forward to hearing you.

Riley Jarvis: Alright, let’s go. So number one, we want to find out what our sleep animal sign is. And what that means is, we are genetically wired to either be a morning person or a night person or maybe a combination of them all. And ideally, the best way to figure this out is by doing a genetic test. This is one thing that I do with my clients. But if you go to www.thepowerofwhenquiz.com, it’s actually a questionnaire that you can answer and kind of get an idea if you are a morning or nighttime person. We want to match what our Crona biology genetics are with our external environments. A lot of people stay up late, but they’re actually genetically wired to be a morning person. And it’s no wonder why they feel so sleepy in the morning sometimes. So it’s getting that match between two.

And when you do that with people, it’s just amazing how much better they feel. Moving on to number two. We want to have no caffeine after 2pm and 11am if you’re sensitive. I won’t go into the details too much on that. But that’s a big one because you know, caffeine can stay inside of us for up to 14 hours.

Andi Simon: Now let me emphasize that means no Coke, no chocolate, not just coffee and tea. Years and years ago, I was running a bank and I had a secretary who filled my cup up all day long. And so I couldn’t go to sleep at night. I couldn’t wake up in the morning and then I went cold turkey for a week of headaches, and I haven’t had it since. You don’t realize how many ways some people like caffeine as a stimulant and others don’t. So that’s a good number two, now number three.

Riley Jarvis: Number three. We want to reduce blue light exposure two hours before bedtime. A recent study came out of infants who were exposed to a one-hour blue light prior to bed. It reduced their melatonin by 99%. Now I could tell you adults are probably very similar to that. So melatonin is our sleep hormone that we know you need to stay asleep and everything with that so just be careful. You can also wear blue light blocking glasses. Check it out on Amazon. Swanwick glasses are also another great option to use as well.

Andi Simon: What is blue light?

Riley Jarvis: Blue light is a light frequency. So light comes in many different light frequencies. We have red light, we have blue light, as based on a different spectrum and different light wavelengths are more stimulatory than others. Blue light happens to be on the far end of the extreme that is very stimulatory for our body and our brain. So it’s good in the morning, like when we go outside and we get the sun coming through from that blue light there. We feel energized and ready to go. But at nighttime, we don’t want that too much. We want more red light form. That’s why when you see these blue blocking glasses, they’re tinted red, because it stops that blue light from coming into your eyes as much as possible.

Andi Simon: And is that from your computer screen?

Riley Jarvis: So it’s from your computer screen. It could be from your phone, it could be from the lights around your house. It could also be while you’re asleep as well from any cable boxes, clocks, fans. Even when our eyes are closed, we actually have light receptors around our eyes that can detect any forms of light. So in an ideal world, this is a little unrealistic for some people, but we would be so dark we couldn’t see your hand in front of us. And that’s what we want to aim for. But do the best that you can.

All right, let’s go on to number four. This one’s pretty self explanatory, we want to sleep in a cool bedroom environment. That’s about 67 to about 70 degrees Fahrenheit and about 18 to 20 degrees Celsius or below if we can. And the reason is our bodies sleep best at a cool temperature. In a 24 hour period, it’s coolest around 3am, so we want our environment that’s conducive to that.

Andi Simon: I must confess though, when it’s minus one out, as it has been here, I opened my window a little bit to let that cool air and it feels wonderful for a while. I’m not quite sure how cool I want it. But I agree with you because I sleep much better when it’s cool. I prefer the air to come in. So I hate hotels, you can’t let any air in.

Riley Jarvis: I know that’s just it. But the other thing is when it’s cool like that, especially in the wintertime, where you and I are, it’s hard to get out of bed in the morning, because it’s warm on your sheets, but outside it’s very difficult to go, especially if we have to get up to go to work.

Number five. We want to just completely blackout our bedroom as much as possible. So this just goes into what I was saying before TVs, cable boxes, fans, anything that’s producing light inside of your bedroom. You can put duct tape over it. Use whatever you want to come up with that can just really help you throughout the nighttime to not wake up.

Number six. We do not want to eat any heavy meals about three to four hours prior to bedtime. And the reason is because we have a meal, a lot of that is our body resources will be digesting that food instead of repairing our body when we need it to. It can cause blood sugar spikes and drops and our body just wants to stay in a safe zone, it doesn’t want to go too much too high or too low. And that’s what’s really important there. So if you can do that, that’s really good.

So if you’re going to bed by 10pm, having your last meal maybe five, six o’clock, that would be a good sweet spot. Any longer, people may notice that they don’t sleep that well. So if you are eating later close to bed, try reducing the hours or increasing the hours prior to sleep. And you should notice a difference.

Number seven. Along the same lines, we don’t want to do any intense exercise four to five hours prior to sleep. And this is because it increases our stimulatory hormone cortisol and everything else that goes along with increasing your body temperature. So you can go for a walk at nighttime, that’s great. But any intense exercise, lifting weights, a lot of the people that I work with are high performing, high achievers, who are looking to gain a ton of muscle and working out in the evening at nighttime isn’t really necessary for all of them and impacts their sleep directly. Saving it for the afternoon is a good place to do as well.

Number eight. This is one of the most interesting ones because a lot of people think that good sleep is all about the evening routine. But equally, it’s also about the morning routine. And it’s because we need to train our body to know when naturally it is a time to wake up and when naturally it is time to go to bed. And if we can get the morning routine down, what we’ll find is we’ll just naturally start getting tired in the evening when the body is supposed to get tired and that causes us to wake up with an abundance of energy. It’s not an overnight process.

But the way we do it is when we first wake up, within the first hour I would say, we go for a walk outside and expose our eyes to the sun. Don’t wear sunglasses for about 15-20 minutes. It’s a great place to start. Where I am, there’s not too much sun. You can buy on Amazon Lumi lights. They have 10,000 Lux, that’s just the light meter that comes into your eyes and that can really help if you just do that 20-30 minutes in the morning.

Number nine. This one is probably one you’re familiar with, Andrea. We want to do a guided meditation 20 minutes before bed. Great resources on this actually. I mean YouTube has so many good free resources. They’re called the Honest Guys on YouTube. Sam Ovens is another one that’s really good as well. But yeah, those are great resources.

Number ten. Have no alcohol about 4-6 hours prior to sleep. A lot of people drink alcohol to try and wind down prior to bed which would make sense and I did that in my early sleep journey too. I’m definitely guilty of that. But what it does is it directly negatively impacts your REM sleep and actually affects your sleep quality negatively.

Andi Simon: Yes, it’s interesting because if we are out for dinner and we have a glass of wine or scotch, two and three in the morning I am all wound up and then I go to sleep, but I don’t stay asleep. It’s not good for the whole night. The other thing is, people don’t fully understand that during sleep, your mind is processing and you said it at the beginning, I want to emphasize it, your mind’s processing it, all the things that happened during the day before. My meditation tape says, you cannot do anything about yesterday, tomorrow hasn’t happened yet, you’re in the moment, stay in the moment. And let your mind go quiet, breathe deeply. You know, get into a moment where you’re not thinking about anything, you are just being and feel whatever you’re sitting on or sleeping on and begin to just get away from time and space.

I find it very interesting because your mind is looking for that client so it can do its stuff. Because it has a whole lot of work to do all night long to make sense of everything that you put into it so that you wake up in the morning fresh with a great perspective. I find that my morning is my best thinking time, my best writing time, my best time. My complex problem solving is first thing in the morning, and I’m a wake up five o’clock in the morning, six o’clock in the morning person. And so I’m raring to go. 7:30-8:00 o’clock at night, everything’s quieting down and you’re ready to let the mind have a little time off from the behavior. You’re physically depleted as well, as you discovered with your Crohn’s disease.

Riley Jarvis: Yeah, that’s just it. Yeah, the sleep is so important for repair. And what you were saying is very true. That old adage of sleep on it. I mean, it’s actually true if you utilize your subconscious mind. There was a really good book, Psycho Cybernetics by Maxwell Maltz. And he talks about the power of the subconscious mind. It’s sometimes like, do you ever get that feeling where just a brilliant idea pops into your mind when you’re in the shower, you’re not thinking too much? Well, that’s your subconscious mind working in the background. We don’t consciously always have to be thinking to do that. With our sleep, it’s the same thing. If we can’t figure out what a problem is, our unconscious mind, our brain will work on the problem. And we usually wake up with the answer.

Andi Simon: I want you to emphasize that because if you sleep on it, your mind isn’t going away. It’s actually a lot of work going on during that time to help you solve that complexity that you’ve got. The worst thing you could do is sit up all night trying to figure it out. That won’t work at all.

Riley Jarvis: As I found out, and when I wrote my exams, trying to pull all nighters is not a good idea.

Andi Simon: This is an interesting time because I don’t need to pull all nighters. But I do need to get good sleep as most of us do. And to your point, I have a friend who goes to bed at midnight and wakes up at 10 in the morning. That’s a good time for her. By 10 o’clock in the morning, I’ve already gone through four hours of my day. And I know not to call her before 10 o’clock. I couldn’t imagine wasting my morning. It’s my favorite time of the day. 

Riley Jarvis: Yeah, it’s amazing before the world starts to wake up, I completely relate. I’m a morning person as well.

Andi Simon: My puppy and I go for early morning walks when it’s warm. It’s the best time. It’s sort of exhilarating. So finally, this has been such fun. As you’re thinking about wrapping us up, a couple of things you want our listeners or audience to remember. And I’d love you to then tell them how to get ahold of you.

Riley Jarvis: Absolutely, it’s pretty simple. They can go to www.sleepconsultant.com. There you can see everything that we offer. We have a free sleep assessment questionnaire so you can see on a scale of one to 10 where you fall, and based on where you fall, I have specific training that you can utilize as well. I’ll send directly to your email that you have. I just keep you in the loop of newsletters, sleep tips and all these other things. If you want to reach out to me directly, you can reach me at Riley@sleepconsultant.com.

Andi Simon: And Riley also has his podcast which I will be on. What is the name of your podcast?

Riley Jarvis: It is called Sleep for Side Hustlers. And we show people how to utilize sleep in order to improve their productivity. It could be for an entrepreneur but it really could just be for everybody because again, everybody needs better sleep. We talk about different modalities and everything to do on there too.

Andi Simon: My last question is about kids. Does your methodology work for children as well and should it?

Riley Jarvis: It does. It’s just with children, you have to be a lot more careful. They’re usually more sensitive to certain things. For that reason they are my specialty. That’s where you have infant sleep specialists who do that. But yeah, it’s a similar approach. It’s just you have to be a little bit more careful with some of them as well.

Andi Simon: Because I certainly remember raising my daughters and trying to get into habits. And they abandon them, of course, when they turn into teenagers, but I think they’ve recovered over the years. But you know, parenting is important, but sleep is important for the parent and for the kids. And if you can get them into good habits, they can build up whatever those natural pieces, even if they just sit in bed, read until they’re ready to quiet down and go to sleep. So it’s important. And then the morning rituals become extremely important. So think about this intentionally. And that will give you purpose and meaning. Well, I’ve had Riley Jarvis from Ottawa here today. He has been talking about a really important topic: how do we get a good night’s sleep. So it’s been great fun. Last thought Riley and then I’ll wrap this up.

Riley Jarvis: If I were to give three quick top points for people to utilize throughout their day, the first one would obviously be sleep. We don’t want to think about hustling to get ahead. We want to think about improving our biology first through better sleep. And through that, we’ll be able to experience life in a much more effortless way with better relationships. We can focus more and that just manifests into whatever material outcomes you want out of your life. Maybe it’s more money, maybe it’s a better relationship with your kids, or becoming a better leader in the workplace. So that is one we want to think about instead of pushing to get ahead, drinking more coffee to get ahead. That’s one of them.

The second one is, we want to be very intentional with the hours that we have to use in the day. It’s all about energy management and output. So once we figure out if we’re more of a morning or a nighttime person, we really want to optimize getting the best work done first thing in the morning. So we call them the morning lark. They usually get their best work done that requires the most cognitive heavy tasks between 10am and 12pm. And then as the day goes on, we want to save just general meetings or stuff like that.

And number three, I would say is, if we can prioritize reducing just overall lifestyle inside of our day, and that could be have a better diet, better exercise, oh just different things. But whatever works best for us. As long as you can be better today than yesterday, then you’re in the right place.

Andi Simon: I think you have to measure, monitor and give it some way of calibrating that this progress is going on. If not, the habits will take over and take you back to where you didn’t want to be. And the new will have a hard time getting embedded into new habits. And this isn’t casual. It’s really important. So thank you for today’s great conversation.

Riley Jarvis: Thanks so much, Andrea.

Andi Simon: Pleasure. Let me wrap up for all our listeners. Thank you. Remember info@AndiSimon.com is where you can send us your ideas. We get tips and tricks from across the globe, new people to speak to and I always enjoy bringing them to you. My job is to get you off the brink. Remember my books. Both of them are available at Amazon, Barnes and Noble and your local booksellers. And Rethink is going gangbusters. So thank you for all of that support.Rethink: Smashing The Myths of Women in Business is all about women who smashed those myths, and they are doing extremely well. It’s a year gone now and I am excited to celebrate one year’s celebration. It’s just cool. I’ll see you next week. It’s been fun. Take care. Thank you again.