Ep 002: How sleep changes an entrepreneur's life? - A conversation with Pat Flynn

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Guest: Pat Flynn

By Yishan Xu, Ph.D.

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TODAY’S GUEST

Pat Flynn!

A father, husband, and entrepreneur who lives and works in San Diego, CA.

His podcast is one of the first podcasts that I listened. He owns several successful online businesses and is a professional blogger, keynote speaker, Wall Street Journal bestselling author, and host of the Smart Passive Income and AskPat podcasts, which have earned a combined total of over 55 million downloads, multiple awards, and features in publications such as The New York Times and Forbes. He is also an advisor to ConvertKit, LeadPages, Teachable, and other companies in the digital marketing arena.

Actually, Pat helped me to name my podcast and that’s how I get this fantastic name: “Deep into Sleep“!

WHAT WILL WE LEARN

  • Challenges with sleep and work-life balance an entrepreneur faces.

  • The negative cycle between working at night, lack of sleep and experiences of low energy level.

  • How did Pat switched from a night owl to an early bird, and what can help us to get up early in the morning?

    • change our mindset!

      • Hal’s suggestion for difficulties getting up in the morning: hit the snooze button = going back to sleep is more important than what you want to do during the day

      • Mental shift: getting up early to get “Me Time.“

  • What changes in sleep has Pat made to be a more energetic, happy, and successful entrepreneur?

    • wake up early

    • track sleep with a calm attitude

    • change diet

  • Pat’s top tips for sleeping well and working well.

    • wake up earlier between sleep cycles

    • have a coffee curfew

    • sleep in a cooler environment

RESOURCES

Pat’s website: www.smartpassiveincome.com

Pat will release a new book “Superfans: The Easy Way to Stand Out, Grow Your Tribe, and Build a Successful Business”

Launch Date: Tuesday, August 13th

I already pre-ordered it, and if you want to do so, the link is: Yoursuperfans.com

Pre-order bonuses:

• An invitation to a 90-minute free training call with Pat Flynn on August 16th at 1:00 p.m. (Pacific Time)

• A free download of the Superfans audiobook, which will be sent via email on the day the book launches

Books and products Pat mentioned in the show:

  • Oura ring (track our sleep)

  • “The Miracle Morning“

  • Keto Low Carb diet

  • Meet Edgar social media scheduling (set consequences for not waking up early)

Thank You for Listening!

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These can help the podcast reach more out those who struggle with sleep and those who want to learn more about sleep.

Finally, feel free to join our community by signing up the Deep into Sleep newsletter. You’ll learn valuable tips about sleep and get the podcast episodes delivered right to your inbox.

Click here, to find out more about Dr. Yishan Xu’s Insomnia Treatment Group (CBTi).



Transcript

-   0:02  

Welcome to deep into sleep with Dr. yishan xu. Let's improve sleep quality and live a healthy life together. Let's go deep into sleep. And now please welcome your host Yishan.

-   0:21  

Hi this is Isha and welcome to deep into sleep. Episode Two. Imagine if you are a night owl for many, many years, and you struggle to work really late and cannot get enough sleep and have trouble to get up in the morning. And one day you decide I'm going to turn myself into an early bird. What your life gonna look like. That's exactly what our today's guest Pat Flynn will share with us his journey of changing sleep that make him a better father. Husband and a more successful entrepreneur, Pat Flynn on several successful online businesses. And he is the host of two very successful podcasts, the Smart Passive income and ask Pat, these two podcasts combined together have earned over 55 million downloads. Let's hear about his journey for a good night's sleep. Hi, Pat, welcome to deep into sleep. Thank you, Shawn. Thank you for having me. I'm excited to talk about this today. Great. So I'm so curious as a successful and busy entrepreneur, are there any challenges with your sleep?

-   1:44  

Yes, I think this is something all entrepreneurs and especially people who just are excited about life, you know, it's it's hard to sleep sometimes because there's so many things that we want to do and especially as an entrepreneur, you have always growing to do list. You know, the used to work a nine to five job and I definitely remember what it was like back then. And I remember coming home from work and just being able to turn work off and turn on, you know, personal life and getting dinner and then going to sleep and getting ready for work the next day. And it was always more regular that way, but since being an entrepreneur, which started in 2008, so it's been about 11 years since I've been doing this. Sleep has been very irregular. And I remember when I first started out, I thought I was in that small group of people who didn't need, you know, seven to eight hours of sleep and I could survive and that's how I got through college. You know, I was an architect, so we were quite busy all the time. And, you know, I, I felt that there was energy but as I've gotten a little bit older, I'm 36 years old. Now I've realized that sleep is probably one of the most important things for me, as a business owner as a husband as a father for my mood for my creativity as a performer. As somebody who speaks on stage as somebody who writes a lot of books I need, I've noticed that sleep has been so important. And I only wish that I was a little bit more wiser back then because it makes me wonder how much more energy I would have. And, you know, I The challenge is just it's hard to turn off being an entrepreneur and especially even even now with whether you're an entrepreneur or not, you likely are staying up late, you know, watching Netflix or on your device, or iPad or in front of your computer doing something even if it's not work. And I know that you know that that blue light that's emitted if you don't, you know, pay attention to that it can it can reduce the quality of sleep that you have, or make it a little bit harder to sleep. And there's so many challenges to sleep now. And it's tough because I think we're starting to finally realize things that people like yourself, just how important it is. Yet we still are getting in our own way of doing sleep. And I think I think The biggest thing for me is I used to think that, Oh, well, you know, I could get an extra hour of work in if I just, you know, take away an extra hour of sleep. But I've realized that it's the opposite. If I actually get more sleep, my work is more productive. And it's just such a challenge, because now that I'm on my own, and I have so many things to do, you know, I often sacrifice sleep for that.

-   4:22  

Yeah, exactly. I definitely hear a lot of people talking about that. And this is great that you share this. And sounds like when you become an entrepreneur, and when you're on your own life is less structured. So there's a lot more you have to figure out and sometime tend to prioritize work over sleep, the energy level really connect to sleep. And I'm very curious, because when I took your power up podcasting class, you mentioned you did something to your sleep you adjusted you'll change it somehow. And I really want to know what have you done with your sleep?

-   5:00  

Yeah, I mean, in architecture and throughout my early parts of my entrepreneurial career, I was a night owl, and I would do a lot of my work late at night. And I would, you know, get a lot of my writing done after midnight. And then I heard about this guy named Hal Elrod, who came out with this book in this sort of movement called the Miracle Morning. And it was about personal development and focusing on not just getting sleep, but waking up earlier. And which obviously means you got to go to bed a little earlier, and I experimented with that. I wanted to try it and see what happens. And I soon realized that the early morning wakeup times were much more productive than the stay up late times. And so I would do things in the morning like, journal and meditate and those kinds of things. A lot of personal development. The other cool thing about this was, it was before anybody else in the house was woken up So I had time to myself. And I have two young kids as well. And I knew that once they were up, it was hard to do work. So it really encouraged me to make sure I was super productive in the morning. So after my personal development stuff, I would get a lot of work done. And I would get it done really fast. I had a full tank of energy from the night's sleep before. So this is different because before I would just use whatever fumes are left over in the day to get my work done. But I changed to a morning routine and it really changed my, my, my sleeping patterns. And in addition to that, I mean, there's always been a number of things that I've tried and I've attempted to do. Like for example, I love to track and I've been using a device called an aura ring. There's a lot of devices that help you keep track of your sleep and the quality of sleep but I've using I'm using a it's a ring called the aura ring. Oh you are a and it keeps track of your movement at night and it gets very specific in terms of how much light sleep you've had, how much deep sleep how much REM and I've been paying attention to just about Well, what I do during the day and how active I am or what I eat even has played a role in my sleep and how that affects the quality of my sleep. And when I wake up in the morning, I sync my ring to my app, and it tells me Oh, here's your sleep score. And that's really motivating for me, because then I can, I can actually be conscious of what's happening. I think, you know, he went 35 years of my life, just sleeping without a care of how great that sleep was. And now I'm actually paying attention and I'm making active choices during the day to influence the quality of my sleep, knowing that it's going to help the next day for me. So that's another thing that I've been doing. And then the last thing has been really focusing on my diet. And I've noticed that since shifting to a keto slash low carb type diet, that it's really been helping me get a lot more longer, deeper sleep, which is really interesting. And a weird side effect is when I first went on the keto diet, I've been having these very vivid dreams as well. Which is really interesting. And it's gotten me interested in things like lucid dreaming and trying to, you know, see what I can do while I sleep to just have more fun with it. I don't know, it's just I've been I'm always experimenting with new things. But those are, those are some of the big things that I've done that had an effect on my sleep cycle.

-   8:18  

Wow, that's great. And sounds like you not only shift your circadian rhythm from a night owl to an early morning person, and then get a lot done, but you also, you're really on top of monitoring your sleep pattern and how that even relates to your, like nutrition level, your diet, and all together to adjust yourself to live healthier,

-   8:44  

trying I'm trying and you know, it's not perfect and like the other night I had some work to do and I was like, Okay, I'll stay up later to do this and knowing that the next day I wasn't able to do it. So you know, there it's not perfect, but I think that the biggest thing for me is even though I know that I'm not perfect all the time. And I do have nights where the sleep score is low that it just means, you know, I just have to try better next time and, you know, it's just like going on a diet, right? Like you can be feeling like you have to be 100% perfect. And then the moment you have a snack, maybe that you shouldn't have, it's all ruined, it just means no, no, you just come back and try better next time. And that's how I feel about my sleep too. But I, I mean, I, I wake up in the morning, and I just assess my feelings and I look at my app to see okay, how did I do last night and it's really motivating for me to improve and also, you know, I do and it's interesting, I look at the score and I'm like, Yes, today is going to be a good day. Yeah, and the opposite. When I have a bad score. I'm like, Okay, I'll do better tomorrow. I never make it Oh, I failed. But I always make it okay, I can do better or Hey, today is going to be great and that influence it does influence my decisions for the day. It does influence my activity for It's just, you know how you wake up is is how you have your day and if you wake up and you start thinking it's gonna be a bad day you know you're probably gonna have a bad day and if you wake up and you have a feeling that like it's gonna be a good day you'll you're more likely to have a productive and good day. Yeah,

-   10:16  

exactly. This is fascinating how you wake up during the day and start the day. It's so important because in sleep, we always talk about waking up at the same time, actually set anchor for your whole day. And it's very important and you add on more like the attitude you wake up with how you think about your last night's sleep, how you think about the day ahead of you, is also play a big role. I really really like your attitude, especially when you have a bad score or not so good score. A lot of people. When you talk about tracking the sleep, my worry is a lot of patient I have seen they get so anxious. They Check their score. They're like, Oh, no, this is bad. I slept poorly last night. And what if I didn't sleep like this? For the next several days, my sleep is broken. But for you, you are full of hope. And you are very optimistic. You see the score, you only say, Oh, I will do better tomorrow. That's a lot of hope. That's a lot of like the message you send yourself. It's strong. You're actually empowering yourself.

-   11:28  

Yeah, I mean, it wasn't always that way. And this is stuff that I've learned as an entrepreneur, the attitude really creates the reality. And that's how I feel like I've become successful not because I had anything handed to me, I worked hard to get here. But also I've had a lot of help from people. And I've realized that it's the mindset really like it's the mind that controls the body, and it's the mind that controls the output. And so the more that I can focus on having a better mindset related to anything in my life, the more likely it is I am to be happy. Beer ultimately, and to have a better life and to be able to better provide for my family and the better I'm able to provide for my audience and serve them too. So it's all about the mindset. And you know, that's, you know, when you're sleeping, it's the it's the the brain that gets to recharge. And that's where your mindset is, right. So it's all connected. It's really interesting. And I found that just having just number one, like if anybody out there is listening, and you're just starting to learn how to sleep better, and you're starting to realize the importance of it, I think the most important thing is just, you know, you've already accomplished step one, which is knowing that, hey, this is important, just like if you have a drinking problem, the first step is to know that you have a drinking problem, and then you can consciously get help, whether that's help from others, or helping yourself or reading material or listening to podcasts like this. And, you know, the first step is just being conscious of it. And that's why, you know, I think I think, you know, again, it's all about the mindset.

-   12:59  

Yeah. Yeah, definitely. And self awareness is the foundation, right? The first step. Absolutely, yeah. And the men set similarly to how we treat insomnia, other sleep disorders. We also use a lot of ways to shift people's mindset that sleep is not broken. And sleep can be better. There are a lot of hope we just need adjust ourselves accordingly. Yeah, so I really liked the mindset piece.

-   13:27  

I think the other part of this is is thinking about Okay, well, what happens if I don't change my ways? What happens if I don't focus on these important aspects of my life? And I think about sleep and I, you know, there's a lot of good TED Talks out there. There's there's a guy, gosh, I can't remember his name, but he's also a sleep expert. And he was introduced

-   13:45  

a worker Yeah, yeah,

-   13:46  

yeah, he was on the Joe Rogan podcast which I listened to and he talked for two and a half hours about sleep and the consequences of not getting proper sleep and I you know, there's there's Alzheimer's disease and things like that. That can happen. Later in life that, you know, can come along, all of a sudden, as a result of years and years of poor sleep, and it really scared me because, you know, I would, like I'm imagining my kids older. And if I had some, you know, mental health issues as a result of a lack of sleep, it would be a burden to them, it would be sad, it would be like, what if I forget them? That that's like, my ultimate nightmare is if I were to be older and have them need to take care of me, but then, you know, I forget who they are. I mean, that's, that's an extreme case. But I think about those things and it makes me again, it just, it just helps. It helps solidify the idea of Okay, sleep is important, and I must, you know, make sure to take care of myself. And I have consciously made decisions when I could stay up later to not so that that doesn't happen later in life.

-   14:53  

Right. Yeah, it's it's definitely a great motivation to keep on reminding ourselves The consequences of losing sleep not getting enough sleep and not working on sleep. Yeah. So one small point when you mentioned I'm just curious because I struggle this myself too. I try to I'm not really a night owl, but I'm evening tendency person. So I tried to wake up early. But no matter how hard I try, I have trouble. I think a lot of our listeners have that struggle to Is there any tips you to help yourself wake up early, sleep early and wake up early and make it happen?

-   15:38  

Yeah, I mean, there's some tips that I've heard other people do, and I'll share mine as well. But one tip that I heard somebody create was, they used a tool called I think it was, I think it was Meet Edgar. And there's a lot of tools like this buffer and these are these are website applications, where you can pre write a tweet Pre schedule it. And this person, his name is James clear. And he wrote a book called atomic habits. And he talks a lot about forming good habits to support your life. And this was one of his strategies was, he wanted to wake up earlier as well. So he pre wrote a tweet that goes out every day, I think 5:30am that his entire audience would see. Unless he turns it off. And in order for him to turn it off, he has to wake up and turn it off. So if, if he over sleeps, his audience will see a message that says, Hey, everybody, I slept I overslept. Please comment and let me know like How shameful I are what I can't remember the exact language but it wasn't harsh. It was just like him, admitting automatically to everybody every day that he didn't wake up on time. And of course, he didn't want that to happen. He didn't want that message to go out. So he created a recurring consequence, a light one but a consequence nonetheless. would go out if he didn't wake up and I don't I don't do that. But that's an interesting strategy that I heard that I was just reminded of. So you could do something similar, where there is a consequence on a daily basis, and you'd have to sort of wake up to turn it off. And that that is enough for him at least to get you out of bed to do that, for me, my motivator. So number one, it's just I remember when I shifted to the morning routine, it was difficult. I pressed snooze a lot. And it took me about two weeks to shift from night owl to morning person and wake up before 5am. And it was a lot of failures, a lot of mistakes. But here is the thing that Hal told me because I told him that I was having trouble waking up early early and I was hitting the snooze button a lot and he says, you know every time you hit the snooze button, you're telling yourself that going back to sleep is more important. Then the things you have to accomplish today. And so when you go to bed at night, I want you to think about what are the things that you want to accomplish the next day so that when you wake up those will be on your mind and you'll be less likely to hit that snooze button. And and I was like whoa that's that's again mindset right and and so I would wake up and go, Okay, what is more important, hitting the snooze button and getting five more minutes of sleep only to hit the snooze button again for another five minutes or this book that I'm writing that could serve 10s of thousands of people Am I gonna let five minutes of sleep get in the way of helping these people. So that's another mindset thing. And the other thing about the, you know, the alarm and waking up, you know, I think I think the other mindset shift that I had was, you know, traditionally for the first 3534 years of my life, it was how many years ago that I served the Miracle Morning it was it was like five years so for like the first 30 years of my life, anytime an alarm went off. It was For somebody else, yes, it was for me to wake up. But it was for me to wake up so that I could go to school or drop the kids off to school or go to work for somebody else. Never had I considered that I could wake up for me and work on meantime. And when I made that mental shift as well, combined with everything else that I just mentioned, it was like, Oh, this alarm right now is for me, so that I have time to work on myself. And before anybody else before I get to devote my energy to somebody else's career and their dream before I have to worry about getting the kids to school, I can work on me. And so waking up for me, motivated me to get out of bed early in the morning and start and start working on that.

-   19:45  

This is great. I really like that. I don't have to try that. And I believe that can help me to get up early to.

-   19:53  

Yeah, great. You're helping people on this podcast, right and they need Yeah, all this information. I don't know if you're going to be writing a book one day. If you do, but, you know if you were doing that, would you just say, oh all go back to sleep or knowing you have all these people who are listening all these people who could read your books and blogs and all that stuff like pray, you know that way, that there's a reason to wake up, right?

-   20:15  

Yes. Yes. And I love the meantime, part two. Yeah. Great. So the last question. You know, a lot of our listeners on this podcast, they struggle with sleep one way or another. And I want to ask you, what are some top three tips you have about sleep that you want to really share with them?

-   20:36  

Yeah, so one thing I learned is that we sleep in cycles, you know, we go through light and deep and then REM and then we just go through that cycle again and again, in about an hour and a half time periods. It's just our rhythm. And you know, having tracking will show you that but I realized that actually, sometimes this might sound weird, but if you wake up earlier, you You actually are more energized meaning if you wake up as cycles are starting again, if you have your alarm go off in a period where you're in deep sleep, you're usually going to wake up a lot more groggy, it's going to take more time to get, you know started in the day and that can often set you off for a bad day if you consider what we talked about earlier. So usually if you can get sleep in about an hour and a half increments, so you know, waking up for example, with six hours of sleep is better than six and a half hours of sleep, but the ultimate would be seven and a half hours of sleep. Versus eight again, this is what I've learned I don't know if that's that's what you teach each on but that that's what I found and tracking that is confirmed that for me so that's, that's tip number one is see what you can do to try to wake up in between cycles, not in the middle of cycles. You'll have far more energy. Number two, a coffee curfew. I am a coffee drinker and I would drink coffee throughout the day and throw about my work time, and then you know, my last cup of coffee, coffee usually was around 4pm, which would make it a lot harder to sleep because you know, coffee has like an eight hour, half life and it's still in your system and it's more difficult to sleep, you can suffer from insomnia. Do you have that caffeine and you still so I have a coffee curfew of about 1pm. And I found that that's been a dramatic difference in me in terms of how easy it is for me to fall asleep and the quality of sleep that I have as well. My heart's not racing as fast when I'm sleeping too. If you have a lower heart rate while you sleep, you'll get better, deeper sleep. So that's number two is that coffee curfew if you're a coffee drinker have a cut off time so that by the time you're falling asleep, hopefully at the same time every day, you're able to get into sleep much sooner. And then finally, is I've realized that sleeping in a little bit colder environment allows me to go to sleep a little bit faster, and also have better sleep as well. So I am not working wearing heavy pajamas, the air condition has made the house a little bit cooler. And sometimes the windows are open as well, so that it's a little bit colder. Because I've just I don't know the science behind it, but I found that that that does work along with keeping the room as dark as possible. This is why when we go to hotels and we have that blackout curtain and everything's completely dark, we just have an easier time to sleep because it's completely pitch black. And you know, sleeping with the TV on or some lights on it can be a little bit more difficult to get sleep even when you are when your eyes are closed your skin I think has receptors that can still feel that light, and it's gonna reduce the amount of you know, ease when it comes to falling asleep.

-   23:45  

Yeah, great. I love all three tips. And actually all three tips has some science behind it, even though you don't know it. I think you are. You're finding what works for you. That's exactly what sleep is about. Sleep is a very Individually thing, there's a lot of science behind it, but we, we adjust it to make it work for different individuals like that. Yeah, that's great. So, Pat, I know you have a book that you're going to release. I'm actually very excited about that. I already pre ordered it. Oh, yeah, definitely. I do you want to introduce that book too? Oh, yeah.

-   24:24  

I would love to thank you Sean for for allowing me to share this. It's it's not it doesn't have to do with sleep per se, but it is involved with business and entrepreneurship. So anybody out there who's listening who's just curious about my style of entrepreneurship, you know, I am a business owner who really focuses on the experience that people have in my in my brand, and that's really helped me earn a lot of really big raving fans and super fans and I'm just a dude in San Diego who is podcasting from his own house yet I can go somewhere and tweet that I'm going to be at a restaurant somewhere and then my fans will come out and Meet me. And it's just incredible. And they are there to support me and they buy every product and that kind of stuff. This is where business I feel should be done. Just like in the old days where you would go buy bread from Bob the baker, because Bob knew your family and you and you knew Bob and you had a relationship with Him versus how a lot of people are doing business today, which is, you know, these life lists ads and and just spamming and all kinds of stuff. So this book is called super fans. And it's a book to help you learn how to grow your business and grow your tribe and build a future proof business. And it's for all levels of business owners, but I'm very thankful that you know, a lot of people have been resonating with this message and the book comes out on August 13. And it's available on Amazon and Barnes and Noble and other places that you can get books. And just I hope people will after listening to this if they have little inkling of becoming an entrepreneur themselves, maybe you own your own practice. It doesn't kind of doesn't matter what kind of business you have offline or online. You know, you want to build for amazing experiences. Is, and I think that you're gonna find a lot of great tips and strategies in this book to help you help you get that even if you're just starting out. And, you know, it's fun. There's a lot of fun stories in there and a lot of good examples from, you know, solo entrepreneurs and YouTubers, like from those kinds of people all the way to fortune 500 companies and companies like Lego and how they're building fans and these things are so important today. And I know that you Shawn, you're building fans right now by providing some tons of amazing value here on the show. And hopefully I've earned some fans today from from you as well. And yeah, so pick it up super fans by Pat Flynn. You can find it on Amazon if you shouldn't. I don't know if you have a link or something that you want to share with with people after this. But I hope you'll grab it and enjoy it. And I look forward to learning more about you and how you might be starting your business too. And thank you again for allowing me to share that.

-   26:49  

Yes, great. Definitely. All this information will be find on the show notes. For sure. Yes. Okay, great. Thank you for coming past today and I learned a lot A lot from you. And I'm sure the listeners learn a lot from you. And these are value very valuable information. Thank you very much for your time.

-   27:08  

Thank you and hope you all get a good night's sleep tonight.

-   27:12  

I have really enjoyed this conversation with Pat Flynn. Just like what he said prioritizing our sleep is prioritizing our house. Hopefully whoever is listening, you learn as much as what I have learned. You can find more information about Pat and his book and the other resources he talked about in our show note. Our website is deepintosleep.co and his show notes located at deepintosleep.co/episode/002. Thank you for listening. I will see you next time.

Dr. Yishan Xuentrepreneur, sleep, night owl, early bird, insomnia, mindsetComment