Get WAY Better Sleep with Peter Martone, DC, LCP

This week on The Less Stressed Life Podcast, I’m hanging out with Dr. Peter Martone, a chiropractor and injury prevention expert with over 23 years of experience! 🙌 Dr. Martone is sharing his revolutionary approach to sleep and spinal alignment, and trust me, it's a game-changer. He explains how the way we sleep affects not only our spine but also our nervous system and overall health. We dive into his concept of Get W.A.Y. Better Sleep and how fixing your sleep posture can help reduce chronic pain, improve digestion, and even boost your immune system by focusing on your cervical spine. Tune in to hear some super practical tips to improve your sleep, and we also have a fun chat about personality-based sleep types—are you a Gorilla, Armadillo, or Ostrich sleeper? 🤔 You’ll definitely want to find out!

Let’s get you sleeping (and feeling!) better! 🎧✨

Find out what out what sleep animal avatar you are here: https://drsleepright.involve.me/what-animal-do-you-sleep-like

Get the Neck Nest pillow here: https://neck-nest.myshopify.com/

KEY TAKEAWAYS:

• How your sleep position affects your spine and overall health
• The magic of Get W.A.Y. Better Sleep and how sleep posture heals your body
• Sleep personality types—are you a Gorilla, Armadillo, or Ostrich?
• Techniques to stop tossing and turning all night
• Boosting vagal tone for better digestion, immunity, and hormone balance
• Why HOW you fall asleep is more important than how you stay asleep
• The Neck Nest pillow and how it helps restore your spinal health while you snooze! 

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ABOUT GUEST:
Dr. Peter Martone is an educator, injury prevention specialist and patient care health practitioner who has focused on improving patient biomechanics for over 23 years. During his private practice as a chiropractor, Dr. Martone always believed that the structure of your spine affects the function of the central nervous system and this interference is at the root cause of most of the chronic problems people face. Dr. Martone now uses this principle as the cornerstone to help people Get W.A.Y. Better Sleep. His techniques have been featured on CBS, NBC, Fox News, now he travels the country teaching people how to regain their health in the bed by getting WAY Better Sleep. 

WHERE TO FIND:
Website: https://drsleepright.com/
Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/drsleepright/

WHERE TO FIND CHRISTA:
Website: https://www.christabiegler.com/
Instagram: @anti.inflammatory.nutritionist
Podcast Instagram: @lessstressedlife
YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@lessstressedlife
Leave a review, submit a questions for the podcast or take one of my quizzes here: ****https://www.christabiegler.com/links

NUTRITION PHILOSOPHY:

• Over restriction is dead
• Whole food is soul food and fed is best
• Sustainable, synergistic nutrition is in (the opposite of whack-a-mole supplementation & supplement graveyards)
• You don’t have to figure it out alone
• Do your best and leave the rest

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TRANSCRIPT:

[00:00:00] Peter Martone, DC, LCP: when you're up and you're standing. Whether it's glymphatic flow or glymphatic drainage, it requires cerebral spinal flow to go across the brain and through the brain and through the spinal cord. And if you have disruption within movement and loss of structure, all of that glymphatic drainage is becoming an issue

[00:00:19] Christa Biegler, RD: I'm your host, Christa Biegler, and I'm going to guess we have at least one thing in common that we're both in pursuit of a less stressed life. On this show, I'll be interviewing experts and sharing clinical pearls from my years of practice to support high performing health savvy women in pursuit of abundance and a less stressed life.

[00:00:48] Christa Biegler, RD: One of my beliefs is that we always have options for getting the results we want. So let's see what's out there together.

[00:01:06] Christa Biegler, RD: today on The Last Stressed Life, I have Dr. Peter Martone, who is an educator, injury prevention specialist, and patient care health practitioner, who's focused on improving patient biomechanics for over 23 years. During his private practice as a chiropractor, Dr. Martone always believed that the structure of your spine affects the function of the central nervous system, and this interference is at the root cause of most chronic problems.

[00:01:28] Christa Biegler, RD: Problems people face Dr. Martone now uses this principle as the cornerstone to help people get way better sleep, which is an acronym. We can talk about that. His techniques have been featured on CBS, NBC, Fox news, and now he travels the country teaching people how to regain their health in bed by getting way better sleep.

[00:01:44] Christa Biegler, RD: Welcome to the show, Dr. Martone. 

[00:01:46] Peter Martone, DC, LCP: Thank you. That's great. That was well written. 

[00:01:47] Christa Biegler, RD: You wrote it and today Dr. Martone is gracing us. So if you're listening to this on the audio version, you're not going to see that he's wearing pajamas, which is great. Maybe we'll have a little demonstration later, but today we're focusing on what's it mean?

[00:02:03] Christa Biegler, RD: What does it say about you depending on how you sleep? We'll first, we'll start with how we usually start, which is why you got into this exact topic, why you became obsessed with this in practice, and if you're like a lot of good clinicians, you just can't help keep seeing the same thing over and over.

[00:02:19] Christa Biegler, RD: So I'm curious how, we were talking a little bit offline about how you see people's spines destroyed based on their behavior. Daily mechanics, and so I'd like to know, how that started to present itself. Did you see things start to change over time? What did you see in practice? And how'd you get.

[00:02:37] Christa Biegler, RD: Derailed into basically talking all about sleep position. 

[00:02:41] Peter Martone, DC, LCP: I think I really like the topic of the show, right? The less stressed lifestyle, when you look at what is stress is a force that causes change. So you can either have, a eustress or a distress. So you can have good stress, right?

[00:02:54] Peter Martone, DC, LCP: A good stress to the body would be like drinking water. That's basically the stress the body adapts to it. Alcohol is, might be good in some ways, but it's a negative toxin to the body. You stress and distress, and I remember when I was young, when I was in school in chiropractic, I'm an exercise physiologist, I was a nutritionist, I was a professional trainer, and then I went into chiropractic school.

[00:03:14] Peter Martone, DC, LCP: And I asked the president at the time what causes, subluxations, like, why do people need to be adjusted? And he said something that I thought at the time was like a cop out. He goes, it's because of people's lifestyles. Everybody lives the same lifestyle and they're stressing their bodies in the same ways.

[00:03:30] Peter Martone, DC, LCP: So their bodies are going to typically require very similar adjustments, which throws them out of balance. And I'm, and I couldn't comprehend that at the time. And I was living my life. I was adjusting. I was exercising at a very high level, but, and I always had back pain and I was always getting adjusted and I was good while I get adjusted, but I still always had pain while I was seeing my patients.

[00:03:54] Peter Martone, DC, LCP: And it wasn't until I finally herniated my L5 disc in a slight little mountain biking incident. And it wasn't even that bad. I'd been in worse crashes before. that I'm like, how did it come to this? I'm a chiropractor at the time working with patients for 10 years, helping them with pain. And I'm on the emergency room table, hooked up on, on an IV of Dilaudid because I was in so much pain that I couldn't even move.

[00:04:20] Peter Martone, DC, LCP: And I started thinking what am I doing, to be able to do this? Like, why is my body giving me pain? It's, I always thought it was my body doing it and they didn't realize It was me doing it. So I started reviewing x rays when I got out of the hospital. Cause I didn't want surgery. My leg was numb.

[00:04:38] Peter Martone, DC, LCP: I'm like, am I ever going to practice again? So I reviewed at the time, 3000 x rays and I found a pattern that is that the lower back is reactive to cervical head posture. So what that means is. As your head comes forward, due to the righting reflex, you lose your cervical, you lose your cervical curve.

[00:05:01] Peter Martone, DC, LCP: And due to the righting reflex, the body twists the lower back with the psoas major muscle spasm to react to that. So the head comes forward and the body twists to bring the spine back upright. And that psoas attaches directly to the disc. So then I started thinking, I'm like, holy mackerel, I didn't have a back problem all these years.

[00:05:22] Peter Martone, DC, LCP: I got a neck issue and it's reactive and being picked up in my lower back with this short leg like discrepancy. So then I'm like, when can I fix this? I can't fix it during the day. I'm not going to, I got ADD. I'm not going to stretch it, 10 minutes a day. I can do it at night when I sleep, theoretically.

[00:05:40] Peter Martone, DC, LCP: So then I started jamming things under my neck to sleep. Fast forward, my disc problem went away. I've never had back pain again. I live a much, much more active life without pain, which is fantastic. 

[00:05:55] Christa Biegler, RD: This reminds me of the adage that I find extremely true that I think we all have to be reminded of sometimes that what you do all the time matters more than the things that you do once in a while.

[00:06:03] Christa Biegler, RD: And so I have followed my husband through a lot of chiropractic experiences and now chiropractic and physical therapy experiences. And so I have a lot of feelings about this, but the way you describe even how you're Spot, your neck was part of the issue for your lower back. It reminds me and how sleep right?

[00:06:20] Christa Biegler, RD: Why don't you make that? This is such an achiever thing. Like, how can I make my sleep the most productive instead of the most stressful, right? 

[00:06:29] Christa Biegler, RD: Absolutely is. 

[00:06:30] Christa Biegler, RD: It just simply reminds me of the, that similar, but different epiphany I had with Just little rises in your heel and the shoe and how it also jams your back.

[00:06:39] Christa Biegler, RD: And it's oh if you're walking around on this teeny little seven millimeter raise in your shoes all day long, and it's throwing a curve in your back. Similarly, like, how often are we looking down? How are we sleeping a certain way? Which is, of course, your specialty. And so how smart to utilize that other thing.

[00:06:56] Christa Biegler, RD: I'm curious, did you have back pain before you went into chiropractic? Because we're often inspired into career a little bit with our own struggles. 

[00:07:03] Peter Martone, DC, LCP: Yeah, I was in, I had neck pain and not as, my back pain would always go out on me like once in a while, like once a year and it would take four days and it would be better than it would take a week and be better.

[00:07:15] Peter Martone, DC, LCP: So I always have that on and off. So I consider myself a lower back person, but really what got me to go into chiropractic was after an accident. I had digestion issues and never realizing that I was taking the heartburn medication because of the accident. I just thought that he had a stomach issue and it wasn't until I had saw a chiropractor that said, listen, the nerves going to the digestive tract come from here and here, and they can be damaged in whiplash.

[00:07:41] Peter Martone, DC, LCP: So when he adjusted me, And my stomach problem, by the way, I'm like, wait a second, I started understanding that there's more to health than just a medicine cabinet. So I, I started living a little bit more conscientiously about, how did the body heal and stuff like that. And that's really what drew me into chiropractic.

[00:07:59] Christa Biegler, RD: Yeah, cool. I always say here that you can go about pretty much every symptom from a nutritional angle or a structural angle and also an emotional angle. So you bring up this perfect thing where usually with GI stuff, you, we often go to nutritional not always, sometimes it starts structural at kind of a different version with GI, but to your point, the structure, It's a big deal for you.

[00:08:18] Christa Biegler, RD: So I love that story just because it drives that point home a little bit more. Let's go into some of the sleep positions. And I was telling you a little bit before I hit record, This was really interesting to me. I think a very human problem is that seeing is always believing. And so something I would see with my own children is that when they would start to not sleep on their backs, and they would start to sleep crazy on their stomach, we would take them in, and they would go from not wanting to nap to, and my second child, especially, she was like a terrible sleeper.

[00:08:47] Christa Biegler, RD: Terrible. She would never take a nap. Second children will really throw you for a loop sometimes but we would take her to the chiropractor and she would nap the entire way home. It was like this magical thing. So I'm with you. I understand this and I definitely observed. Can we unravel this a little bit through, if people sleep on their left or right side, does it mean something about them?

[00:09:09] Christa Biegler, RD: They sleep on their stomach, what does it mean about them? Can we talk about, what does it mean about a person if they're sleeping in a certain position, the most 

[00:09:16] Christa Biegler, RD: common positions?

[00:09:17] Peter Martone, DC, LCP: It means a lot because, so we came up with this thing that's called the the triune of sleep, the sleep triune.

[00:09:24] Peter Martone, DC, LCP: And there are three things that play when you're sleeping. There's the conscious brain, the subconscious brain, and the body. All the body wants, and everybody hates it, because you look in a coffin and you see somebody like this. All the body wants is alignment. It just doesn't want to be in pain. It wants to distribute its weight over the greatest surface area.

[00:09:48] Peter Martone, DC, LCP: Eliminating pressure points. It wants alignment. Makes sense. The body doesn't want to sleep like this. It wants to sleep like that. That's all it wants. The subconscious brain, all it wants is safety. It just wants to feel protected and safe. That's all it wants. It wants to shut down, be in a nice, safe environment, so that it can heal, stimulate, and grow.

[00:10:12] Peter Martone, DC, LCP: The problem is the conscious brain. The conscious brain is where everything screws up. That's where the stinking thinking happens. That's where the I can't and the excuses and all of that stuff happens. The conscious brain, it thinks it's, it wants comfort. So it sleeps in this safe environment. So what it mistakes for comfort is safety.

[00:10:36] Peter Martone, DC, LCP: This is not comfortable. For the spine, remember this, but body wants alignment. So what happens is the conscious brain puts itself into a position that the subconscious feels safe, and then you fall asleep. And that is why the average person will toss and turn for 20 to 40 times a night, because you're putting the body in a contorted position.

[00:10:57] Peter Martone, DC, LCP: So we want to reverse the triune. We want to put the body in alignment. Understand for most people, and this is where the personality types come into play. Okay. That's going to be an unsafe environment. So we want to create safety in that position in the, and if let's say you're cross dominant, which means you're right handed and you're left eyed or you're ambidextrous, that cross dominance is like that ADD brain.

[00:11:27] Peter Martone, DC, LCP: It wants more protection. So your stomach sleepers are going to be like your we categorize people as animals, like your ostriches, they're going to want to stick their head in the ground. They want pressure all over themselves, they're going to be, hugging things because their body's requiring a lot of safety because of the neurology.

[00:11:45] Peter Martone, DC, LCP: Then you look at, the amygdala is just going to, sleep curled up because it just wants to feel safe. So the body feels safer in this environment. Then this environment, like the gorilla can fall asleep anyway, because it is so confident insecure.

[00:12:00] Peter Martone, DC, LCP: So the position that you're falling in most people with ADD and those really anxious people are going to be stomach sleepers because they're looking for a lot of pressure to keep themselves protected. So if you then understand that about somebody's conscious subconscious in bottom in the body, you can then put them into an aligned position, put pillow.

[00:12:20] Peter Martone, DC, LCP: So the body requires pressure. Your conscious brain might know you're on your back, but if you put pressure against the side of the face, the subconscious brain thinks it's on its side. So you can use pressure in a very specific way to teach the subconscious brain to stay in that position of alignment.

[00:12:41] Peter Martone, DC, LCP: And just the problem is the conscious brain needs to fall asleep. It needs to let go and hand the pass off to the subconscious. And that's where, the trick is in giving people techniques to be able to fall asleep. 

[00:12:53] Christa Biegler, RD: Oh, I love your sleep triune. I think that's perfect. We talk a lot about conscious, subconscious, and body.

[00:12:59] Christa Biegler, RD: And if someone hasn't really thought about it in that way, it's such a cool anchor point into thinking about how the body is always trying to be in some kind of survival or safety or craving that thing. So I love how you talked about that. You mentioned Transcribed Some things you mentioned armadillo and gorilla, so you must have sleep animals.

[00:13:16] Christa Biegler, RD: So let's go ahead and just make sure we understand your because these are fun. These are fun. We 

[00:13:21] Christa Biegler, RD: did it. Yeah. 

[00:13:22] Christa Biegler, RD: Dr. Bruce has his sleep chronotypes, but you've got animals on like, how so I'll let you just review that again. And what are the typical things under these different?

[00:13:32] Christa Biegler, RD: Subtypes of,

[00:13:33] Peter Martone, DC, LCP: it's basically on personality types and then personality typing it based on the way you have to sleep. So you look at the gorilla in nature. The gorilla is typically sometimes on his back. It's like this. It doesn't care. It can sleep anywhere.

[00:13:46] Peter Martone, DC, LCP: So that's the confident avatar that will fall asleep, with a glass in their hand, they just fall asleep. They can pretty much sleep anywhere. Then you have the armadillo. This is where most people are. They crave this side sleeping position, which is a majority of us. And we sleep on our side.

[00:14:04] Peter Martone, DC, LCP: We fall asleep in this position, but then the problem is, After about 20 minutes, 30 minutes, it's going to be in pain. So then you're tossing and turning. And then you'll go from side sleeping position. Then you have ostrich is frail. Everything wants to attack it. So it sticks its head in the ground and it doesn't really do this to feel safe.

[00:14:24] Peter Martone, DC, LCP: But when it's, it's prey, so it needs its head under the ground, those are the people that are going to sleep with the pillows over the head on their stomach. So they really need quite a bit of pressure in safety and protection. They sleep in the head garages. They have the covers over their heads.

[00:14:42] Peter Martone, DC, LCP: Because they're trying to sleep in this sleep cocoon and then you have the ostradillo and You have people that are right in the middle, but those are my main personality type avatars. So then once we personality type what people Feel like or what they are And then we can give them techniques to be able to fall asleep in the position that every spine is See, people are like, oh, I can't do this because of this, that's the conscious brain making it.

[00:15:09] Peter Martone, DC, LCP: Oh, my airway. Oh, I supposed to sleep on this side because my body drains better on that way or arguably, the heart, is less stressed by 4 percent on one side when your heart rate, when your blood pressure drops. Third, 20% anyways at night. A lot of these things just don't make sense as far as overall healing, because what they don't use, and I love how you use the term anchor, they don't use the anchor that the most important structure in the body to maintain alignment for is the spine.

[00:15:42] Peter Martone, DC, LCP: Nobody understands that maintaining the health of the spine trumps everything else, right? Because when you're up and you're standing. Whether it's glymphatic flow or glymphatic drainage, it requires cerebral spinal flow to go across the brain and through the brain and through the spinal cord. And if you have disruption within movement and loss of structure, all of that glymphatic drainage is becoming an issue.

[00:16:07] Christa Biegler, RD: Yeah, cool. Okay. I'm just thinking about some other things that I've seen people who have to cover. They sleep on their back, but they cover their eyes. It might be like a mixture between an ostrich and. A gorilla, 

[00:16:18] Peter Martone, DC, LCP: I always use stuff over my eyes all the time. I have a cross dominant right handed left footed.

[00:16:24] Peter Martone, DC, LCP: That is a, an avatar that requires safety and. And so the biggest thing with sleep, is ultimately, and I love it again stress. Stress. What does stress do? It's a force that causes change. What ultimately is adapting to stress? It's your sympathetic nervous system. It it's your autonomic nervous system.

[00:16:43] Peter Martone, DC, LCP: So you have your sympathetics and then you have your parasympathetics. During the day our sympathetics are surviving, right? Keeping us, ability to survive. And then at night, our parasympathetics help us thrive. That's we need to really be able to effectively shut down our sympathetics and engage our parasympathetics.

[00:17:00] Peter Martone, DC, LCP: So our nervous system. So our parasympathetic nervous system really ultimately is the vagus nerve coming down from the base of the occiput. A way that you can stimulate parasympathetic response or activation is using pressure. So that's why, like the, the kids that have autism or ADD, they use weighted blankets, or you can even use a weighted blanket because pressure on the torso and pressure over your eyes stimulates parasympathetic innervation.

[00:17:31] Christa Biegler, RD: That's good. Okay, cool. Let's talk about, you mentioned. After you type someone for their sleep type, we've got three types, gorilla, armadillo, ostrich, or some combination of the 3, you can give people tools for each sleep type for what they're gravitating to, which is really probably music to people's ears.

[00:17:47] Christa Biegler, RD: It's even though you tell someone that sleeping in our back is the best way. If you feel that sleeping on your side is the most comfortable. People go for comfort, right? Like we go for what we know. And so let's, you want to unravel what are some of the tools or techniques that you offer or that you suggest for people for each sleep.

[00:18:08] Christa Biegler, RD: Personality type. 

[00:18:09] Peter Martone, DC, LCP: All right. I like it. So when you're looking at the number one reason, typically people don't fall asleep is because of the conscious brain. So you gotta be able to shut down the conscious brain and turn on, dive into that. The subconscious the best way to do that is to stop thinking.

[00:18:28] Peter Martone, DC, LCP: How do you do that? Because we like to be in control, you can Be in control of one of two things at night. It's definitely take self discipline So you have to work on it. You can either think or you can actively try to remember when you're actively thinking The energy is in the prefrontal cortex, which is not where your sleep centers are when you're remembering You're accessing a different portion of your brain where your memories are, which is typically where your sleep centers are.

[00:19:01] Peter Martone, DC, LCP: So you can remember yourself to sleep, but you can't think yourself to sleep. 

[00:19:06] Peter Martone, DC, LCP: So 

[00:19:06] Peter Martone, DC, LCP: if you focus on a memory in the past, let's say this happened yesterday or the day before, and it was a walk or went around a golf course and you walk yourself around the golf course, every hole, remember the hole, remember the sand traps.

[00:19:22] Peter Martone, DC, LCP: Remember how you felt breathe a good memory and you put yourself to sleep on that memory once It's easier to put yourself to sleep on the same memory night in and night out So if you can focus on that memory over and over that memory becomes clearer and clearer And then you're able to fall asleep quicker and quicker.

[00:19:44] Peter Martone, DC, LCP: So that's how you do it. 

[00:19:45] Christa Biegler, RD: I like it. I think you're exactly right that our conscious brain is the problem and our awareness of our conscious brain is a probably a totally different conversation. I wonder also, I like using a memory. I wonder if you could use a future vision or do you think that goes into thinking too much?

[00:20:03] Christa Biegler, RD: Just because I'm thinking about stacking like opportunities here. 

[00:20:08] Peter Martone, DC, LCP: I got it. I see what you're doing. You can't rationalize. If you rationalize, you're in the conscious portion. Can you do me a favor? Yeah, point to your camera for me. All right, make a circle and look at me through that. Yeah, 

[00:20:23] Christa Biegler, RD: my husband is the shooting sports coordinator.

[00:20:25] Christa Biegler, RD: He would really enjoy this. 

[00:20:27] Peter Martone, DC, LCP: Okay. Are you right handed or left handed? 

[00:20:30] Christa Biegler, RD: I'm right handed 

[00:20:31] Peter Martone, DC, LCP: and then do you kick with your right foot or your left foot? 

[00:20:34] Christa Biegler, RD: I cook with my right foot. 

[00:20:35] Peter Martone, DC, LCP: Okay. And do you do anything ambidextrous? 

[00:20:38] Christa Biegler, RD: Not really, I don't think so. Okay. I'm just imagining. Yeah, I should be right. I dominate.

[00:20:42] Peter Martone, DC, LCP: Okay. I could. I was just because you're asking a lot of cross dominant question, which is fantastic. But it's all about productivity. I love it. You have to let go and then go into memory. Even you can try to access a dream from the night before. What I do find though, is it can't be the memory of that day.

[00:21:00] Peter Martone, DC, LCP: Okay. It's some reason needs to be already like defragged into your brain somehow. But so if you think about a memory in the past, like you're at a party, count the people at the party. I counted people at my Christmas party for 3 months and put them in it, put me to sleep real quick until I.

[00:21:20] Peter Martone, DC, LCP: Went on to another memory, but it needs to be a memory. It can't be trying to rationalize and think about putting things in because you're in a different portion of your brain. 

[00:21:29] Christa Biegler, RD: As I rationalize right now, as I'm wide awake, I think about why a memory would work so nicely and memory recall, you're usually in theta brainwave state.

[00:21:39] Christa Biegler, RD: And that's the step before delta brainwave states. I feel like you're like, just a step away in my head. This is making sense to me. I don't know where you came up with this, but I like it. It's really a useful. 

[00:21:48] Peter Martone, DC, LCP: Thank you. And remember that. So that's really good. And then what are the 3 body signs? I guess you could say, or rhythms that you can control to be able to help.

[00:21:59] Peter Martone, DC, LCP: Number one, it's breath, right? Number two is heart rate. You control your breath through your heart rate and then you control your heart rate through your breath. 

[00:22:09] Peter Martone, DC, LCP: Yeah. 

[00:22:09] Peter Martone, DC, LCP: And then and then the third is body core temperature. So those three things are really critical. To be able to understand to be able to get into deep sleep when then the first 30 a sleep cycle and that's ultimately where your body does the most.

[00:22:28] Peter Martone, DC, LCP: You, you really need to be able to get parasympathetic dominant very quickly to be able to get really good deep restorative sleep because somebody can have coffee. And go to sleep and say, Oh, I fall asleep fine with coffee, but you're still stimulated and you're not, you can still sleep being sympathetically stimulated with a high heart rate.

[00:22:49] Peter Martone, DC, LCP: You're not going to get great quality sleep at all. So it really, you really want to drop those three vitals. 

[00:22:55] Christa Biegler, RD: Yeah, I was actually just talking to a client right before this, and she was one of those typical adrenals are in terrible shape. And so I just let her know when adrenals are in terrible shape.

[00:23:06] Christa Biegler, RD: I see people complain of tossing and turning all night. And I think she said this, and many people say this, they say I fall asleep initially, and then I'm tossing and turning. Yeah, conscious. Courtesy brain, all the thoughts going through your brain. I don't know. Just again sharing that because the conscious brain or people listening to this will be like, that's nice.

[00:23:26] Christa Biegler, RD: But I toss and turn all night. 

[00:23:27] Peter Martone, DC, LCP: They toss and turn for 1 reason, but that's it. So bodies in pain, number one reason you toss and turn also, temperature regulation in the airway, those things can be managed, but the number one reason people will toss and turn is because the body's discomfort and it's going to turn out of those positions, whether your legs out to one side, whether your back is hurting you, whether your ribs are hurting you.

[00:23:51] Peter Martone, DC, LCP: That's why people toss and turn within most people. They don't use the pillows correctly. So the issue is they're putting a pillow under their head, which is a pillow defined as a support for your head, which is destroying the structure of your spine. That is why I'm like, so passionate about being in the sleep industry now, because I tried so hard to adjust people's spines straight and you realize all you're doing with the adjustment is you're taking hard clay and you're putting it in water.

[00:24:20] Peter Martone, DC, LCP: What does that do? That makes clay more moldable. It's still up to the patient to remold the clay. So that's why we started designing like pillows and the sleeping system, because it really, ultimately I want people to be more productive at night. When you think about sleep and I'm a productive, freak where I want, when you think about sleep, you're lying in one position for nine hours.

[00:24:41] Peter Martone, DC, LCP: That is such a waste of time. So we might as well, people don't want sleep. They don't want to waste nine hours. They want what sleep gives them. More energy, a better life. So might as well learn how to maximize sleep. And maximize sleep, not just from a standpoint of waking up well rested, which is super important, but waking up refreshed, realigned, re energized your spine, so that you don't have the pain during the day, like I suffered with my whole life.

[00:25:08] Christa Biegler, RD: Yeah, you got a great segue here and I should have done this earlier drawing. I was complaining about shoes because I was thinking about how that created a lower kink in my back for a long time. And then it sent me down quite a spiral for you. You ended up on a different spiral for the upper cervical.

[00:25:24] Christa Biegler, RD: But similarly, the pillow is like the same thing as your shoes. And so I would say, Most great upper cervical chiropractors I've ever known all hated pillows, or they had special pillows that they like to talk about. And you as well, you're doing a good job, not, trying to jump in here selling a pillow, but you have created, this as a resource to help people.

[00:25:44] Christa Biegler, RD: And so I don't know how you want to talk about this, but also we were going to talk about strategies for each sleep type. For example, with an armadillo, because the gorilla is on their back, right? Okay. So they're in the proper and just to review the perfect place is just on your back to sleep. 

[00:26:01] Peter Martone, DC, LCP: Well, 

[00:26:01] Peter Martone, DC, LCP: it's on your back in what we call the corrective sleeping position. Now, most people cannot lie on their back. So if you lie on your back, what immediately happens to your lower back, it goes into extension. So extension is this. So that's, it's almost like the bridge, the suspension bridge, the structure of the bridge is what supports the bridge.

[00:26:25] Peter Martone, DC, LCP: So the people like, Oh, I need to put some back support onto my back. No, you don't. Anytime you support anything in the body, you weaken it because like the name of this in the absence of stress, the body will atrophy. Okay. So if you're in space and there's no gravity, every joint in your body atrophies.

[00:26:47] Peter Martone, DC, LCP: If you put a cast your leg and you remove the, the stress of of movement, your body's going to atrophy. If you use a support for your head, your neck's going to atrophy. When you're the gorilla and you're lying back, gorillas, they just lie right back, their neck is into extension, the back is into extension, and then, then they climb trees during the day.

[00:27:09] Peter Martone, DC, LCP: So you have to understand is that arms above their head, they're not on cell phones, so their structure is different. So then you look at the armadillo and they're curled up in a ball. They're on their side. So these are the people that are going to have shoulder problem. You give me a side sleep.

[00:27:23] Peter Martone, DC, LCP: I'm going to give you a shoulder problem. I can look at people and read their neurology and then tell them what's going on internal just by the structure on this, the way they're standing. So you're going to be like this. And you're going to have a shoulder issue.

[00:27:36] Peter Martone, DC, LCP: You're going to have a hip issue. You're going to have distorted positions that are due structurally, but that pressure against the side of their face that curled into that protective position they need to be able to open up in order to sleep, so that person, I do recommend.

[00:27:55] Peter Martone, DC, LCP: The weighted blanket or using some pressure on their side or putting pillows down by their side so that when they sleep, there's pressure on their side. So that body thinks that they're on their side or even a pillow on the side of the face. Then you go to the stomach. These are the people that need the cocoon, right?

[00:28:14] Peter Martone, DC, LCP: These are the ones. That need the pressure on their eyes, the things over their head, the pressure on their chest in the more pressure you use and the more that you put the body into this safe swaddled state using your own covers. It's really important for them to use their own covers, but you're going to understand that you're not really putting people into the position using these techniques for the conscious brain.

[00:28:45] Peter Martone, DC, LCP: You're doing it for the subconscious brain. All we need to teach is all three avatars go to sleep the same way. They need to let subconscious go and hand it off to the subconscious. We sleep for the subconscious. So the, each avatar, we need to just treat differently that way. 

[00:29:01] Christa Biegler, RD: Yeah. So where does the pillow come in for each avatar or?

[00:29:05] Christa Biegler, RD: How did you end up designing a very goofy shaped pillow? 

[00:29:09] Peter Martone, DC, LCP: So the reason why I designed a pillow and I was, be frank, I was rolling up towels, which weren't that comfortable. I was taking down pillows and putting them on their edge. I was recommending 650 fill down pillows so people could put them on their edge and get it under their neck.

[00:29:27] Peter Martone, DC, LCP: And what was important for me is that their head Did not rest on the bed. They use the weight of their head as like a little stress to gently stretch the curve back into the neck. So we use something called distraction. Distraction is a force. It's a gentle stretching force if you do it correctly.

[00:29:47] Peter Martone, DC, LCP: So using a distractive force while you sleep, you can gently you'll regain these cervical curves. And then take the pressure off of the lower back and regain that leg length. So when you look behind me, because I know you said that this is a video. So basically, you can use a pillow or a neck nest or whatever you do.

[00:30:07] Peter Martone, DC, LCP: But you want it under your neck. And then you want the weight of your head suspended off of the bed. So right now it's a neutral position and my hands are down by my side. And this is an aligned position. Most people look at this and make you say, no way. There's no way I can sleep in that position because that's the subconscious brain saying you can't.

[00:30:29] Peter Martone, DC, LCP: And all I'm telling you is you don't have to. I only want to live in that position. I only want you to fall asleep. You all that lifestyle habit is to fall asleep for the first 10 minutes like that. And once you're falling asleep like that, I don't care what you do because I'm not talking to your conscious brain.

[00:30:45] Peter Martone, DC, LCP: We're just putting the subconscious brain in that position for 10 minutes to an hour a night. And then whatever happens. So don't try to consciously control everything because you can't. All you need to do is just fall asleep in that position falling asleep in that position with a pillow under your neck where your neck arched back is just about allowing the brain to let go to the subconscious and maintain them and keep the body into alignment.

[00:31:13] Peter Martone, DC, LCP: That's all you need to do. And you do that as a lifestyle habit. I don't care how you sleep. I'm not like, I didn't get into the sleep world to help people sleep. I got into the sleep world to help people fix their structure while they were in bed. And that just made me a sleep expert, 

[00:31:28] Christa Biegler, RD: right? As I'm watching you there's basically a pillow and then a little bit of a roll on the top of the pillow, and then he's on it.

[00:31:35] Christa Biegler, RD: And then, you're, you've got a little bit of cushion on the side for people who want a little bit of something on the side. But it reminds me of, I always thought we called him traction. I'm sure I'm wrong. Maybe it's detraction. I don't know. You're the going to be the wordsmith on this one, but I've seen these little devices.

[00:31:49] Christa Biegler, RD: They're like cushions that are triangles. And my husband used was very religious about laying on them. And so essentially you're just creating a pillow that allows you to have that honestly same exercise. So you're, instead of taking 10 or 20 minutes out of your day, you're just doing it at bedtime and then you can do whatever you want after that, right?

[00:32:06] Christa Biegler, RD: This is the ultimate productivity. It's like, why don't I maximize the time I'm already laying here? 

[00:32:11] Peter Martone, DC, LCP: So when I was deciding to build the neck mass, to design it. How I was going to design it. I use a triangle. It was just wait. So what's not comfy, right? So it was like, I was like, what's better.

[00:32:24] Peter Martone, DC, LCP: A lot of traction or distraction over a short period of time or less over a long period of time. 

[00:32:32] Peter Martone, DC, LCP: And 

[00:32:32] Peter Martone, DC, LCP: I know as an exercise physiologist, the best stretching is that long stretch that you do, not the quick bouncing type of stretching that you do. So I'm like, you know what? I'm going to design something that puts the body into this position and gives the body the best chance to stay in that position on that you could put a glass of water on my chest and it will still be there in the morning when I wake up. 

[00:32:56] Christa Biegler, RD: I'd like to see you try this. I'd like this video to land on your website. I'm just kidding. Let's talk about what happened after you started implementing, 1st, it was towels and then it was 650 filled down filled pillows. But, and that's the thing I think that is the complaint of the chiropractor or going is people will say I have to go all the time.

[00:33:13] Christa Biegler, RD: Are you doing the work outside to change the structure? What's what are you doing every day? So what were some other results that you saw as people started doing this? 

[00:33:23] Peter Martone, DC, LCP: Yeah. And this is really where the, all of my sleep I have a now way better sleep academy where.

[00:33:29] Peter Martone, DC, LCP: All of this education is really dumped into, building the roadmap for somebody's life because it's not about just about sleep. It's about what you do during the day for sleep. So when you start to change the sleeping position, which are in a sense doing. Is you're taking, say there's a spine, so for those of you that aren't listening, there's a, should be a curve in the cervical curve.

[00:33:52] Peter Martone, DC, LCP: Most people, because they're texting and especially our children, our kids that are on computers would lose this curve. So that tensions the, Vegas nerve. So when you have tension in the vagus nerve, you cause that vagus nerve function to become dysfunctional. So you have low vagal tone. So I do not.

[00:34:14] Peter Martone, DC, LCP: So I was always teaching people how to meditate to. Decreases sympathetics because they're chronically fatigued and they have adrenal distress. We changed our entire thing. Once we started getting into HRV work where people aren't just sympathetic, dominant, their parasympathetic inhibited because they have low vagal tone because they don't have the structure of their curve.

[00:34:36] Peter Martone, DC, LCP: So when we start to improve the curve with the way that you're sleeping and your HRV reading start to improve. You don't just get more energy during the day because you're sleeping, you get better digestive function, you get better immune system function, better reproductive function, because the vagus nerve is critical in controlling those three systems, immune system, digestive system, and reproductive system.

[00:35:00] Peter Martone, DC, LCP: So anybody that has an issue with one, one of those areas, they have an issue with all three of them because they're all connected. Parasympathetically, they're going to have distribution of their head off to one side. They're going to have a short leg. Typically, they sprain an ankle to the side of handedness.

[00:35:16] Peter Martone, DC, LCP: So they're going to roll an ankle. Then they're going to lose rotation to the opposite side when they turn their head. So when somebody comes in to me, I look at them like, oh, how's your digestive tract? They're like, how do you know? They're sitting here like this because they're side sleepers and your spine due to Davis's Law is like clay.

[00:35:31] Peter Martone, DC, LCP: It's molded based on the molds that you're using and there's nothing more that we're doing eight hours a night than jacking up our structure. So that's how I. Have now pulled into our practice where if you come into our office, one of the major things that we need to do, especially if you're exhibiting a lot of dysfunction throughout your spine and internal health, you got to change the sleeping position. 

[00:35:54] Christa Biegler, RD: Yeah, I like it. I love the flip on the head of I'm going to use different words. Your rest and digest is literally blocked because your vagal tone is atrophied from running on fight or flight essentially. 

[00:36:09] Peter Martone, DC, LCP: Yeah. 

[00:36:09] Peter Martone, DC, LCP: Yeah, because look at your sympathetic down the entire spine, right?

[00:36:14] Peter Martone, DC, LCP: Every nerve root has a sympathetic root that comes out very strong and prominent your parasympathetic, it's vagus nerve and then you have some small amount in the sacral plexus. Down below with the carcinogeal plexus. But think about that. Most people have cervical dysfunction based on the way that they're sleeping.

[00:36:34] Peter Martone, DC, LCP: So that's why we all have, if we have high anxiety, we're going to have digestion issues. You're going to have hormonal imbalances and you're going to have, immune system issues, bumps on the back of their arms. All of this is related to low vagal tone. When you ask me, what am I most excited about?

[00:36:51] Peter Martone, DC, LCP: It's that, right? Being able to. Tie in sleeping position and structure or the way that you fall asleep to help where nobody else on the planet is talking about it. 

[00:37:02] Christa Biegler, RD: Yeah, I like it. So someone's going to say that they heard that sleeping on your left side, maybe it's your right.

[00:37:10] Peter Martone, DC, LCP: I 

[00:37:10] Peter Martone, DC, LCP: heard that too. I heard that too. 

[00:37:11] Christa Biegler, RD: Yeah, 

[00:37:11] Christa Biegler, RD: about as good for your vagus nerve. So what do you want to say to them? 

[00:37:15] Peter Martone, DC, LCP: That's great. Good for them. 

[00:37:18] Christa Biegler, RD: Okay, cool. I get it. I get it. I get it. Any comment. I'm just trying to think of like other things people might want to know 

[00:37:25] Peter Martone, DC, LCP: the thing to not to, but when you sleep on your side, pressure against your face is stimulating the medicine. 

[00:37:32] Christa Biegler, RD: Okay. If someone wanted to ask you, hey, does my bed firmness matter because you're, that I feel like that's a big thing with structure to maybe it matters. Not at all. But it's a question that popped into my head. Is there anything to say about that? 

[00:37:47] Peter Martone, DC, LCP: Yeah. So when you get the bed stiffness and stuff matters.

[00:37:53] Peter Martone, DC, LCP: More when you are on your side or on your stomach in those positions, when your weight is distributed over the greatest surface area, what you're sleeping on becomes much less important. 

[00:38:03] Christa Biegler, RD: Okay, cool. I wonder if there's a relationship to stiffness. If that ever influences how people sleep as well, I have this other bed I sleep in sometimes and I get into it and it's a foam mattress and you always get into it and you think oh.

[00:38:17] Christa Biegler, RD: This bed is too hard and then you wake up perfect, no issues. And if I sleep in a soft bed, it's fine. And I know people, I don't spend a lot of time thinking about this but some people do they have strong feelings about what kind of bed they can sleep in. 

[00:38:28] Peter Martone, DC, LCP: So we bought a lake house and I hated the bed up there because we bought all the furniture.

[00:38:33] Peter Martone, DC, LCP: All I did is I put a 1 topper down on it. And I didn't like it. Then I put another topper on the topper and then now I'm good. So a lot of times, if you get your positioning you can get away with the mattress becomes less important and you can talk yourself into something more. 

[00:38:49] Christa Biegler, RD: Okay, so there was another acronym that you use in your bio on your website and it's way W.

[00:38:55] Christa Biegler, RD: A. Y. what does way stand for? 

[00:38:58] Peter Martone, DC, LCP: So our mission is to awaken the full potential of a well rested aligned. You right? So the full potential of a well rested alignment in it. So the well W is well rested right away. In alignment is really what people don't understand. current health paradigm doesn't understand it.

[00:39:18] Peter Martone, DC, LCP: The alignment in two ways structurally within your spine, how important it is for the central nervous system to function efficiently and effectively is critical to the structure of your spine. In alignment in life, because most of the issues that we have typically are in our brain, when I talk about alignment, I'm talking about in alignment in such a way where we are aligning ourselves to new ways of thinking, because ultimately we're a product of our daily rituals, what we do in a daily basis defines our health and well being.

[00:39:54] Peter Martone, DC, LCP: Our beliefs drive those actions. Our beliefs are defined by the people around us. We become like the people around us. And we live in the United States, which doesn't rank too healthy in the healthiest countries in the world, have the highest heart disease and a lot of cancer rates. We have all of this dysfunction due to so many different things.

[00:40:12] Peter Martone, DC, LCP: So when we want to awaken the full potential of a well rested aligned Jew, we want alignment in the absence, in the sense of structure and then alignment in the sense of daily rituals, which is changing your beliefs. 

[00:40:24] Christa Biegler, RD: Yeah, I love that. And if we would even re listen to this episode, there was things that you were saying at the beginning that just felt like such a crosstalk between the whole emotional and energetic life, which is what you're saying as well, right?

[00:40:36] Christa Biegler, RD: You can't have structural alignment when other parts of your body or life are unaligned. I agree with you wholeheartedly there. We covered a lot. We talked about the sleep types, the sleep personality types of the gorilla, armadillo, and ostrich, which I think is just fun. I think people, obviously you know this too, I think people love to categorize themselves.

[00:40:57] Christa Biegler, RD: I think you, I loved the trying to sleep the conscious mind, the subconscious mind and the body. I loved that application. You also dropped that Pearl about think about a good memory really give it some life and use that same memory to fall asleep again and again. Rationalization. The conscious brain is the enemy of falling asleep.

[00:41:20] Christa Biegler, RD: And also how you fall asleep is more important than how you stay asleep. Because I think like that whole, that conscious that mind is always Oh, I cannot do whatever. And you're just saying no problem. 

[00:41:33] Peter Martone, DC, LCP: How you fall 

[00:41:35] Peter Martone, DC, LCP: asleep is more important than how you stay asleep.

[00:41:38] Peter Martone, DC, LCP: You're brilliant. That's a great, 

[00:41:40] Christa Biegler, RD: I thought you 

[00:41:41] Christa Biegler, RD: said it. I'm just paraphrasing what you're saying. Yeah. Yeah. I just think that's a good thing to underline because we could get stuck on. Hey, I didn't do it perfectly. There is a lot of perfectionism, right? I always ask my clients like, hey, raise your hand if you're a perfectionist.

[00:41:54] Christa Biegler, RD: A lot of people are here. And so some people perfectionists don't believe good or done is better than perfect. They just simply don't believe that. And so it's really good to remind them. We're just working on how you fall asleep, what you can control right in that moment. So that's it.

[00:42:08] Christa Biegler, RD: I like that. I like it. And I like that. Like the really ultimate underneath of it. It's just, you're just stacking. You're basically giving yourself extra like therapy and I don't know what do we call it? Detraction. Is that what it is? 

[00:42:19] Christa Biegler, RD: It's yeah, it's called traction. I thought it was distraction.

[00:42:22] Christa Biegler, RD: It's called distraction. Distraction. Thank you. Distracting. Yes. 

[00:42:24] Christa Biegler, RD: I thought it was traction, so thank you. I just, I didn't know I wanna use the right word here. You're just doing that exercise in a more comfortable way, which is boils down to pretty much how humans are programmed. That's all most people want.

[00:42:36] Christa Biegler, RD: So avoid pain and to see comfort. I think we covered a lot of lovely things and since, I don't know if it's half the popul, you would know half the population struggle with sleep. I think that. Anything that offers a new, and this is a, I think, a unique angle to sleep issues is very much appreciated and welcomed and pretty cool.

[00:42:54] Christa Biegler, RD: Where can people find you online? 

[00:42:56] Peter Martone, DC, LCP: They can go to Instagram, find me in drsleepwright. com, D R S L E P R I G H T, or drsleepwright. com, sorry, and they can take a free sleep risk assessment. And from there. They can, they'll find the website of our pillow, which is called NeckNest.

[00:43:12] Peter Martone, DC, LCP: If you do choose to purchase a NeckNest, and we just came out last week with NeckNest 2. 0, but if you do get it, remember, it's not a pillow that's just going to be more comfortable. So it stands for better function and then function becomes comfort. So that's the reason, like people go from pillow to pillow because they don't know how to use them and they want something that's more comfortable.

[00:43:33] Peter Martone, DC, LCP: Remember, comfort is consciousness, not subconscious. So if we can identify alignment first and then use a neck nest to put yourself into alignment, that function will then become comfort. That's how it works. 

[00:43:46] Christa Biegler, RD: And I am just talking out of my pocket right now, but when I saw you using that version, that does look like a more comfortable version than the original version that I have a colleague that was using.

[00:43:56] Christa Biegler, RD: She's you just fold it up like this. And I was like, Oh, interesting. She was traveling with it when we were traveling for conferences together. It was good stuff. So anyway, thank you so much for coming on today. 

[00:44:10] Peter Martone, DC, LCP: Thank you for having me. I really appreciate everything you do. Thank you.