How to Sleep Better: The Best Sleep Position and Habits

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Peter: The more weight somebody has, the more stress they're under. And that stress comes in three areas: emotional, physical, and biochemical. So when you get poor quality sleep, you put your body into survival. When your body's in survival, you're in a stress state, so you're going to gain and retain weight. Almost every chronic disease out there, in some way, shape, or form, is connected to lack of sleep.

Nikkiey: What is going on, everybody? Welcome to The WarriorBabe Show. Today, I am super excited to be joined by Dr. Peter Martone. He is an educator, an injury prevention specialist, and a patient care health practitioner who has been focused on improving patients' biomechanics for over 25 years. He specializes in helping people optimize their health through proper posture, sleep alignment, and foundational habits to support overall well-being. So, Dr. Martone, it is a pleasure to have you on the show today.

Peter: Well, thank you so much. It's always an honor to connect with people like you that are making such an impact in this world, because I know how hard it is to create an audience and have a podcast and do it every single week. So thanks for the impact that you're making on humanity. It's great.

Nikkiey: Oh, thank you so much. Well, I'm excited to dive into your expertise here. Your work focuses specifically on foundational habits like sleep and posture that many of us might not think about until we experience pain or discomfort in our body. So can you share a little bit about what inspired you to focus on those areas and how they became a central part of your approach to optimizing health?

Peter: Yeah, that's a great question. My undergrad degree was exercise physiology and kinesiology. So I always loved the study of biomechanics, how the body moved, nutrition and fitness. Then I was a professional trainer for years until I moved into the chiropractic world. And chiropractic really looked at the structure's effect on neurology. A lot of times when people think about chiropractic, and even today a lot of chiropractors practice like this, it's about just moving bones to improve motion, to get people out of pain. But I never practiced like that. I would look at the alignment of the structure of the human frame and its impact on the nervous system. By aligning the structure, you improve the function of the nervous system, and that's how you get people well.

I did that for a long time, but my problem was I always had pain. I went through the first 12 years of my practice always having back pain until finally my disc herniated. I was in a little bit of a mountain biking mishap, but it wasn't even that bad. I'd done much worse before. But then my back tweaked, and I'm like, oh, this is just like a million times before. Then my leg got numb. Then I seized up, and I couldn't move. And I found myself in the emergency room, hooked up to Dilaudid. They gave me so much morphine they asked my wife at the hospital if I was a drug addict. That's how much pain I was in.

When you're really at the lowest of low, your brain just needs to start innovating and saying, how the hell did it get like this? How have I been working with patients for a decade of my life, and I can't even help myself? So I started reviewing X-rays, and I found a pattern. I found that the problem all these years wasn't my lower back. It was my neck, because of the righting reflex, body posture, adjusted head position. And then I theorized, well, I should be able to fix this at night while I sleep. So I started sleeping in different positions, using pillows different ways, and fixed my neck. And I've never had a back problem again since.

Nikkiey: Oh, my goodness. I love that story. I love that you had to go through your own experience to see how you could improve things for yourself, and now you're spreading the word through your work, which, thank you. I'm getting to know you here on this podcast, and I'm super excited to know more about what you do, but already, high level, knowing what you do, it's great work. People need to know about this. And if you guys can hear his Boston accent, it is thick.

Peter: Oh, it is thick. Wicked thick.

Nikkiey: Wicked. Awesome. Well, can you also explain a little bit about why sleep is so crucial and what most people misunderstand about getting quality sleep?

Peter: Thank you, Nikkiey. Thank you so much. Let's look at science. There are two different types of science, and I don't know if people really know it. Medicine's based on Newtonian principles, which is very fact-based. It's basically, to identify a perfect circle, every point is equal distance. So medicine looks at one vertical, and they research one vertical, but everything else is a side effect. Well, no, it's an effect. Then the other type of physics is quantum physics, which looks at the holism of the body, and they're looking at so many different aspects of it. So you can't give somebody one thing and say this is what it does, but let's forget about everything else.

That research still moves into the sleep world. When they make recommendations, they're only based on one vertical, not looking at the holistic model. And most of the recommendations out there are: be a side sleeper. Everybody says side sleeper's the best sleeper. That research is based on glymphatic drainage, which a lot of people are concerned about, and you should be concerned about. But the gold standard study was done in 2015, and it was done on rats. And in there, there's a significant statement that says, we understand that this study was done in rats, but we're extrapolating that humans need to sleep the same as rats do. So the same sleeping position for glymphatic drainage is going to be the same for humans.

But the big thing that they don't understand is that the rat cervical spine is completely opposite the structure of the human cervical spine. So when you're extrapolating a sleeping position based on the structure of an animal that isn't even close to the human frame, it's not apples and apples. It's comparing apples and, I don't know, grapefruits. Well, no, that's actually pretty similar. Apples and bananas.

Nikkiey: Apples and bananas.

Peter: Yeah, yeah, yeah. They're not even in the same ballpark, but they're just looking at one vertical. And a lot of the recommendations that have been given by our sleep experts are just that. They're based on one vertical. For instance, it's really important to make sure that your core body temperature drops when you sleep. That is really important, especially as women age. You're going to notice they don't get good sleep because their core temperature doesn't drop at the beginning of the night. So what is the recommendation? Take all the sheets, throw them on the floor, and sleep with no sheets. But that, due to the allostatic load in the body, puts the body into survival, and that destroys your immune system while you sleep. So now you put the body into more imbalance.

So we need to bring a holistic understanding to the bed. And we need to have an anchor that you can't argue. That anchor is that the nervous system controls everything in the human body, and that the structure of your spine directly affects that nervous system. So if we can agree and start from there, and the first thing we do is start with alignment while we sleep, then everything else starts to fall into place.

Nikkiey: Got it. Got it. And I'm curious, because we're going to get to this at some point in the podcast today, but is this a part of the WAY method, the W-A-Y method?

Peter: Yeah. So—

Nikkiey: Wait, hold on. I don't want you to elaborate yet. I want to get to it later.

Peter: It is. Yes, very, very much. It's our mission to help people get way better sleep, awakening the full potential of a well-rested, aligned you. Yes, it is.

Nikkiey: I love that. Okay, cool. Well, I'm excited to dive into that part. But you mentioned posture there, so I just want to put this in the listener's mind right now. The normal way is on our side. What is our best way? Is it on our back? Is it on our stomach? You don't have to elaborate now, but what is the best position to be in?

Peter: The best position is, well, our WAY method starts with the body in alignment. So let me ask you a question.

Nikkiey: Yeah.

Peter: What position do you think the body would be most in alignment?

Nikkiey: On your back.

Peter: Right. On your back, where your body weight is distributed over the greatest surface area. In a rat, it's on its side. In a human, it's on their back, with your neck supported, not your head supported. A pillow, by definition, is a support for your head. That's why people do not like their pillows, because you can't support the head and get great quality sleep. You're going to toss and turn all night long. But we'll get into that. So yes, on your back. But the problem is, being on your back is not a safety position. So most people's conscious brain says, I can't do that, because the conscious brain really messes everything up.

Nikkiey: Oh, interesting. Okay. So we're going to get into that when we get into the WAY method, then.

Peter: Yes. That's really where we're going to dive in.

Nikkiey: All right. Beautiful. Okay, really quick before we get into it, because I want to talk about cortisol and all those things with you too. How does poor sleep affect aspects of our health, like our energy, our posture, and even people trying to lose weight? A lot of people listening to this episode right now are like, I want to build muscle. I want to decrease body fat. I want to lose body fat. How does poor sleep affect that?

Peter: Weight is an insulating layer to the external environment. I'm going to say that again: weight is an insulating layer to the external environment. The more weight somebody has, the more stress they're under. And that stress comes in three areas: emotional, physical, and biochemical. So when you get poor quality sleep, you put your body into survival. When your body's in survival, you're in a stress state, so you're going to gain and retain weight. So really, almost every chronic disease out there, in some way, shape, or form, is connected to lack of sleep.

The way that I explain sleep is this. There are experts that understand why we sleep a lot more deeply. But just think about your body like a cell phone. You have all these apps going, and that's performance during the day. Well, at night, what do you need to do? You need to plug in. But if you only plug in that cell phone for a 50% charge, you only have 50% performance the next day. So you have to look at sleep as plugging-in time. If you're not working to maximize your sleep, your performance every single day is going to be diminished, and you're going to retain weight because of that.

We can go into leptin and ghrelin and all that stuff. But ultimately, it's purely that you're not getting enough sleep or you're not getting good quality sleep, because there are very specific milestones and points that we need to hit in order to get deep sleep. Sleep ultimately is your plug-in time. And if you have any health issue going on, digestive, immune system or reproductive, you have a chronic sleep issue.

Nikkiey: That's a great analogy for the listeners to think about it easily like that. And to that, sleep struggles are a common thing, and that's why you are doing the work you are doing and spreading this word about sleep. What are some of the most prevalent reasons why someone can't fall asleep?

Peter: They can't fall asleep because they can't shut off their own brains. You see, we've got this whole thing about sleep wrong. One of the problems is we think, oh, I'm going to get better sleep and have better health. It doesn't work that way. You have to have a healthier life, and then you get better sleep. It's a combination. So when we look at sleep, sleep's a nervous system problem. It's an imbalance within your nervous system.

The nervous system that controls your body when you're awake and surviving is your sympathetic nervous system, which is where cortisol lives. That's your survival nervous system. And the opposite nervous system that counterbalances that is your thrive nervous system, or your parasympathetic nervous system. The parasympathetic nervous system controls the immune system, digestive system, and reproductive system. So the trick with sleep is being able to pass the torch over to the parasympathetic nervous system: shut down the sympathetics and turn on the parasympathetics. But the problem is, whether our body thinks we're running from a tiger or we are running from a tiger, the physiological state is still the same.

So this parasympathetic nervous system is like a weak muscle. We don't know how, in our culture, to turn it on. The emotions that trigger the sympathetics are anger, envy, fear, uncertainty. Those are sympathetic emotions. Parasympathetic emotions are love, gratitude, caring, nurturing. So sleep isn't just a matter of not being able to shut down your own brain. It's what state are you in? That's what nobody's talking about. Sleep is a nervous system imbalance. And what I'm an expert in is figuring out how to help people balance their nervous system so they can live a healthier life.

Nikkiey: Okay. Well, is this part of the method? Because we should just dive right into it.

Peter: It is.

Nikkiey: All right.

Peter: It is definitely part of the method.

Nikkiey: We can circle back to any other questions I had, because I definitely want to dive into cortisol a little bit with you. But you've developed this WAY method to help people achieve better sleep. And what I'm hearing you say right now resonates so hard with the way I think about things and what we share inside of our WarriorBabe community. We focus on the mindset aspects of things. What emotional attachments, what limiting beliefs, what stories are women holding onto that are getting in the way of them consciously showing up on a daily basis to take action on their goals? They're living in a state of mind that is emotionally charged around things that don't even matter anymore. So what you just said there about fight or flight: people carry anger, judgment, resentment, envy. They carry those emotions with them. I'm so interested to hear what you have to say about this. So please explain what the method stands for and how it works.

Peter: Okay, great. It sounds so simple when I bring it up, because it's simplicity on the far side of complexity. It took us so long to pull all of this together, to combine the research that's out there with the research within the chiropractic industry, and then put epigenetics together to come up with this. So basically, to get way better sleep means awakening the full potential of a well-rested, aligned you. Alignment is critically important, and that's not just alignment in your body. It's also alignment in your life.

The WAY method starts with what's called perfecting the triune of sleep. In the triune of sleep, we have three things at play when the body needs to go to sleep. They're all battling each other. And if you don't align these and start with them in the right framework, you're never going to get way better sleep. You're never going to get great quality sleep. The first thing is the body. The second thing is the subconscious brain. And the third thing is the conscious brain.

All the body wants when it sleeps is to not be in pain, and it wants alignment. That's it. It doesn't care about anything else. The average person will toss and turn 20 to 40 times a night because they're in pain. Pain is what makes people toss and turn. That's it. And if you have alcohol and you fall asleep in an unsustainable position, you're going to wake up with a sore shoulder and a sore hip.

It's funny, when people ask, what's the best position? I'm like, well, what position do you sleep in? They're like, oh, on my side. I stay there all night. I'm like, okay, this is what I want you to do. Lie on the couch in the position you fall asleep in and try to watch a two-hour movie without moving. It's not possible, because you have to move, because you're in an unsustainable position. So what the conscious brain thinks is comfortable is not comfortable. It's safe.

Let me go all the way back to when I grew up in Malden, Massachusetts, on a busy street. My bed was on the front porch. As a child, I can always remember kids playing a prank would come and smash on the window, and I thought I was going to get kidnapped every time I went to bed. So when my parents would tell me to go to bed, I never wanted to go to sleep, because I was petrified. The only way I was able to go to sleep was to curl up in a ball, put all my stuffed animals around me, and create this cocoon of what? What am I doing? Safety. Safety. And only when my subconscious brain felt safe was I able to fall asleep.

That is what the subconscious brain is about. That's why we have on our website a free animal sleep avatar test, where you can see what animal you need to sleep like and how much safety you need to create in order to move to the next step. So we have the body; the subconscious brain wants safety; and then the conscious brain, we just need to teach it how to get out of its own effing way. Because the conscious brain messes everything up with all of these excuses: oh, no, I've always been like this. Oh, I can't change. It just has no idea. So if you understand what the body wants and what the subconscious brain needs, you can put anybody to sleep.

Nikkiey: Ladies, are you feeling frustrated with the body changes you're experiencing during menopause? It's time to take control. If you're between 45 and 65 years old and tired of struggling with body fat and muscle loss, WarriorBabe is here for you. At WarriorBabe, we've helped over 18,000 women just like you lose body fat, build toned muscle, and understand their bodies better with personalized plans based on hormone and thyroid testing and more. Imagine knowing exactly what your body needs to see real results, and results that last. Don't wait anymore. Take charge of your health and join our community of strong, empowered women. Visit warriorbabe.com/apply today to start your transformation. That's warriorbabe.com/apply. All right, let's get back to the show.

I love that. Okay, that's great. Quick break: if you're finding this episode helpful so far, it would mean a lot if you could hit pause for just a second, leave a quick rating or review, or share it with someone who could benefit from it. Your support helps more women discover these tools to build muscle, lose fat, and feel confident. Thank you so much for being a part of this journey with me.

Okay. I'm thinking about the ones listening to this who have this thought in their head: oh, I can only sleep five hours. First of all, what is the recommended number of hours you need to sleep a night?

Peter: It varies from person to person. But you can't improve what you don't track. So I think you need to track something. I like HRV, heart rate variability. They have rings that do it. They have Whoops that do it. They have all sorts of things that do it.

Nikkiey: I saw that. Yeah.

Peter: And when you understand when you're at the best of your best, when you have so much energy and you feel like a rock star and a machine, see what your HRV is. Then you try to improve toward that, either with quality of sleep or quantity of sleep, depending on what we need to do. So I like to picture a day when you're at your best, see what your HRV is, and then back into how much sleep you need. But on average, eight to nine hours, somewhere in that realm.

Nikkiey: Okay. Beautiful. I'm going to put a pin in what I wanted to ask you and circle to this question. But anybody that's listening, all of Dr. Peter Martone's information, website and all that jazz, is going to be in the description below. You can check out even more of what he's sharing with us today. For HRV, talk a little bit about that, because that's something I look at every single time I open up my Oura ring. I'm looking at my HRV, and I like to talk about this because I pride myself on my HRV being at like 160 with a max of over 200.

Peter: But if you take that number and look at somebody else who may be the same age, theirs may be 70 or 80. There are so many variables. That's why you can't compare yourself to somebody else. That's why I have a little bit of an issue with trackers. You have to compare them to your own numbers.

Nikkiey: Right. Right.

Peter: HRV, basically, is about the way your heart's beating. It's telling you how balanced you are between your sympathetics and your parasympathetics and your ability to shut them off. Do me a favor, Nikkiey. Make a circle and look at me through the lens of that circle, then bring it all the way back to your eye. See how you're left-eyed? And I'm guessing you're right-handed.

Nikkiey: Yeah. Yeah.

Peter: So let me tell you a little bit about your avatar, how you need to sleep, and what that tells me about your internal systems.

Nikkiey: Okay. Okay.

Peter: Somebody that's cross-dominant, which I already profiled you as when we got on this call, is a brain that goes a million miles a minute. It's tough to shut down. It's its own worst enemy. It compares itself to other people. That avatar typically has immune system, hormonal imbalance and digestive issues that, not always, but usually, run in the cross-dominant individual. The cross-dominant individual's neurology likes to be cuddled. It needs pressure. So in our animal sleep avatars, where we have the gorilla, the armadillo, and the ostrich, you would be more like an armadillo. You would need pressure on your chest and pressure on your forehead in order to fall asleep, because your avatar has a prefrontal cortex that's underdeveloped, and that causes a little bit of anxiousness or anxiety.

A lot of times as you get older, though, that changes. I'm cross-dominant, and I had that before. I don't have it now because I meditated, I trained, and I have a lot of purpose in life. But if you have an absence of purpose and you're cross-dominant, you're going to have such a difficult time shutting down your brain when you sleep.

Nikkiey: Interesting. I can align with some of the things that you said. However, for me, it's super easy to fall asleep. I have no problem falling asleep, and I don't have a problem staying asleep. My sleep numbers are pretty good. My readiness score is always in the high eighties and into the nineties. But I do resonate with the fact that I have to fall asleep on my stomach, which—

Peter: Oh, okay. So that's because of the pressure that needs to be created. Here's the issue. That affects your vagus nerve, because it affects the specific alignment of your atlas and occiput. That causes digestive issues, hormonal imbalances and immune system issues, because the vagus nerve is 80% of all the parasympathetic supply to the entire system. So whether you have them now, or you had ear infections or strep throat when you were a kid growing up, you're going to translate those into adulthood with heart palpitations, ringing in your ears, and different things like that. Because in the cross-dominant, the brain runs so quickly, it runs sympathetic-dominant anyway. So sleeping on your stomach suppresses the parasympathetic nervous system.

Nikkiey: Interesting.

Peter: But the pressure stimulates the parasympathetic nervous system. That's why, for somebody like you, or if a woman's listening and has vagus nerve suppression, which cross-dominant stomach sleepers will be very prone to, you're going to feel really good when you're pregnant. And then when you give birth, there's a huge dip. That's why those patients typically have a lot more postpartum depression, because you're getting an enormous amount of vagal stimulation while you're pregnant. Once that shuts off, you go into a depression. So those women have to be very conscientious about that.

Nikkiey: Okay. Well, there's lots to unpack here. Interesting.

Peter: I know. Here's my problem: I can definitely talk in a vertical, but my brain thinks a million different things at one time. So you've got to keep me on track.

Nikkiey: Okay. Let's go with the gorilla, armadillo...

Peter: Yes. Perfect. Gorilla, armadillo, and an ostrich.

Nikkiey: An ostrich. Okay. Let's say we go to your website, we take the test, and we're in one of those categories. Which one is the most common?

Peter: The most common is the armadillo.

Nikkiey: Okay. So how would you help somebody in an armadillo state get better sleep?

Peter: The subconscious brain is the second step, not the first step. The first step is putting the body in alignment. Everybody needs to sleep the same way: on your back, pillow under your neck. At least fall asleep like this. You don't have to stay like this all night, because the subconscious brain is at play when you're falling asleep, not the conscious brain. People say, I'm not in control. You're not in control. It's so funny. You want to be in control the entire night, but you're not. I respect you for thinking that, though.

So you put the pillow underneath your neck. The head can't be supported. A lot of people say, oh, I'm a back sleeper already. But you're using a pillow that's supporting your head and doing this. You need to get a pillow like this. This is a Neck Nest, which just happens to be one that I designed. You want the neck arched and the weight of the head off the back of the pillow.

In somebody like you who's a stomach sleeper, your subconscious is looking at that saying, no effing way, because I will not feel safe. So your conscious brain's like, I can't do that. But we know that your conscious brain is a stupid brain. The subconscious brain is just giving the conscious brain the information. It's like a two-year-old. 95% of our day is in our subconscious. It's all subconscious. And the subconscious wants safety. So the animal avatar you identify with will tell you how much safety you need to create. Now that I know you're a stomach sleeper, you're going to be like an ostrich-armadillo. You need a lot of pressure.

Nikkiey: Okay. Okay.

Peter: And when you fall asleep, this is the key: your subconscious brain does not know what position you're in. It only knows based on pressure. So if you're a side sleeper and you like this, you put a pillow against the side of your face, you put a pillow against your body, you put a weighted blanket on, and you mimic the pressure created in the position that you love to sleep in. Once you fall asleep, your subconscious brain just wants the pressure. That's what's creating the safety. Your body wants alignment, so it won't move. But if you can create the pressure for the subconscious brain, it's unbelievable.

Nikkiey: Got it. Okay. That makes total sense.

Peter: And nobody's ever talked about this before, so it's such a new concept. But once you start trying it, the idea is, listen, once you fall asleep, you are not in control. So within our Way Better Sleep Academy, we talk about the 10-minute sleep ritual. Just worry about what I want you to do for 10 minutes. That's it. And once you fall asleep, I'm out. It doesn't matter. I'm an expert at being able to help you fall asleep. That's it.

Nikkiey: Well, I fall asleep fine.

Peter: It's not just getting to sleep. It's how we want you to fall asleep, from positioning to safety to daily habits beforehand. There's so much that goes into falling asleep. That's really the variable that's going to allow you to get way better sleep.

Nikkiey: Got it. That makes total sense. So it's more about the posture you fall asleep in, falling asleep in alignment, and it's going to make you feel safe. So what I need to do is mimic the pressure, like you said with the weighted blanket, the way an armadillo would, once they take your test. Because I do tend to sleep on my side and I like the pressure here. So mimic those things, but try to stay in alignment like we talked about earlier, on your back.

Peter: Put the body in alignment first. Create safety second. And the last thing is get that primitive brain out of its own way. There are different ways to do that.

Nikkiey: How do we do that?

Peter: We have a technique within the academy called CALM. It's controlled breathing, alignment and specific stimulation, and mindful release or mindful relaxation. So how do we do this? Let's start with controlled breathing. It's the type of breathing that stimulates your parasympathetic nervous system. First, you take an inhale, and then you exhale. At the end of the exhale, there's a pause. You fall asleep on your exhale and pause, not the inhale. So you focus on just letting go. You have to let go into that pause and feel safe in that pause.

And think about it: the emotions that live in that pause are love, gratitude, respect. Hate, anger and anguish will shorten that pause. So as you give more into that natural pause, you'll hear your heart rate. Maybe it's going fast at the beginning when you take a breath in. But as you let it out and that pause gets longer and longer, your heart rate's dropping, your respiratory rate's dropping, your core temperature's dropping, and you'll be out like that.

Nikkiey: Okay. All right. I'm definitely going to have to give this a try tonight. And I want everybody to go to your resources in the description below and see which type you are. Do you have any specific success stories of patients who have overcome chronic pain?

Peter: We've worked with tens of thousands of people across the globe now who have gone through our programs. One that I worked with specifically was a patient in Atlanta. We have insomniacs that can't sleep. He had just had a baby, and he had to go to work, and when he came home, he didn't have any energy to play with the children. The biggest thing we did was recognize that he couldn't get out of his own head. So we said, listen, let me put you in alignment. He was a gorilla avatar, and gorillas are the easiest for me to work with. I said, listen, you're a gorilla. I can help you so much. Just lie down like this. He's like, oh yeah, I'll fall asleep like that. Perfect.

But when you fall asleep, I want you to do something very specific. Don't think yourself to sleep. Remember yourself to sleep. He's like, what are you talking about? I'm like, just don't think. Your brain can be in control of two things: thinking or remembering. You can think about your to-do list, or something you need to do, or something you need to figure out or rationalize tomorrow. Then blood's in the front portion of your brain, and it'll wake you up all night long if you're thinking. In contrast to that, there's remembering. You can remember a walk you took around a golf course, a basketball game you played when you were a kid, a happy memory, a walk around a lake. I count the windows in my house sometimes. I count people at a party. You remember something.

I don't know why this happens. I have no science on this. I couldn't find it anywhere. But from what we find, you have to have fallen asleep on that memory once. And when you remember a memory and you fall asleep on it, and you remember the same memory over and over and over again, you fall asleep quicker and stay asleep. That's the only technique we gave him, and now he sleeps incredibly well.

Nikkiey: Wow. That's huge. I love hearing success stories of people's work. That's awesome. Let's circle back to cortisol, because cortisol is a primary stress hormone and it plays a significant role in sleep regulation. A lot of people that listen to this podcast get their testing done, and their cortisol is out of range at night, and it's affecting how they feel in the morning, or vice versa. They have a really good cortisol spike in the morning, then it dips, but then it starts to rise back up again at night. From your perspective, how does cortisol affect sleep?

Peter: Cortisol greatly affects sleep, but you should still be able to get to sleep. Here's the problem. Most people look at cortisol as the problem. Nobody has ever looked at the suppression of the parasympathetic nervous system giving an overall state of increased sympathetic dominance. Everybody looks at sympathetic dominance. So they meditate. They exercise to metabolize cortisol. They do all of this. But nobody looks at the parasympathetic inhibition due to cervical dysfunction, which everybody has.

When you sleep on your stomach or your side, you're losing the structure of your cervical curve. Let me explain. Here's the curve of the neck. If you don't do things to maintain this curve... the vagus nerve comes right down here, and it's 80% of all of your parasympathetic tone, which is the opposite of sympathetic. So if you damage this curve, which 80% of the people in my practice have—

Nikkiey: I'm actually feeling this to my core right now. A couple years ago, I went to the chiropractor, and... you can keep going. I want you to finish that statement, because I know I'm going to need to hear it. I went to the chiropractor because I was having numbness. This was years ago.

Peter: Oh, geez. Yeah, I know exactly where that's coming from.

Nikkiey: And I went in and my head had shifted. I have that curve issue, and it's getting worse. It's from either the phone or computer or iPads or things like that. So I've been consciously aware of that through the years, but I just wanted to throw that little nugget in there so you can pick that apart.

Peter: And that stemmed from when you had strep throat as a kid, by the way.

Nikkiey: I had it all the time.

Peter: That degeneration has been there since then, because typically the cross-dominant has a suppressed immune system, because they're sympathetic-dominant and have low parasympathetic tone. So this complicates that. People fight it all the time and do everything, and you can make up for it if you're so clean and doing all the right things. But when you don't think about it, as we age, parasympathetic tone just drops and drops and drops. Neuroplasticity goes away, and then immune system issues, hormonal imbalances and digestive issues all take over.

But anyway, when you damage C5 and C6, which are these low points, you lose the curve. So now you have low parasympathetic tone, and that's going to give you an overall high cortisol level because you can't engage the parasympathetic system. I fought my own cortisol level for ages, and I fought it with my patients. I was trying to adjust their necks straight, and you can't do it, because they're at home for a third of their life destroying their structure while they sleep. And this is all being done while you sleep because nobody has been taught to put the body in alignment first, then create safety. Everybody looks at a rat study and thinks that that's the best way to sleep, and it drives me effing bonkers. But that's fine.

Nikkiey: No, this is good, though. That's why you're doing the work you're doing.

Peter: The integrity of the vagus nerve and maintaining the integrity of the cervical spine is my anchor. I started because of the dysfunction it caused in my lower back and the pain. But fast forward 15 years, why I'm still doing it is because of the changes I saw in my patients: health problems going away because we improved the structure while they slept. Immune systems, digestive systems, chronic illnesses. We have people with high blood pressure off all their medications, digestion issues, IBS, all of this stuff, by increasing vagal tone because we're improving the structure of the curve. It's all getting better.

So when you ask what the biggest issues are with cortisol, well, we can talk about the emotions and the stress people are under. But I'm sure everybody in your community is working on those and still asking why. The why that nobody even talks about is that change in the structure.

Nikkiey: Yeah, heck yeah. So what are some habits or techniques? Is it that pillow you were talking about, and the WAY method as well?

Peter: Put a Neck Nest under your neck. Start improving.

Nikkiey: Everyone, regardless of the—

Peter: Regardless.

Nikkiey: Got it. Regardless.

Peter: If you're going to be doing this...

Nikkiey: By the way, guys, he's playing with his phone, looking at his phone.

Peter: You have to have the neck in extension at least an hour a night. Whether you sleep like that all night doesn't matter. You're not in control. Your subconscious brain is in control. So you just put your neck like that. Then you do the hot showers or you meditate. And every time you meditate or do a slow breathing technique, always use a scent to attach you to that technique. Attach your subconscious brain to relaxing, to engaging the parasympathetic nervous system. I don't care what the scent is. It can be eucalyptus. It can be lemon. It can be apples. It could be lavender.

As long as you practice some sort of daily meditation, or you get out in the sun, because the sun promotes the parasympathetic nervous system, do that with a scent every time you're working on strengthening your parasympathetic nervous system. We give 15 different techniques within the academy, but do each one of those with a scent. Then when you go to sleep, or any time you want to calm down during the day and you find yourself in a stressful situation, all you need to do is use that scent, and you automatically calm the central nervous system.

Nikkiey: Beautiful. I love that. I can tell you're so excited about what you're talking about and your work, and I thank you so much. I have never heard anything like this. I'm learning a lot from you, and I'm sure all the listeners are too, with immediate action items I can take away from this podcast. That's why I love this. That's what the whole podcast is about, by the way. I'll talk and share insights about all the things I'm really good at, and I'm like, just go do the thing now. Go take action. So everybody listening, please take some action on what Dr. Peter Martone is sharing.

I can feel your excitement, and I keep hearing you say not enough people are talking about this. What excites you the most about growing awareness around these foundational habits of how to fall asleep and what you're doing in your work? Why do you want to continue to grow awareness around this?

Peter: This is so great. You're right. I really want to change the way the world sleeps, to unlock the potential of a well-rested, aligned you. Sleeping in alignment, and the limitations the spinal structure puts on your health, is so misunderstood. When you tell somebody, oh yeah, I'm a chiropractor, they say, oh, I already know what you do. Just crack my back. They have no idea of the implications of alignment, how structural alignment and the health of the spine affect the central nervous system. I've spent the last 25 years of my life helping people regain their health when everything else has failed, through structural alignment and maintaining that alignment. I am so excited for humanity to start shifting their consciousness to understanding that they have way more control of their health than they think. And for me, where I want to live is this: I want to sleep with everybody in America. I want them to just think about me for the first 10 minutes. That's it. And then I'm out. I'm done.

Nikkiey: I love that. You're doing God's work here, Dr. Peter Martone. You are. This is so important, that people understand better ways of sleep hygiene. But this goes so much beyond that concept. It's so much further. And I'm super excited for this message to get out to everybody listening to this podcast. You talk about an app. You talk about an academy. Share a little bit about what it's like inside the WAY method and inside your practice. What exactly do you offer?

Peter: Yeah, that's great. We've launched something called the Way Better Sleep Academy. When you think about it, sleep is a waste of time. You're spending eight hours doing nothing. So if you're not working to maintain or get way better sleep... nobody wants sleep. They want who they're becoming because of good sleep. They don't want to waste time. So our whole model is that in order to have way better sleep, which is an outcome, you have to have way healthier habits. And ultimately, why? Because we want a way better life.

Way healthier habits is a structural roadmap. Every month we change something. January is gluten-free and we do cleansing. We change these habits health-wise in three areas: eating right, being fit and thinking well. And then we have a sleep change every month. So that's the way better health. Then we have the way better sleep, which covers understanding the body, putting your body into alignment, taking your animal sleep avatar test, and the 15 things you need to do to create safety. Then we move to the conscious brain, stimulating the autonomic nervous system. So we do everything in order to get good sleep.

And then ultimately, what I'm so passionate about, and I'm passionate about both of those, is the way better life. I'm a mindset person, if you can't tell. I'm pretty positive. But I was never like that.

Nikkiey: Full of energy too, y'all. If you're not watching Dr. Martone on video right now, he's full of energy. He's standing up. He's moving around.

Peter: Oh, yeah. It goes along with my ADD. But with that cross-dominance and that high degree of energy, you can go enthusiastically into a really bad place, which is where I was. My best friend had just died right in front of me. I went into a deep, deep depression, and I found myself in a really bad place. I was 205 pounds and I was a mess. In order to come out of that, to be able to sleep and not be self-destructive, I had to find myself.

The way better life is the mindset roadmap to be able to create a way better life. Because ultimately, you're a product of your daily rituals, and your rituals are driven by your beliefs, because your beliefs drive your actions. So if you are not happy with where you are, we have stinking thinking. In that stinking thinking, you might think you're doing the right things, but it may be the people around you that are suppressing your state of health. That's why you've got to look for new leaders like you, follow people who are where you want to be, and then back into the lifestyle habits. That's what the whole academy is all about.

Nikkiey: Love that. We align on a lot of what you said, in terms of who you are now being different from the person you are becoming, but you need to start showing up as that person right now. So how can you do that? It's a bunch of the action items you talked about on this episode today, and also in the resources you're sharing. Like I said, you are doing God's work. I think that in fitness, in this field, sleep is not talked about enough. So thank you for bringing your insight into today's episode and sharing your expertise on how powerful the connection is between sleep, posture, overall health and overall mindset. Your insights have been very eye-opening to me personally, and I know to our listeners too. There are a lot of actionable takeaways here to improve the well-being of everyone listening. Before we wrap up, if you could leave our audience with one key takeaway or piece of advice to start optimizing their health right now, today, what would it be?

Peter: Understand that you have more control over your health and well-being than you think you have. And for me, your health day starts when you plug in. It doesn't start when you wake up. It starts when you plug in at night. So my 24-hour health day is very different from, let's get up and start my day. No, let's plug in. Then you're starting your day. And understand that the deeper you plug in, the more performance you're going to get out of your body the next day. So please give yourself the time and respect that sleep deserves. Sleep is a necessary action to have great health. But remember, it's also a byproduct of great habits. So there you go.

Nikkiey: Amen. I love that. I'm going to put everything in the description below, but where can everybody find you? I like them to hear it so they can go and do it.

Peter: I love that. That's great. If they want to take their free animal sleep avatar test, then you're in our world. You can go to drsleepright.com. That's D-R-S-L-E-E-P-R-I-G-H-T dot com. And they can follow me on Instagram and TikTok, where we do some pretty crazy things, at drsleepright.

Nikkiey: Awesome. Well, thank you, Dr. Martone, for being on this episode today. Such good insight. I appreciate your time.

Peter: Thank you.

Nikkiey: Thank you. Keep doing God's work.

Peter: Thank you.

Nikkiey: Hey, really quick before you go, I have one small favor to ask. If this episode brought you value or sparked something in you, take just a moment to hit that review button. Your rating and review make all the difference, helping more women discover the tools they need to transform their fitness and their confidence. It takes less than a minute, but it can change the path of someone else's journey. Thank you so much for leaving that review. I appreciate you so much.