If we could only sell people on the importance of sleep as successfully as we sell them on the pleasures of sex, we’d have a much healthier—and happier bunch. This is one of sleep expert Kirk Parsley’s messages.

Parsley calls sleep “the greatest elixir,” and places its importance above that of both exercise and nutrition. Yet, this simple physiological need is hard to satisfy in a society that glorifies business and overworking—and loves its electronics, which don’t exactly prepare the body for sleep.

Parsley discusses these and other issues with STEM-Talk host Dawn Kernagis. He talks about how his background as a Navy SEAL led him to a career in medicine, focused on sleep. He also explains why sleep is important—and how you can get more of it.

Parsley served as the Naval Special Warfare’s expert on sleep medicine, and has been a member of the American Academy of Sleep Medicine since 2006. He is also the inventor of the Sleep Cocktail, a supplement designed for the sleep optimization of Navy SEALs: http://www.sleepcocktails.com

A much sought-after sleep expert, this podcast marks Parsley’s 100th podcast interview. You can find more information on him at his web site: www.docparsley.com. You can find his TED talk at http://tinyurl.com/pw9h7qz

4:10: Dawn welcomes Kirk.

5:00: Kirk joined the Navy SEALs after high school and stayed for nearly seven years. “I quickly realized that was a young, single man’s job, and I was becoming neither.”

6:09: Kirk volunteered at the San Diego Sports Medicine Center to qualify for physical therapy school, but found the field too limited, so he shadowed doctors and decided to pursue medicine.

7:00: He attended the military’s medical school. “They were going to pay me to go to medical school instead of the other way around…”

9:58: The SEALs came to him for medical advice. “The most palatable way for me to talk about it in the military was through sleep. They didn’t really want me talking about testosterone. Adrenal fatigue is sort of a pseudo-scientific term. So inadvertently I became a sleep guy.”

10:40: “I don’t think there’s any area of your life that isn’t significantly impacted by sleep. Good quality sleep is probably the most important elixir there is.” He places it above both nutrition and exercise.

11:35: Sleep is a hard sell, with the advent of factory jobs and the idea that time is money.

13:55: “My message is the more you sleep, the more work you get done.”

14:58: “The big problem with sleep is …. Once you fall asleep until you wake up, you don’t really have any objective experience of that.”

15:50: Polysomnographs reveal that some people wake up 300 times a night, but say they slept fine.

16:13: You don’t need the same amount of sleep every day. Seven and a half hours is the average amount of sleep we aim for to enhance the immune system.

17:05: Kirk compares proper sleep to taking your daily vitamin. “You can’t really tell the true benefits of proper sleep until you’ve done it for a month or so.”

17:40: Wearable tech gadgets such as Fitbit and Jawbone measure how much you move during sleep and equate that with sleep quantity. “The truth is you could stare at your ceiling, never move, and never sleep, and it would say you got this awesome night of sleep.”

19:00: Some devices also measure heart rate variability; others, placed under your pillow or on your nightstand, record your respiratory rate. Some iPhone apps capture snoring.

19:40: Polysomnographs are the gold standard for determining how much somebody sleeps.

20:00: Everyone has a different sleep metric: mood, athletic performance, project completion rate/satisfaction.

21:12: Sleep deprivation leads to anxiety, which is already a big problem for entrepreneurs and other professionals.

21:20: Commercial break: STEM-Talk is an educational service of the Florida Institute for Human and Machine Cognition, a not-for-profit research lab pioneering ground-breaking technol...