To sleep is to trust
Jordan Raynor sits down with Dr. Benjamin Long, Sleep Medicine Physician, to talk about the one shockingly simple thing you can do today to drastically improve your sleep, what scientists are learning about the correlation between faith and sleep quality, how we can help our neighbors—especially the marginalized—get better sleep, and Parks and Rec and Pitch Perfect.
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And don't forget, if you pre-order a copy of Jordan's new book, Redeeming Your Time, you can enter to win a trip for two to the Holy Land (or a cash prize of equivalent value)!
Entering to win is super simple:
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[00:00:00] JR: Before we get to today's episode, a quick announcement. October 19, I'm releasing my next book Redeeming Your Time: 7 Biblical Principles for Being Purposeful, Present and Wildly Productive. But in case you haven't heard, I'm giving you guys an amazing over the top incentive to pre order the book today. I'm giving away a trip for you and the guest of your choice to visit the Holy Land. Here's why. The new book is all about these seven time management principles for the life of Christ that we can see in the gospels, believe it or not.
Essentially, what I've done in this book, is I've taken those seven timeless principles and mapped them to 31 hyper practical practices, to help you live out those principles today, ensuring that you and I can walk like Jesus walked in the first century, here in the 21st century today. So, I thought, if I'm teaching people how to walk, like Jesus walked, how awesome would it be to send a listener of the podcast to go walk where Jesus walks? That's exactly what I'm doing.
Now, listen, I know many of us are not comfortable traveling internationally right now. That's why I'm giving the winner of this sweepstakes three years to book their trip to Jerusalem. Now, if you're still not comfortable traveling to the Holy Land, I get it. No worries. If you win, you can choose to receive the equivalent cash prize of the trip instead.
Alright, so with all that other way entering to win this trip, or the prize wherever you want, super simple. Step one, go preorder Redeeming Your Time on Amazon or wherever you buy your books. Step two. Go to jordanraynor.com, you'll find a form right there on the website, where you can enter in the number of books you pre ordered, and enter to win the trip. That's it.
Now, here's today's episode.
[INTRODUCTION]
[00:02:11] JR: Hey, everybody. Welcome to the Call to Mastery. I’m Jordan Raynor. This is a podcast for Christians who want to do their most exceptional work for the glory of God and the good of others. Each week, I host a conversation with a Christ follower who is pursuing world-class mastery of their craft. We talk about their path to mastery, their daily habits, and routines, how the Gospel of Jesus Christ influences their work.
Guys, I might have a new favorite episode of The Call to Mastery. I know. Shocking. I get it. I hear you all laughing. Today's guest is my friend, Dr. Benjamin Long. He's a Board-Certified Pediatrician, and a Sleep Medicine Fellow with the United States Air Force. What I love about Ben is he's thought incredibly deeply about what God's Word has to say about sleep.
Dr. Long and I recently sat down and we talked about the one shockingly simple thing you can do today to drastically improve your sleep. We talked about what scientists are beginning to learn about the correlation between faith and sleep quality to fascinating conversation about that. And we talked about how, for those of us that already do get good sleep, how can we think sacrificially about sleep and help our neighbors, especially the most marginalized in our communities, get better sleep.
Guys, forgive us for Dr. Long and I’s sidetrack rants about our love of Parks and Rec and Pitch Perfect 2. You've been warned. You guys are going to love this conversation with Dr. Benjamin Long. Enjoy.
[INTERVIEW]
[00:04:02] JR: Ben, thank you so much for joining us on the podcast. Longtime listener, first time caller. Actually, that's actually not true. You actually did call in for the ask me anything episode, right? That's how we got connected.
[00:04:15] BL: Yeah, yeah.
[00:04:16] JR: I just remembered this now.
[00:04:16] BL: Well, you dodged my question a little bit. If I'm being totally honest.
[00:04:22] JR: This is good. Call me out and force me to answer.
[00:04:27] BL: So, I asked you, if you had like three to five good old books that you read.
[00:04:33] JR: Yes. I remember this now. I basically said no. I don't read old books. What did you mean by old books? I'm going to give an answer here.
[00:04:45] BL: Okay, so I was meaning, at the time, I was reading the biography of a physician named Howard Kelly. He was one of the big four that founded the residency system at like John Hopkins and he wrote this other book called The Scientific Man in the Bible, and it's just this tiny book. It was actually kind of released a little bit after like the monkey scopes trial. So, the context of it was so interesting because I was reading all this and I was like, “This could be written today.” I think there's something about old books when you have a generation or two removed, that you get this different perspective, that's kind of breeds into you.
[00:05:30] JR: Totally. Alright, I get it. I appreciate the question. I'm going to answer. Favorite old books. I don't go back too old, but I love Louis and especially the stuff that he was writing early on in his career. I can afford this, problem of pain, that type of stuff, that really catapulted him to kind of national fame of Britain during the war. I also love the writings of this Jewish Rabbi named Abraham Heschel. Have you read Heschel before on the Sabbath?
[00:06:03] BL: No.
[00:06:04] JR: It's this tiny little book, glorious little book on the Jewish people's history with Sabbath and how Sabbath is meant to be a gift. It’s what Jesus said in the Gospels. Sabbath is made for man, not man for the Sabbath. I read it. I think my friend John Mark Comer recommended it to me years ago, and I read it and I loved it. I tried to read it every couple of years. It's a great old read. So, check that out. Did I answer the question?
[00:06:34] BL: Yeah. That was great. Thanks.
[00:06:38] JR: So, since you've listened to the show before, I'm curious, I always like to ask listeners favorite episodes so far?
[00:06:45] BL: Oh, man, there are so many. Well, I've got to say, Lindsey Ray, of course. I have massive respect for nurse practitioners, PAs, people in the trenches, especially in the kind of primary care. She's cranking it out and that is hard work. People, if you don't realize how much stress and effort goes into being a really good primary care physician, maybe just ask the next time you see.
[00:07:21] JR: Ask your pediatrician. Ask your doctor. I think it's in the podcast episode. She is my wife's best friend in college. So, they're really, really close friends. It was really fun. We actually recorded that in the master bedroom closet in my house. This very luxurious accommodation for that podcast episode. Our kids were running around the house. But yeah, great, great episode. You know what, those are the episodes that our audience seems to really love. Most is the episodes of people that they've never heard of. And for good reason, it's much more easy to see what The Call to Mastery looks like in somebody like that. I dig it. Good answer. All right, Ben, what does a sleep medicine physician do?
[00:08:04] BL: Sleep medicine is about the diagnosis and management of sleep disorders. So, the kind of big three would be sleep apnea, insomnia, and narcolepsy. There’s some other stuff that goes bump in the night that we have to be experts on. But mostly, that's what we're working with.
[00:08:25] JR: So, what does your day to day look like?
[00:08:26] BL: So, as a sleep medicine physician, day to day practice, it's just a little bit of both reading sleep studies, and then seeing patients in the clinic. If you've never had a polysomnography, it's like we hook you up to all this stuff that bands like over your chest and your stomach and the little thing of your nose and all this stuff, and then we're watching you sleep, and then tell you to go to bed.
[00:08:53] JR: That sounds like the worst experience ever.
[00:08:58] BL: Yeah. So not surprisingly, we get this kind of like first night effect, where people just don't sleep as well the first night in the lab compared to if we brought them back and try it again, kind of a thing. And then in clinic, it's just a matter of seeing new patients, seeing if we're putting someone on PAP therapy, which just positive airway pressure to help control their sleep apnea. And then really just kind of helping figure out what are their barriers to getting good sleep and trying to impact those barriers.
[00:09:34] JR: What got you interested in this? Because you were, correct me if I'm wrong, but earlier in your career, you were focused on pediatrics and then you made this shift to sleep medicine as a specialty. What led the shift and why'd you decide to double down on sleep?
[00:09:49] BL: Yeah, absolutely. Man, that is a loaded question. What happened was I was in my last year of pediatrics training, and I kind of wondered, “Is this really what I want to do?” I had made a decision around 12 years old or so that I want to pursue medicine, and specifically pediatrics, because my grandfather was a pediatrician. And then it was like, I was running for this goal for so long, so hard and then I got there. I was like, “Oh, I don't know if this is it.”
[00:10:32] JR: But I think a lot of people in that situation would feel an obligation kind of the sunk cost bias to stick it out. I think in some cases, that's good advice. But how did you think through that decision? How did you overcome kind of that sunk cost bias?
[00:10:47] BL: I happened to be rotating on the sleep medicine rotation. So, for people who aren't familiar with kind of the residency system, you do four years of medical school, you graduate, so you're officially an MD, but you're in this weird paradox where you're like, “I'm not a real doctor yet.” Even though –
[00:11:08] JR: Professional purgatory.
[00:11:11] BL: Yes. Exactly.
[00:11:12] JR: To be clear, I'm not advocating for a theology of purgatory. I want that on the record. That’s a bad one.
[00:11:20] BL: Yeah. So, you're in this weird paradox of I'm a doctor, but not doctor yet kind of thing. Really, I just kind of had this click moment. I was seeing patients and I had all these other things that I was interested in as far as like pulmonology, and neurology and psychiatry. I love different aspects of all those things and then sleep was kind of this overlapping of all those things.
[00:11:54] JR: Yeah, kind of touches all those things. You've thought really deeply. This is the main reason why I wanted you on the podcast. You've thought really deeply about what God's Word has to say about the sleep. It has a lot to say about sleep. I'm curious if your faith played any role in your interest in this field?
[00:12:13] BL: Oh, yeah, 100%. Well, one on just more of a, like a spiritual journey in and of itself. I think sleep was the right decision for me for that, because, like I said, I've been running so hard towards general pediatrics. Actually, I was considering applying for a job. So, chief resident, is where you're kind of like, in charge of all the residents and academics and schedules. I'm a type two on the Enneagram. So, I would essentially have 30 people who are dependent on me and needing my help 24 hours a day.
But then I got to this point, and I was like, “I don't want to do that. I want to do sleep medicine.” It was this actually big decision for me to walk through this and realize, like, it's okay for me to not do something, even though I would be good at it, and that's okay for me to walk away from that to pursue something else that I think I'm really meant to do.
[00:13:22] JR: Amen. It's choosing to say no to something that you know he could be good at, to say yes to something that you think it could be even better at, in service of others, and the Lord's given us great freedom there. I mean, I've talked about this on the podcast before. This was part of the calculus I made when I transitioned from CEO of this really rapidly growing tech startup to chairman of the board, so that I could focus more my time on this podcast and writing my books. I was a good CEO of that company, and we were growing pretty quickly. But I also knew there were 100,000 people, whatever, who could do that job as well, if not better than me.
This work, I'm focused on today of helping the church connect the gospel of the work, that's just felt like a more unique lane, and something I could do even better. It sounds like that was the calculus for you, which I got a lot of respect for. Alright, so Ben, you wrote this amazing 12-day, essentially devotional on what God's Word has to say about sleep. In it, you talk about sleep in the context of ordered creation. Can you talk to us about what you mean by that term, ordered creation and how sleep plays a role in it?
[00:14:38] BL: Yeah. So, I actually have you to thank for inspiration for that. Because after listening to a lot of your podcast episodes, and you're talking about going through the Bible to look at your work, as far as how the Bible can speak into that, I just was interested, “Hey, what doesn't say about sleep?” Like you said, actually says a lot.
Ordered creation, it's interesting because in Genesis from the very beginning, we see sleep present. The first time that we actually see that is with this word called [inaudible 00:15:18], which is translated to deep sleep. The first two times that we actually see that in Genesis is with Adam, and with Abraham. So, in this sequence, we see that deep sleep falls upon them. And then God does something, and then people are blessed by that. Meaning that Adam is blessed with a partner, with relationship, with his wife. And then Abraham is blessed with this promise of going to be a blessing for many people.
So, it fits into the larger arc of Genesis of showing that there was all this chaos, there was all this darkness and then God brings order. Ordered creation just means that creation as it is meant to be ordered. So, sleep is part of that sequence. Ancient people realize this, because they didn't have cell phones, or all this other stuff to keep us up 24/7, this cycle of morning and night and waking and sleeping. Sleep is part of that ordered creation.
[00:16:41] JR: I want you to go a layer deeper on this idea that, at least in the instances of Adam and Abraham, sleep was a conduit to blessing, to God's blessing. I think that's super interesting. I think oftentimes, we view sleep as a curse today, right? This necessary evil, this thing I have to do. But in Scripture, it tells us a different story. Talk a little bit more about that, if you can.
[00:17:12] BL: Scripture shows us that sleep is good, that God cares about it. There's a little portion actually of it in Deuteronomy that talks about the sleep of a poor person, and that God cares for their sleep. It has that same redemptive arc that everything has in the Bible, that we have this good creation, and then sin entered the world, disfigures it, but then Jesus comes to redeem it. I mean, I see that every day in my clinic, because people come to see me not when they're sleeping well, but when they can't sleep. There's so much of that even in the Bible and the Bible shows us as Christians, what we can do in our sleeplessness.
[00:18:07] JR: I love that. You and I are both really big fans of John Mark Comer and specifically his book, Ruthless Elimination of Hurry. I thought was interesting. You heard about this in this devotional you wrote that hurry can contribute to some of our problems with sleep. It sounds like you've seen this in the lives of your patients. What's the connection there?
[00:18:29] BL: For people to get a good night sleep, maybe we just think we should be like computers or something.
[00:18:37] JR: Power down, now.
[00:18:38] BL: Yeah, yeah, exactly. Or a light switch. I mean, literally, we have a little button on our computer that says sleep. I think we just think that we can just go, go, go, go, go, go, go and then I should be able to just fall asleep. We have lost sight of this reality that we can't control sleep. We have to wait for it to fall upon us and that requires certain conditions. Certainly, we try to bypass those things and that's why there's all sorts of medications and therapies and things like that to try and help you get to those right conditions. But ultimately, you every single night, have to kind of go through this sequence, this pattern of behavior to let sleep fall upon you.
[00:19:34] JR: What's that pattern? What's the ideal pattern to prepare us for sleep?
[00:19:38] BL: So, I'd say a good thing for trying to fall asleep is really consistency. So many people, their life is just so chaotic, and they have so many things going on that they just can't even tell me what's their bedtime routine or what they tried to do to kind of get ready for bed. So many times, I just say start with that. You have to have some consistency. That’s actually in our biology as well. So, your circadian rhythm, it's roughly 24 hours. So, you're going to have a lot of pressure to fall asleep and that comes from adenosine that's building up in your brain. If you are moving those bedtimes and wake times, then that impacts your sleep pressure as well.
So, people who are just going to and from, and just pulled in so many different directions, and it's just like, they don't have that consistency. Sometimes, unfortunately, people don't even have the degrees of freedom to have consistency. I'm thinking about the season that I'm coming out of medical trainees, every single month, you're in a different rotation, and sometimes you're working from 5 AM to like 7 PM, 8 PM at night, depending upon what's going on with your patient. And then sometimes you have like normal hours. So, your margins are moving all over the place and if you don't have a way to be intentional about your time, it is so difficult to prioritize your sleep.
[00:21:26] JR: This is so much harder for the working poor, whose hours and shifts are constantly changes, something that leaders have got to think really deeply about is how can we create conditions where all members of our team can sleep well? I want to go back to this idea of routine though. I find it really fascinating that, and I wrote about this a little bit in my new book, Redeeming Your Time. When I talk to my friends about their sleep routines, almost all of them wake up at a consistent time, every day, right? I got to be up at 6 AM. So, I can get the kids ready for school, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. But very few of them have a consistent time in which they go to bed which is crazy. The conversation is usually like, “Yeah, I go to bed sometime between 9 and 11, depending on what's on TV.” If we believe that we need an eight-hour sleep opportunity every night, that match just doesn’t pan out, right? The end time can be fixed, but the start time is got to be pretty darn fixed.
That sounds like a pretty simple thing to solve for, not all people, but for a lot of people. I read this Wall Street Journal article, like six months ago, or maybe longer ago, it’s like right at the start of the pandemic. It's like 50 ways to like get better sleep. It was like $1,300 Louis Vuitton sleep masks. I'm not kidding and like cooling socks. You know what it's a lot cheaper and easier. Set a freaking bedtime. It's like not rocket science. But that's what you've seen with your patients. Your first line of defense against bad sleep is create a routine.
[00:23:18] BL: Right. And it's so simple. Exactly with that, it feels like I should have something more to offer offer. I guess usually people come to me because they think that I have like a magic pill that's going to like just help them magically fall asleep. And it's like, no, really, exactly what you said, you have to have this consistent wake time. But we know that your body needs at least seven to nine hours of sleep. So, let's track back, “Okay, this is the time that you need to fall asleep. So, what kind of things are you doing every night?” It's really more of this kind of coaching relationship that I see that I'm like, “Hey, I'm in your corner, and I want to help you get better sleep. It's up to you whether or not you want to do the things that I tell you to do. I have science and facts behind me. But whatever, you can kind of decide.”
That's the problem with self-deception is by its nature, you don't know what you are being deceived about. So, people just get used to their patterns, their routines and their behaviors, and then don't really see how that's impacting their sleep.
[00:24:33] JR: That's interesting. The data is pretty clear that you and I've talked about this before. I've read a lot on this topic. I'm fascinated by sleep. The data is clear that sleep is productive towards our goals. But I talked a little bit about this in Redeeming Your Time. It's also productive for our souls, if I can rhyme like a Baptist minister, because it reminds us that yeah, God keeps the world spinning without us as we sleep. I'm curious, like, as a physician, do you see in patients that a lack of sleep is sometimes rooted in this just, I don't know, desire for control and feeling like, “Man, I just need to keep my work and my business and my family going and thus I can't lay down at night?”
[00:25:19] BL: Oh, yeah, 100%. That's the same thing that people don't realize that they're not trusting in order to fall asleep. So, that's also kind of my job is to kind of bring out what is it that you're thinking? What is it that is running through your mind? That's exactly it. I think what's so crazy to me, is the research that looks at religion as a social determinant of sleep health. There's a lot of good stuff that shows that, “Hey, if you have a lot of attachment to God, assurance of salvation, or things like that”, then there seems to be like this significant association between the quality of the sleep that you get. But the problem with the current research is all of it is cross sectional data, meaning that it's just kind of a snapshot from these surveys. Usually, the surveys just kind of have like one or two questions on sleep.
So, there's definitely more research to be done. But then some of this newer data showed that people who identified as either atheist or agnostic actually reported better sleep quality and ease your ability to fall asleep when compared to Catholics and Baptists. That just blew my mind. Because I was like, “Okay, if we believe in God of the universe, who is holding all things together, and have this personal relationship with Jesus Christ, shouldn't we be great at sleep?” If I believe that God is holding everything together, he's the one who is bringing order to my life, I should be able to rest in that. And that, I think, is another reason that I wanted to kind of try and write on this intersection of faith and sleep, is our faith gives us amazing tools to be able to connect with sleep, and how to respond to that sleeplessness.
Unfortunately, I think medicine as it's practiced in America today, is not optimally serving people of faith. Because there's just this disconnect, that sacred secular divide that most physicians Don't even ask a spiritual history, or even consider that as an important part of people's life, when there's so much research that shows that religiosity, spirituality, whatever you want to call, it, impacts people's health. So, if you can meet people where they're at, and be able to say, “Oh, you're a Christian and you're not sleeping well, let's see, what is your faith have to say about sleep. What are you doing when you're trying to fall asleep?” I think because, especially, in this realm of insomnia, and relaxation training, and so much of what's available in medicine is meditation and deep breathing, which are great. I'm not saying that that's a bad thing. But it doesn't utilize the resources that Christians have in their daily lives as already as far as like, devotion time, and prayer, and utilizing those things to help them not be in that fight or flight mode, but to be able to rest.
[00:28:56] JR: That's fascinating. I love that perspective. You touched on the sacred secular divide, which is perhaps most visible in science. I'm thinking back to, I don’t if you ever watched Lost a decade ago, but season finale, season one, I think it was called man of science, man of faith. It was Jack and Locke, right? You're a scientist, you're trained to find empirical proof for things of the world. And yet, you're also a person of faith who understands that science can't answer everything with empirical proof. Does that tension impact your approach to your work?
[00:29:30] BL: I think the gospel impacts how I practice medicine, and that, if I'm thinking about the patient's good, the main ultimate aim of medicine is to bring about the restoration or improvement of a person's wellbeing. So, this guy, what was his name? Dr. Edmund Pellegrino, who's kind of one of the founders of bioethics. He talked a lot about these kinds of four levels of good. We talk about the person's biomedical good, but then beyond that is the patient's perception of his or her good, and then the good of the patient as a human being, and then the spiritual good of a patient.
I think the problem with the sacred secular divide is that people don't even recognize that a spiritual good exists. So, as a physician, I was also a Christian. That is part of my aim, and recognizing what is good spiritually for this person. I think sometimes some people hear that and they get nervous because they think that I'm like proselytizing and forcing people to convert to Christianity or things like that. But really, what this is about is everyone is on a journey, everyone is trying to move through this life. As a physician, I have this awesome opportunity to just walk with people beside them, and see, “Hey, what do you need today?” Maybe that is a pill, maybe that is therapy, maybe it's just me sitting here, being present, listening to you.
I think one of the best things that Christianity gives to medicine is that we are all made in the image of God. That's just mind blowing to me, as far as I get to help people who were created in God's image and deserve intrinsic respect and dignity, which is really easy lip service until you have a patient yelling at you, or demanding an excessive amount of time and emotion and all this other stuff.
But ironically, some of the most rewarding interactions I've had with patients have been actually, when I couldn't change anything at all, we've reached kind of a dead end. And I think the patient's about to get up and be like, really mad at me, and then they just turn and say, “Thank you for listening.” It's so sad that that is masterful, or extraordinary that they have a doctor who listens to them. I usually like, “I'm sorry, that that should be every encounter.” But yeah, just being made in the image of God and that intrinsic respect and dignity that people have, that's just not like some kind of belief that I have. It impacts how I see every single patient.
[00:32:35] JR: I love that so much. The science is pretty clear. I mentioned this a few minutes ago that sleep is counterintuitively perhaps, one of the most productive things that we can do, right? The most productive thing we could do most times is go to bed. It's a critical key to mastering anything, vocationally, whether you're a doctor or a writer, or whatever. Can you share with us some of the ways in which sleep contributes to our ability to get better at the work that God has called us to do?
[00:33:06] BL: I mean, I think the easiest way for that is just sleep is the critical ingredient for you to synthesize all the stuff that you've taken in during the day. So, if you are studying or learning or trying to kind of make things work, that's why I think you said this in your chapter on sleep. That's like, that's why we say sleep on it. We don't say –
[00:33:31] JR: Stay awake on it.
[00:33:31] BL: Yeah, exactly. Because ancient people just thought, okay, you're laid down for eight hours, and then you get up and we don't really know what happens. And we thought it was a very static time in a person's life. But really, sleep is very dynamic. You're going through all these stages on a 90-minute cycle roughly. So, when you're entering that REM sleep. So that's the rapid eye movement, that typically people dream, that is synthesizing all of these problems in your day. I think, really, that's why when you wake up, and it's like, all of a sudden you have that revelation of, “Oh, yeah, this is how I can fix that problem. Or this is how all of this fit together.” Our mind doesn't go dormant during that time. It's actually helping us to process through all of that.
[00:34:26] JR: Did you read Matthew Walker's book, Why We Sleep?
[00:34:30] BL: Yes, yeah.
[00:34:30] JR: I’m obsessed with the book. But in particular, and I quoted so much of Redeeming Your Time, as you saw in the advanced copy, but I'm obsessed with this idea of what you just touched on that sleep enhances problem solving, right? We can go to bed with these problems rolling around in our heads and wake up and have the answer. It's not always that linear. But I love some of the stories that Walker shares in that book about this – do you remember the story about Keith Richards’ in the Rolling Stones. Do you recall that?
[00:35:02] BL: I don't know. No.
[00:35:03] JR: Okay, I'll share it. So, it’s a great story to prove this point. Keith Richards, guitar player, songwriter for the Rolling Stones used to sleep with a guitar and a tape recorder next to his bed.
[00:35:16] BL: Oh, yes.
[00:35:16] JR: You remember this?
[00:35:19] BL: Yeah.
[00:35:19] JR: So just in case he wakes up in the middle of night, and he's got an idea for a lyric or whatever, he’ll record it. So, one night, he was in Clearwater, Florida, of course, right down the street from me. He went to bed and woke up the next morning and found that the tape recorder had recorded all the way to the end of the tape. He's like, “I don't remember recording anything.” He goes back and he plays the tape. As he was sleeping, unconsciously, he grabbed the guitar, and play basically the first verse and chorus of Satisfaction. One of the Rolling Stones all-time greatest hits. This is amazing. And there's a ton of stories like it. I love it. I love it so much.
Alright, sleep is critical to perfecting skills, to master in our crafts. Beyond sleep, I'm curious, what are some of the keys to vocational mastery that you've found, maybe heard from past guests on the show that you find apply to your work as a physician?
[00:36:20] BL: I think definitely something that I've heard on past shows is just this commitment to practice and improvement, and that you never actually reach being a master.
[00:36:34] JR: Yeah. It’s not a destination.
[00:36:36] BL: Yeah, exactly. I think that is definitely the first thing that comes to my mind. But specifically, for medicine, what masterful physicians do, I think it's hard to actually because we don't necessarily agree what good physicians do. What I mean by that is, we know that a physician is good, pretty much up by a definition of what is not bad. Okay, as long as you're not neglecting your patient, or abusing your patient or things like that, then you're good, which it's like, that's really sad definition.
[00:37:13] JR: It’s pretty low bar.
[00:37:15] BL: Yeah. I say that, I think that's more of how it is practiced in the real world, we have a lot of writings of this is what professionalism is, and this is the values that a doctor should live by. But how it actually impacts people on a daily basis, I don't think those two things necessarily translate.
So, I would say that masterful physicians recognize that really, medicine at its heart is a moral enterprise. And what I mean by that is physicians make decisions every day on what is good or bad, right or wrong, appropriate or inappropriate for patients. Whether doctors are conscious of these moral decisions is a whole other talk in and of itself. But we're trained on that patient's biomedical good. But what we lack is really, in most places, a robust training in responding and caring for the patient's perception of their good, whether that's physical, emotional, and spiritual.
So, the task physicians really, is to order all of these goods toward our ultimate aim of restoration or improvement of the person's wellbeing. The problem is, we get this myopic focus on competency to become a masterful physician. I think a lot of that comes from this acceptance of this provider of services model. Duke University, they have this initiative called theology, medicine and culture, and they make great content on this intersection for anyone who's interested. One of the physicians there, Dr. Farr Curlin, he just published a book called The Way of Medicine that talks about this. So, he says a lot more eloquently, and I'm just starting to read his book.
But essentially, it's that we've kind of accepted this term that I'm a provider of services and you as a patient are consumer. That is a very different reality. Then I'm a doctor, you're a patient. We have a relationship that's built on trust and caring, and really, in some ways, love. I think, masterful physicians, they sharpen their craft by pursuing growth and competence and compassion, with equal vigor.
[00:39:45] JR: I love that marriage of competence and compassion. That's well said. Hey, I ask a lot of guests what their daily routines are. I'm curious to get more specific with you. What is your nighttime routine look like? You mentioned the importance of rituals. So, what is that, for you, when do you start kind of winding down for the evening? And what exactly does that look like?
[00:40:09] BL: Yeah, so typically, I think I really want to answer this question based upon the season that I'm coming out of. Meaning medical education, like we've already said, it's a crazy time, and you really don't have a lot of freedom for your margins. So, sometimes I get home at or I would get home at like, eight o'clock or nine o'clock and it's like, I have maybe an hour or something like that, before I actually needed to like fall asleep to wake up. And then other days get home earlier. So, you have this like shifting margin, and I think a really difficult thing is people, this expectation, reality, and the dissonance that comes from that, and then the constantly changing schedule.
So, the thing that I focused on more in residency is, at the end of my day, I want to have connection, connection with my son, connection with my wife, and connection with God. That really helped me to be able to process all of the stress and the things that would normally keep me up at night. And then really helped me to keep that attachment with my family. And so even if it was just like, “Okay, I'm going to have five minutes here. Oliver, what do you want to do?” And if that's playing with Legos, or going outside, running around, or whatever it is trying to have time to just be present. So, I think that was really important for me. And then actually, my bedtime routine really is just kind of winding down with my wife. Didn't you say in your book that you all watch Parks and Rec?
[00:41:53] JR: Yeah.
[00:41:56] BL: Yes. Oh, my gosh. I love Parks and Rec.
[00:41:56] JR: Love Parks and Rec. It's one of the best things to watch before going to bed.
[00:42:02] BL: Yeah.
[00:42:01] JR: It's mindless, but funny, and wholesome and we can go into whole – I could go into whole soapbox about the difference between Parts and Rec and The Office and how it underscores theology of work, but I won't. I will withhold you all to come back for another episode for that.
[00:42:19] BL: Yeah, I love Parks and Rec. Actually, my 27th birthday was Parks and Rec themed. Pin the tail on little Sebastian and we had like mini calzones to eat. Yeah, so good.
[00:42:31] JR: That's the best thing I’ve ever heard. That's great.
[00:42:35] BL: So, we actually watch like Parks and Rec or some kind of show, which there probably would be a lot of sleep medicine physicians who are like, “You're watching screens before bed.” But, it's really, I think, each individual person, what are you doing and is that a barrier to your sleep? Because there's some people that they like drink a cup of coffee, and like after dinner, and they're like, “Nope, I fall asleep fine.” And I'm like, “Okay, cool.”, if you ever can't fall asleep, that's definitely –
[00:43:03] JR: That’s the problem, right?
[00:43:07] BL: Yeah. If you're not creating barriers to your sleep, then, okay. So, we'll usually watch something kind of wind down together, and then a practice that has been really important for me, is the prayer of examine. I think it was by St. Ignatius of Loyola, who kind of first started that have were examined meaning like on a scale, the point that shows that it's balance, it's not actually an exam. So, the practice is that you are inviting the Holy Spirit to kind of help walk through your day. You get some time to just reflect on what was I doing today? And in what moments was I in kind of disintegration and feeling like I was farther away from the Father? And in what moments did I feel close to the Father? That I think is really been good for me just to get outside myself, and really see things from a different perspective. The same thing really helped me to process a lot of the stress, a lot of the things that I went through in the day, and then I lay down and just wait for sleep to come.
[00:44:21] JR: Your son's pretty young. I've got young kids too. I'm curious if your wife also gets good sleep because my wife and I both get, on average, seven and a half to eight hours of sleep a night. I think it's really important for spouses to be thinking about especially with young children, how the how both can be getting adequate sleep. Do you have any tips there for other people in a similar stage of life?
[00:44:45] BL: Oh, man, yeah. Okay, so there's a couple of different ways to take this. I think one, if you are husband and wife together with children, your team, if it is constantly falling upon your wife to kind of help with kids and the routine and think things like that, that's something to really analyze right there. Because exactly what you're saying, in some ways you are sacrificing your spouse's sleep so that you can sleep. There's so much nuance in that as well. So, I want to recognize I see patients all the time where, they have multiple kids who have multiple behavioral and medical problems, and they are just at their wit's end and like, help us.
So, a lot of times that starts back at the same conversation, what are the routines? What are you doing on a nightly basis? But I think, definitely focusing in on if you have a team, utilize your team, because that is critical. But then not everyone has that privilege. So, I think about like the single mother, who is kind of on her shoulders to play both parents as well as taking care of their kids. That is where the church is important. Because we think of so many things of how we can fill practical needs of people around us and focus on the homeless, or the abused, and all these good things that we're trying to do good for the world around us. But then it comes down to who is my neighbor? How can I help my neighbor’s sleep?
I think you said something in your chapter on rest about the best thing that you can do to love your neighbor is to get a good night's sleep. But I would challenge us to go beyond that, of if I'm getting eight to nine hours of sleep, how can I help the sleep of my neighbor, because that mom who has a three year old or teenager, who is all over the place and doesn't want to go to bed, maybe there's something really practical that you could do to help step into that, and the church is I think one of the best bodies of people to help that, because we bring people from all these different backgrounds on so many different levels, and do life together.
[00:47:12] JR: Amen. Another rousing endorsement for the local church, which I'm a huge believer in. Great perspective, Ben. Alright, three questions you know we wrap up every conversation with. What books are you recommending these days and maybe gifting to others most frequently?
[00:47:29] BL: Yeah. Okay, so, definitely, for anyone who's interested in this work, faith interaction, if you have not read Divine Conspiracy, or The Divine Conspiracy Continued by Dallas Willard, you need to do that. So, that truly enriched my understanding of discipleship and what it means to be an apprentice of Jesus. One of my favorite parts of that, to paraphrase, what is it, he said something about like true discipleship forms practices that will help us as fully and forcibly as possible, bring God in His glorious reality before the mind and kept there in such a way that the mind takes root and stays fixed, until we dearly love and constantly delight and the Heavenly Father. I think that is something critical that we all need that in our lives, it's not a matter of going to be a monk in a monastery, how me as a doctor, you as an entrepreneur, and everyone who's listening, what practices and what way do we need to live our life to help God be rooted in our minds.
[00:48:43] JR: We have a running leaderboard of the most frequently recommended books on the podcast at Jordanraynor.com/bookshelf. Divine Conspiracies got to be moving up the rankings. It's when we hear a lot on the show. So, thanks for sharing that. Any others you want to recommend?
[00:48:57] BL: I was going to say if you're interested in more about this sleep and faith interaction, the main book that I could find on that is called Theosomnia. It's by an Anglican minister, Andrew Bishop. I think that I quote in my Bible study on deep sleep, but great perspective on that as well.
[00:49:17] JR: Who do you want to hear on this podcast?
[00:49:20] BL: Oh, man, I thought so hard about this question. Oh, man, so there are two, if that's okay.
[00:49:27] JR: Yeah. Oh my gosh, please.
[00:49:29] BL: One of the first person who actually popped in my head. Are you a fan of Pentatonix?
[00:49:32] JR: I wouldn't call myself a super fan. But yeah, I enjoyed the Pentatonix.
[00:49:37] BL: Yeah, absolutely. So, Kevin Olusola. He's their beatboxer. But he's also masterful at the cello and also is a Christian. So, I would love to hear his story and because they've won Grammys and have huge followings. So, just from his perspective, that journey, I think, would be awesome.
[00:49:58] JR: Hang on a second. I have to ask. Were you an acapella singer? Is that the draw here?
[00:50:04] BL: No. I grew up in choir. So, definitely I sing acapella a lot but I was not a part of an acapella group but fun fact, I wasn't extra in Pitch Perfect 2.
[00:50:16] JR: What? Hold the phone. Alright, so timeout, so I was in an acapella sextet.
[00:50:23] BL: No way.
[00:50:25] JR: For good reason. I've never talked about this publicly. I'm not a pentatonic superfan. I am a Pitch Perfect. Super, super, super fan. You're an extra in the movie. How did this happen?
[00:50:37] BL: Okay. I say extra, very, like split moment. But I was in medical school at the time and I like – I don’t remember how I found it. But there was like this call for extras, which they filmed in Louisiana and I was in Savannah, Georgia. So, I was like, “Hey, babe, what if we just like sign up for this ad that'd be crazy.”
[00:50:55] JR: Go hang out with Anna Kendrick, whatever.
[00:50:59] BL: So, we like signed up and they accepted us as an extra. We just had like sending the picture or whatever. So, we're like, “Okay, I guess we're flying to Louisiana.” We flew to Louisiana, and had just a good time, as far as being able to be like on the set and see all of like, what that entails. For split second when the Bellas are like coming out to the stage it like goes to stage left, I think and there's like a tall person in the center of the frame, you can see the back of my head there, for a split second.
[00:51:34] JR: Do you have an IMDB page?
[00:51:37] BL: Oh my gosh, no.
[00:51:39] JR: That's amazing. I am 100% going to go look for this. This is great. Alright, so other than Kevin for the Pentatonix? Who's your other name?
[00:51:46] BL: Oh, man. Okay, so I don't actually have another name. But who I think we need to hear from is someone in the deaf community. I think a lot of people who listen to podcasts don't think about the deaf community, because obviously you have to usually talk to be able to do interviews and things like that. But there are a lot of people in the deaf community who love podcasts and that's why it's so important to have transcripts because they actually read through the transcripts for episodes.
So, I think it would be a huge blessing, not only for your team, but also for the listeners as well. Because actually, the deaf community is one of the most unreached people groups for Christianity, which I didn't even know. Part of that is because the Bible hasn't been fully translated to ASL until I think was last year. It took them like 38 years to be able to translate that because people think, “Oh, like sign language is just English in science”, but it's totally different language.
My wife is studying it, and that's kind of how we have gotten involved into the deaf community. And there are so many people, you know, I think it's estimated that like, 98% of deaf people are not reached for Christ. But that 2%, they love the Lord. And that's part of the deaf community, from my understanding is that they really want to give back and serve their community as well. So, I think that influence, and faith if you can have someone on the podcast that brings those two things together would be awesome.
[00:53:18] JR: I love that answer. Did you see the Sound of Metal?
[00:53:22] BL: No, I have not yet. I've heard so many good things. It's actually on our watch list. Is it good?
[00:53:27] JR: It's incredible, and deeply, not necessarily overtly, but a really, really beautiful, beautiful film. Alright, last question. What's one thing from our conversation that you want to reiterate or highlight to our listeners before we sign off?
[00:53:43] BL: I would say whenever or wherever you're listening to this podcast, just know that you are fully known and deeply loved by a God who never sleeps. So, he's always available to us, but paradoxically understands our sleeplessness through Jesus. So, you can trust that he will be gracious and faithful to you, on your journey to better sleep.
[00:54:14] JR: Ben, I want to commend you for the great work you do for reminding us that sleep is a part of God's order creation and a good gift. It's productive towards our goals and our souls. Hey, we mentioned this a few times in the conversation, this terrific devotional you wrote Deep Sleep: A 12-Day Exploration of Biblical Sleep. Where can our listeners get a copy of that?
[00:54:35] BL: I think the best way to do that would be if you have an Instagram, you can just follow me on Instagram @thewholeheartedmd. I'll have a link in my bio that you can click for Deep Sleep. If you don't have Instagram, then hopefully by the time this podcast comes out, I should have the wholehearted MD website up and running. And so, you should be able to go to thewholeheartedmd.com and I'll have it there as well.
[00:55:01] JR: I love it. Ben, this has been a joy. Thank you so much for hanging out with me.
[00:55:08] BL: Absolutely.
[OUTRO]
[00:55:10] JR: Anytime I told you is a great one did I lie? I think we delivered on that promise. Hey, by the way, one of the seven principles in Redeeming Your Time, my new book is this principle called embrace productive rest. It's this idea that Dr. long and I talked about that rest is counterintuitively productive, towards our goals and our souls. And I got an entire practice in the book, showing you what science has to say about how to get a solid eight-hour sleep opportunity, every single night. That's just one of 31 practices in this book, to help you redeem your time.
I say in the introduction of the book, one of these practices can change your life. If you pick up two, just gravy. There's 31 for you to choose from. Remember, if you preorder the book today, you can enter to win a trip for two to go to the Holy Land, go to Jerusalem, walk where Jesus walked, go to the garden of the tomb. Go to the spot of Jesus's birth in Bethlehem. You're also going to stand where David Slade Goliath. It's an incredible trip and entering to win is super simple. Step one, go preorder Redeeming Your Time on Amazon or wherever you buy your books. Step two, go to jordanraynor.com, fill out the form right there and you'll be entered to win. There's also a lot more details on the trip and the book right there on the homepage of jordanraynor.com.
Hey guys, thank you so much for tuning in to The Call to Mastery this week. I'll see you next time.
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