Episode 378 revisits Dr. Shane Creado’s science-driven advice on sleep, strategic napping, and why sleep is foundational for health, hormones, immunity, and performance. Learn practical nap protocols (10–20 minutes or 90-minute recovery naps), timing, environment tips, and how to protect your morning from cortisol-spiking habits like checking phones.

The episode also shows how combining a short nap with the Silva Method — setting an intention and entering alpha — can boost creativity, insight, and problem-solving. It concludes with actionable routines to improve sleep consistency, support shift workers, and make sleep a strategy for better productivity and well-being.

✔Learn practical nap protocols (10–20 minutes or 90-minute recovery naps), timing, environment tips, and how to protect your morning from cortisol-spiking habits like checking phones.

✔The episode also shows how combining a short nap with the Silva Method — setting an intention and entering alpha — can boost creativity, insight, and problem-solving.

✔ It concludes with actionable routines to improve sleep consistency, support shift workers, and make sleep a strategy for better productivity and well-being.

Welcome back to SEASON 14 of The Neuroscience Meets Social and Emotional Learning Podcast, where we connect the science-based evidence behind social and emotional learning and emotional intelligence training for improved well-being, achievement, productivity and results—using what I saw as the missing link (since we weren’t taught this when we were growing up in school), the application of practical neuroscience.

I’m Andrea Samadi, and seven years ago, launched this podcast with a question I had never truly asked myself before: (and that is) If productivity and results matter to us—and they do now more than ever—how exactly are we using our brain to make them happen?

Most of us were never taught how to apply neuroscience to improve productivity, results, or well-being. About a decade ago, I became fascinated by the mind-brain-results connection—and how science can be applied to our everyday lives.

That’s why I’ve made it my mission to bring you the world’s top experts—so together, we can explore the intersection of science and social-emotional learning. We’ll break down complex ideas and turn them into practical strategies we can use every day for predictable, science-backed results.

This week, in our review of EP 72 with Shane Creado, MD and his book Peak Sleep Performance for Athletes and will learn: 

How strategic napping, morning brain habits, and even the Silva Method all work together to reset your brain, boost performance, and transform your health from the inside out.

Clip 1: The Science of Strategic Napping

In Clip 1, Dr. Shane Creado explains why every cell in the body follows its own circadian rhythm—and why humans were historically wired for polymodal sleep, with natural dips in alertness that make afternoon naps biologically appropriate.
You’ll learn:

Why the “post-lunch crash” is actually a melatonin rise, not just fatigue
Why old advice to “avoid naps” is outdated
How short, intentional naps can boost alertness, learning, mood, and performance
The simple rules behind strategic napping: length, timing, and environment
This clip lays the groundwork for using naps as a tool—not a crutch—for better brain function.

Clip 2: Your Morning Cortisol Curve & Hidden Sleep Dangers

Clip 2 shifts the focus to the first moments of your day.
Dr. Creado warns that checking your phone the moment you wake up spikes cortisol and sends your brain into danger mode, increasing anxiety and disrupting emotional regulation for the entire day.
You’ll also learn:

Why shift work fragments DNA
Why the WHO classifies shift work as a possible carcinogen
How sleep protects your hormones, immune system, gut health, and long-term aging
This clip reinforces that sleep is foundational biology, not optional or replaceable.

How This All Connects to The Silva Method

We close the episode by tying these insights back to our most-listened-to series—the Silva Method.
Both Dr. Creado’s strategies and Silva’s techniques point to the same powerful truth:

When we intentionally shift the brain into restorative states—through sleep, strategic napping, or Alpha/Theta training—we unlock higher performance, creativity, intuition, and emotional stability.

You’ll see how:

Strategic naps naturally guide the brain into Alpha and Theta brainwave patterns
Morning routines that protect your cortisol curve mimic Silva’s “mental housecleaning”
Sleep resets the brain in the same way Silva exercises reset focus, clarity, and intuition
Both methods teach us to work with the brain, not against it

Together, the science of sleep and the mental training of Silva give you a complete framework for building peak performance from the inside out.

Episode 378: Featuring Dr. Shane Creado

(Integrating the Silva Method[i] for Increased Creativity-Nap Integration)

For today’s Episode 378, we continue with our review of past episodes as we make connections to prior learning with whatever it is that we are currently working on this year. I’ll create a roadmap at the end of this season so this pathway will make sense to us (I hope!) as we piece together important parts of our success puzzle and begin to bring them to life.

As we review these episodes, you’ll notice that around the time of the pandemic, around 2020, our interviews took a turn towards health and wellness, and to stay on track, I created a framework of our Top 5 Health Staples on Episode 87[ii], which eventually evolved into our Top 6 Health Staples when we added stress reduction to help us to boost our physical and mental health.

This week, we’re going back to one of my favorite interviews with the inspiring Dr. Shane Creado, who we first met on EP 72[iii] in July 2020 on the topic of “Sleep Strategies that Will Guarantee a Competitive Advantage.”

Dr. Creado is a double board-certified sleep medicine doctor and psychiatrist who practices functional sleep medicine, integrative psychiatry, and sports psychiatry. He brings all of these specialties together to uncover the underlying factors that sabotage our sleep and then treats them comprehensively, helping people to achieve their health and performance goals with sleep at the forefront.

To quickly review his background: Dr. Creado completed an undergraduate degree in physical therapy, went on to earn his MD, and then completed a fellowship in Sleep Medicine at the University of Wisconsin, recognizing the huge overlap between sleep and psychiatric issues. He believes in optimization, not normalization, and devotes his work to optimizing brain health in professional athletes, executives, and anyone interested in peak performance.

We did a deep dive into his book Peak Sleep Performance for Athletes: The Cutting-Edge Sleep Science That Will Guarantee a Competitive Advantage on EP 71[iv] so that, when he came on EP 72, we could maximize our time together, by asking the most practical questions to help all of us move the needle with our sleep.

How did I come across Dr. Creado? I first heard him on Dr. Daniel Amen’s Brain Warrior’s Way Podcast, since he worked closely with Dr. Amen at that time. At that point I was just beginning to learn how to track and improve my own sleep. This conversation with him actually happened about a year before our interview with Dr. Kristin Holmes,[v] VP of Performance Science at WHOOP, and before I began officially measuring my sleep data with a wearable device.

A few months after this interview, Dr. Creado reviewed my brain scan results from Dr. Amen’s Clinics and told me that my brain showed the same pattern as someone who was sleep deprived (which we shared on EP 84[vi]). That feedback sent me searching for what else I could do to improve this crucial health staple: sleep.

This episode opened the door for me to meet many other leaders in health and wellness and ultimately led to our deep dive into the six health staples that are scientifically proven to improve our mental and physical well-being.

This was all years before our popular series on The Silva Method[vii] (still our most-listened-to series on this podcast), where we covered how to improve our creativity and innovation with sleep, and also before our review of The Fisher Wallace Brain Stimulator[viii] that held the top spot for years (with the topic of improving sleep). But it all really began with conversations like this one—with Dr. Shane Creado—on achieving peak performance with our sleep.

So let’s go back to March 2020 and revisit what Dr. Creado had to say about sleep.

Clip 1: The Science of Strategic Napping

VIDEO 1 – Click Here to Watch

Dr. Creado reminds us that every cell in our body has its own circadian rhythm. When we understand this, it becomes clear what we need to do to support healthy sleep.

He explains that historically, human sleep has been polymodal—people would sleep a few hours early in the night, wake for a bit, then sleep again in the early morning, and often nap in the afternoon. This pattern lines up with how melatonin behaves in the body: it rises at night, dips, and then shows a slight rise again in the afternoon.

So when you feel sleepy after lunch, it’s not just the food—it’s your melatonin rising and your brain asking for a recharge.

Key Takeaways from Dr. Shane Creado

Dr. Creado challenges older sleep-hygiene advice that says to avoid naps altoge