What would you change about your health if you couldn't rely on a good night's sleep? Not occasionally — ever. I put that question to Paul Poulos, a human potential coach who lives with narcolepsy, and his answer reframed lifestyle optimisation for me entirely. When your baseline is permanently lower than everyone else's, you can't afford things that don't work. You find what actually does.
What lifestyle optimisation really means
Paul spent much of a decade in the fitness industry and, like a lot of people, found himself climbing a ladder and growing quietly disillusioned with the life he was living while doing it. Fit, busy, and not well. That gap is what sent him looking.
Narcolepsy is a neurological condition that stops the brain regulating sleep-wake cycles properly. It isn't the cartoon version where someone drops off mid-sentence. It means sleep attacks during the day and genuinely poor sleep at night. As Paul puts it, he's always operated from a baseline well below most people's, because quality sleep simply isn't available to him as a tool.
So his definition of lifestyle optimisation is refreshingly unglamorous: implementing strategies and techniques in everyday life that let you be the best version of yourself. Nutrition, sleep hygiene where it's possible, habits, goal setting, understanding how your own brain works, learning to live more mindfully. Not hacks. Fundamentals, applied consistently.
Most people are missing the basics, not the advanced stuff
When I asked Paul where his clients most need support, he didn't name a protocol. He said the fundamentals are what's missing — and specifically, understanding how to set goals and build habits in the first place.
His reasoning is worth sitting with. The brain doesn't really see itself in the future, so aspiration alone gives it nothing to work with. People then try to close the gap between who they are and who they want to be far too fast, and what Paul calls the snapback effect kicks in: like an elastic band, they return to the old identity because they never felt themselves arriving at the new one. It has to be a slow process.
There's a second trap he named that I see constantly: endlessly gathering knowledge without the ability to implement any of it. Another podcast, another book, another protocol — and no traction. These are life skills, and nobody teaches them at school. We learn English and maths and science and then go out into adulthood with no instruction in how to actually change our own behaviour.
Scheduling is the skill nobody wants to hear about
Here's the part of our conversation I keep repeating to clients. When Paul coaches someone through a change of routine while keeping health a priority, he starts with scheduling — religiously finding space in the day for yourself.
He practises what he calls zero-hour scheduling: nothing in the day is left unscheduled. Not work. Not recreation, not partner time, not personal time. If you want do-nothing time, you schedule do-nothing time. The value isn't rigidity — it's that you get an immediate red flag when one thing starts encroaching on another, because time is finite and you can't make more of it. Awareness of where it's going is the whole starting point.
And I loved how he motivates it. Rather than arguing that health matters in the abstract, he links it to whatever the person already cares about. If you want career growth, greater creativity, better thinking — then mindfulness, cardio and strength work aren't a competing priority. They're inputs. They're not a waste of time; they save you time. People will schedule their children's sport and their partner's commitments down to the minute and leave nothing for themselves. The fix is mechanical, not motivational.
He's also pragmatic about when. He has views on optimal timing, but as he said, there's no point fitting something in at a time you hate, because you'll drop it. Sustainable beats optimal.
Nutrition, gut health and the honest version of experimenting
Paul puts nutrition and gut health first, on the grounds that the gut and brain are in constant communication and an unsettled microbiome can show up as stress, low mood, irritability and poor focus. That's an area where the research is genuinely moving, and he was careful not to overclaim.
His own big lever was cutting sugar right back — and his main observation was how much of it hides in everyday food under a long list of different names. Once he started reading properly, most of what he'd been eating came off the list. He also experimented with a restrictive elimination period; I'd note that the specific framing he used for it isn't well supported by evidence, but the underlying move — pulling added sugar and heavily processed food out and seeing what happens — is sound.
On protocols generally, he was admirably undogmatic. Try something, give it a few months, see how it affects you, then try something else. Low-carb and ketogenic approaches are reported anecdotally within the narcolepsy community to help, though that's community experience rather than trial evidence — ketogenic diets are well established in epilepsy, but under medical supervision. His best practical tip: keep a food and mood log. It lets you go back and actually see what's going on instead of guessing.
I'd add the nutritionist's caveat: individualisation is everything. What transforms your friend may do nothing for you.
Sleep hygiene, breathing and the wind-down routine
For someone with narcolepsy, Paul notes, high-quality sleep largely isn't available without prescription treatment. But sleep hygiene still matters — and here's the striking part. When you're getting very little deep sleep, a few extra minutes of it makes a far bigger proportional difference than it would to someone already sleeping well.
His evening routine is a masterclass in stacking small things: lights dimming to warmer tones as the night goes on, with a light change acting as a reminder that bedtime is about 45 minutes away. No stimulating screens. Around fifteen minutes of gentle yoga to release muscle tension. A hot bath finished cold, to trigger the body's own cooling response. No food for roughly three hours before bed. Then meditation — often a body scan — to settle the mind. He also pays attention to temperature under the covers, not just room temperature, and to consistency of schedule so the body knows sleep is coming.
The other foundational skill he teaches is functional breathing: nose breathing, slower and lighter, aiming for roughly six breaths a minute. He makes the point that carbon dioxide and nitric oxide aren't the enemy — they play real roles in oxygen delivery. (One small correction: the mouth does have a legitimate breathing role during hard exercise, so "noses only" is best read as a default for rest, not an absolute.) His most usable version is what he calls the three-minute breathing space: a short reset before a meeting, in gaps between tasks, or when you notice stress rising. Four or five of those across a day, and you turn up to the next thing as a better version of yourself — which, as he points out, is a service to whoever you're meeting.
Key takeaways
- Start with habits and goal-setting, not protocols. Without traction, more knowledge changes nothing.
- Go slowly enough to avoid the snapback — rushing toward a new identity is why change fails.
- Schedule everything, including rest, personal time and relationships. What isn't scheduled doesn't happen.
- Link health to a goal you already care about, like career or creativity, so it stops competing for time.
- Keep a food and mood log, experiment for months rather than days, and judge by how you feel.
- Build a wind-down routine out of several small things, and learn slow nose breathing as a daily reset.
- Book a 13-week window for the relationships and hobbies you want to grow, and protect it.
What stayed with me from this conversation is Paul's insistence on allowing time — for mobility work before training, for a protocol to show its effects, for a habit to bed in, for you to grow into the person you're becoming. We live in a culture of shortcuts: quick money, quick success, quick weight loss. Almost nothing worth having in health works that way. That's exactly how I approach things at me&my wellness — looking at the whole picture across mind, body and lifestyle, and building change at a pace that will still be standing in a year. Start with foot mobility if that's where you are. Start with three minutes of breathing. Just start somewhere real.
Want to go deeper on this? Book a free 30-minute discovery call with Anthony at meandmywellness.com.au