Dr. Ravi Aysola

Growing up in Los Angeles, Dr. Aysola developed an early fascination with physiology, philosophy, and psychology. After earning a Bachelor of Arts in psychobiology from Claremont McKenna College and his medical degree from University of Texas Southwestern Medical School, he discovered that pulmonology, critical care, and sleep medicine could bring his interests together.

He completed his internship and residency in internal medicine at Parkland Health & Hospital System/UT Southwestern, spent a year as a hospitalist, and then trained in pulmonary and critical care medicine and in sleep medicine at Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis. While working in the Intensive Care Unit, Dr. Aysola cared for critically ill people whose treatment involved a great deal of neurology. In sleep medicine, he worked on the fundamentals of sleep, wakefulness, consciousness, and performance, along with the lasting effects of surviving critical illness.

“Sleep is an all-encompassing signal. So if you’re stressed, if you’re sick—physiologically, emotionally—it’s going to manifest as a sleep problem,” says Dr. Aysola. “I take a holistic, integrative approach towards optimizing sleep and improving each person’s overall health. I’m also a pragmatist, so my goal is that at the end of our visit, each person leaves with a tool: knowledge or a practice that’s going to help them.”

In 2008, Dr. Aysola returned to Los Angeles to join the UCLA faculty. During his nearly two decades there, he founded the UCLA Sleep Medicine Section of the Pulmonary, Critical Care & Sleep Medicine department; served as its first chief; directed the UCLA Sleep Disorders Center; and directed the UCLA Santa Monica Pulmonary and Sleep Medicine practice. He grew the sleep medicine team from a handful of physicians to more than 20 and built collaborations with psychiatry, otolaryngology, neurology, and dental sleep medicine.

Dr. Aysola also developed Restorative Sleep Therapy (ReST), a framework for complex insomnia that emphasizes mindfulness and breathing practices in addition to behavioral sleep medicine; directed the expansion of a home sleep apnea testing model; and as UCLA Health’s Senior Quality Officer, he led work to improve chronic obstructive pulmonary disease care.

His work spans the continuum of disease states and stages of life. He advised UCLA Athletics on circadian disruption, fatigue, and recovery when the university’s move to the Big Ten brought longer travel, and he worked with the UCLA Comprehensive Menopause Care Program to develop its sleep algorithm and lecture to its providers.

Dr. Aysola’s approach draws on his own experience. For more than a decade, he worked overnight in the ICU while raising young children and he developed a disciplined schedule to protect his sleep. “I’ve lived it,” he says, describing the effort to find peace and balance at home and still do his job well the next day. That perspective helps him connect with high performers who may understand the science of sleep and still find it hard to change their habits due to complex schedules, long-held patterns, or established expectations.

He starts by keeping the conversation simple. “Whatever ails you, if you’re not sleeping well, it’s going to be worse,” he tells his patients. “Then we can go into why you’re not sleeping well, and that becomes a conversation.”

Breathing is a regular part of his guidance. Dr. Aysola has advanced training in pranayama, a yogic breathing practice, and regularly uses it to teach patients autonomic self-regulation. “I teach people to breathe, and then meditation follows,” he says.

With so much information about sleep available on the internet and wearable devices putting more sleep data in people’s hands, Dr. Aysola sees his role as providing wisdom as well as knowledge. “Everyone has access to information about sleep now,” he says. “What I do is help them sort through that to ask, ‘How do I actually use this in a way that’s going to help me?’”

Dr. Aysola appreciates that Atria’s multidisciplinary team-based model can incorporate each person’s sleep into the context of their overall health. “If you sleep well, you live longer,” he says.

Dr. Aysola’s sleep expertise has been featured on NPR’s Life Kit and the UCLA Health podcast Medically Speaking, and he lectures nationally on sleep, circadian health, and recovery. He continues to serve as a consulting physician at Venice Family Clinic and is the founder of The Aysola Center, where he sees a wide range of sleep patients, and TOORYA, a technology company developing tools that use wearable data to support performance.

Dr. Aysola grew up in Los Angeles, is a devoted Lakers fan, and shares a love of basketball with his young sons. He enjoys playing tennis and guitar, and has recently rediscovered an appreciation for Dobro lap steel guitars.