141: Improve Your Sleep, Feel Great Every Morning, and Discover Your "Chronotype" | Michael Breus, PhD

90 minutes after you're supposed to wake up based on your chronotype—that's when you should have your caffeine. The reasoning is because cortisol and adrenaline have boosted you up to wake you up in the morning, and so when you have that those two things functioning in your brain, adding caffeine does almost no good ... Cortisol and adrenaline are like cocaine compared to caffeine, which is like weak tea, in terms of just how powerful they are towards the brain.

Cannabis can definitely have an effect on REM sleep, and so for folks out there who are daily users of cannabis or evening users of cannabis, one of the things we know is continuous use of high levels of THC will definitely start to bring REM sleep down.

Every single SSRI—Prozac, Zoloft, Effexor, Abilify—every single one of them almost completely knocks out REM sleep.

Caffeine is a stimulant. It doesn't matter how you slice it, that's how it acts in the brain. So, the closer to bedtime that you drink caffeine, the worse your slow-wave sleep is.

Most people don't know sleep is a dehydrative event. You lose almost a full liter of water from the humidity in your breath from sleeping all night long, so you're dehydrated when you wake up.

The easiest way to improve slow-wave sleep is exercise—the most positive way is daily cardiovascular exercise.

If you're looking to use CBD for sleep, it's not going to be your friend. You're talking about almost 200 milligrams before we see any real, what we call, soporific or insomniac effect.

If you're not one of those people who's like me, a night owl... and you're working the night shift, the increase in suicide, the increase in mental health problems, the increase in high blood pressure, it's astounding.

The biggest metric that's important for falling asleep is heart rate. Your heart rate needs to be at 60 or below, period. That's how it works.

People are always saying 'I want to get less sleep...' I'm okay with that, but what you really want is you want to think not about the quantity of sleep; you want to think about sleep quality.

CBN is the constituent within cannabis that actually has the most data surrounding positivity for sleep.

We now understand that this is genetic. You can send me your 23andMe data or your Ancestry.com data and I can actually show you on your genome exactly where the polymorphism is that creates this idea of being an early bird or a night owl.

REM sleep, it appears as though, has the biggest function [of] moving information from our short-term memory to our long-term memory.

You need five hormones to have successful sex. You need estrogen testosterone, progesterone, adrenaline, and cortisol—they all need to be high, and then you need melatonin to be low.

Literally every single hormone is altered in terms of when it is produced based on these [sleep] chronotypes.

In order to pull a body and a brain out of a state of unconsciousness, you need two hormones: cortisol and adrenaline.

As far as melatonin is concerned, 90% of people have got enough melatonin in them, and it's going just fine.