Welcome to the huberman Lab podcast, where we discuss science and science based tools for everyday life. I'm Andrew huberman. And I'm a professor of neurobiology and Ophthalmology at Stanford school of medicine. Today, I have the pleasure of introducing dr. Matthew Walker, as our guest on the huberman Lab podcast. Dr. Walker is a professor of neuroscience and psychology at the University of california-berkeley their his laboratory studies sleep, they study
Why we sleep, what occurs during sleep such as dreams and why we dream learning during sleep as well as the consequences of getting insufficient or poor quality sleep on waking States. Dr. Walker is also the author of The International bestseller book, why we sleep our discussion today is an absolutely fascinating one for anyone that's interested in sleep learning or human performance of any kind. Dr. Walker teaches us how to get better at sleeping.
He also discusses naps whether or not we should or should not nap whether or not we can compensate for lost sleep and if so, how to best do that, we discuss behavioral, protocols and interactions with light temperature, supplementation food, exercise, sex, all the variables that can impact this incredible state of mind and body that we call sleep during my scientific career. I've read many papers about sleep and attended many seminars about sleep yet my
In with dr. Walker today, revealed to me more about sleep, sleep science, and how to get better at sleeping than all of those papers and seminars combined. I'm also delighted to share the Doctor Walker, started a podcast that podcast entitled, The Matt Walker podcast releases its first episode this month and is going to teach all about sleep and how to get better at sleeping. So be sure to check out the Matt Walker podcast, on Apple Spotify or wherever you listen to podcasts.
For We Begin, I'd like to mention that this podcast is separate from my teaching and research roles at Stanford. It is however, part of my desire and effort to bring zero cost to Consumer information about science and science related tools to the general public in keeping with that theme. I'd like to thank the sponsors of today's podcast. Our first sponsor is rokka rokka, makes sunglasses and Eyeglasses that are of the absolutely highest quality. The company was founded by two All-American, swimmers from Stanford and everything about the design of their glasses is with
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Oh, really like their boneless rib eyes. I see those pretty much once a day. Again, that's huberman for the code and it's Bell Kempo.com huberman for twenty percent off your order and now my discussion with dr. Matt Walker. Great to finally meet you in
person wonderful to connect. I mean, it's being too long, but I suspect it would have been a short of time before we'd met less the
pandemic. No, thank you. No, thank you. Yeah, I'm delighted that we're finally sitting down face to face. I've been tracking your
Work
both in the internet sphere and I read your book and loved it. And also from the perspective of science, you actually came to Stanford a couple of years ago and gave a lecture for bring mind. Oh yeah, yeah. And there of course, you talked about sleep and its utility and its challenges and how to, and how to conquer it. So to speak, let's start off very basic. What is
sleep sleep.
Beep is probably the single most effective thing you can do to reset your brain and body health. So that's a functional answer. In terms of, you know, what is sleep in terms of its benefits. Sleep is a process though is an incredibly complex physiological ballet, and if you were to recognize or see, what happens to your brain and your body at night during sleep, you would be blown away. And the Paradox is that most of us. And I would think this
To, you know, if I wasn't asleep scientist we go to bed, we lose Consciousness for seven to nine hours, and then we sort of wake up in the morning and we generally feel better. And in some ways that denies the physiological and biological beauty of sleep. So, upstairs in your brain when you're going through these different stages of sleep. The the changes in brain wave activity are far more dramatic than those that we see when we're awake and we can speak about
About deep sleep. And what happens there, REM sleep is a fascinating time, which is another stage of sleep often called dream sleep, which is rapid eye movement. Sleep, that stage of sleep. Some parts of your brain are up to 30 percent more active than when you're awake. So again, it's kind of violating this idea that our mind is dormant and our body is just simply quiet isn't and resting. So I would happy to disorder of double click on either one of those and also what changes in the body as
Well, but it is an intense evolutionary adaptive benefit and system that said though I would almost push back against an evolved system. When we think about the question of sleep and what sleep is, our assumption has always been that we evolved to sleep and I've actually questioned that and I have no way to get in a time capsule and go back and prove this. But what if we
Started off sleeping, and it was from sleep, that wakefulness emerged. Why do we assume that it's the other way around? And I think there's probably some really good evidence that sleep may have been the Proto state that it was, the basic fundamental living State. And when we became awake as it were, we always had to return to sleep in some ways at that point sleep was the price that
Paid for wakefulness and that's another way of describing what sleep is. But again, I think it sort of denies that the active state of sleep. It's not a passive state of sleep either. And then, finally, you can say, what, what is sleep across different species and in US human beings and in all mammalian species and avian species as well. Sleep is broadly separated into these two main types, and we've got non-rapid eye movement. Sleep on the one hand, and then we've got rapid eye.
Movement sleep on the other and we can speak about how they unfold across a night and their architecture because it's not just intellectually interesting from the perspective of what sleep is. It's also practically impactful for our daily lives and I'd love to sort of go down that route to but you navigate you dummy. I can
let's definitely go down that route. So um, you mentioned how active the brain is during certain phases of sleep. When I was coming up in science, REM sleep, rapid eye movement, sleep,
Referred to as paradoxical sleep, is that still a good way to think about it? Paradoxical because the brain is so active in yet. We are essentially paralyzed.
Correct. Yeah, it really is a paradox and where that came from was simply the brainwave recordings that, if all I'm measuring about you is your brainwave activity. It's very difficult for me. Sitting outside of the Sleep. Laboratory room to figure out. Are you awake or are you in REM sleep? Because those two patterns of
brain activity are so close to one another. You can't discriminate between them yet, the Paradox is that when you are awake, I go in there and you're sort of sitting up your clearly conscious and awake. But yet when you go into REM sleep, you are completely paralyzed. And that's one of the I think that's part of the Paradox. But the Paradox really just comes down to two dramatically different conscious States, yet.
Activity is dramatically more similar than different. And the way I can figure out, which of the two you are in, is by measuring to other signals the activity from your eyes, and the activity from your muscles. So, when we're awake, we will occasionally have these blinks and we'll have sort of saccades. But during REM sleep, you have these really bizarre horizontal, shuttling eye movements that occur and that's where the name comes from rapid eye
movement as they always horizontal.
It'll
mostly they are horizontal and that's one of the ways that we can differentiate them from other waking, I movement activity, because it's not always, like can be sometimes, horizontal but can also have diagonal, and also vertically in that plane, but then the muscle activity, is the real dead giveaway. Just before you enter REM sleep, your brain stem, which is, were the Dynamics of non-rem and Ram or essentially played out and then expressed
Is in the cortex and downstairs in the body. When we go into REM sleep, and just a few seconds before that happens, the brain stem sends a signal, all the way down, the spinal cord and it communicates with what are called the Alpha motor neurons in the spinal cord, which control of voluntary skeletal muscles, and it's a signal of paralysis. And when you go into dream sleep, you are locked into a physical incarceration of your own body.
Laying
out. Your why, why would Mother
Nature? Do such a thing and it's in some ways, very simple, the brain paralyzes the body,
so that the mind can dream safely because think about how
quickly we would have all been popped out of the gene pool. You know, if I think I'm, you know, one of the best skydivers, who can just simply fly and I've had sometimes those dreams too, you know, and I get up on my apartment Window and I leap out, you don't, you're done, you know?
So, that's one of the sort of, that's part of the Paradox of REM sleep. Both its brain activity similarity, despite the behavioral State being so different, and this bizarre, lockdown of the sort of brain of the body itself. Now, of course, the involuntary muscles, thankfully aren't paralyzed so you keep breathing your heart keeps
beating, is this why men have erections during REM sleep and women have vaginal lubrication during
sleep? That's one of the reasons part
Of the other reason though there is because of the autonomic activity. So there is a nervous, a part of our nervous system called the autonomic nervous system and it controls many of the automatic behaviors and some of those are aspects of our reproductive facilities during REM sleep. What we later discovered is that you go through these bizarre, what we call autonomic storms, which sounds dramatic. But it actually is when you measure them that you'll go through,
Periods where your heart rate decelerates and drops and your blood pressure goes down and then utterly randomly your heart rate accelerates dramatically and what we call the fight or flight branch of the autonomic nervous system or the sympathetic nervous system badly named because it's anything. But sympathetic, it's very aggravating and that all the sudden fires up and then it shuts down again and it's not in any regular way. And it's when you get those autonomic storms, you get very activated from a physiological.
A logical perspective that you can have these erections and you have vaginal discharge except for totally paralyzed but you are still paralyzed. There are only two voluntary Scalia to voluntary muscle groups that are spurred from the paralysis bizarre one. Your extraocular muscles because if they were paralyzed, you wouldn't be able to have rapid eye movement
and the other that we later discovered was the inner ear muscle.
And we've got no
good understanding as to why those two muscles groups are spurred from the paralysis. It may have something to do with cranial nerve but I I don't think it's that I think it's perhaps something more sensory related. Some people have argued that. The reason the eyeballs are spurred from the paralysis is because if your eyeballs are left for long periods of time in active, you may get things such as oxygen sort of issues in the aqueous or vitreous humor.
Ah, and so the eyeballs have to clear. The drain and siblings
of the anterior. I are made to require movement. Exactly people with glaucoma have deficits in drainage through the anterior chamber, but they're I'm speculating. I'm also speculating when I asked this. I would imagine that there are states in waking that also resembles slow-wave sleep or rather that there are states that slow-wave sleep. Also resembles, waking States, you beautifully Illustrated, how REM sleep
Can mimic some of the more active brain states that we achieve in waking, what sort of waking state that I might have experienced or experience on a daily basis. Might look similar to slow. Wave sleep. Non-rem. Sleep. If
any it's genius way of thinking about it, turns the tables. I love it. We almost never see anything like the the true Ultra slow waves of deep non-rem sleep. So we spoke about these two stages non-rem and REM and non-rem.
Further subdivided, into four separate stages stages, one through four, increasing in their depth of sleep. So stages, 3 and 4. That's what we typically call, deep non-rem, sleep stages, one and two like maybe take me through the Arc of a night,
just so that. Yeah. So I put my head down. Well, for you, what time do you normally go to sleep. So I'm usually
sort of around about a 10:30 p.m. guy and usually I'll naturally wake up sort of a little bit before seven sometimes before six forty five or
Even I have an alarm set for 7:04
a.m. you heard it here folks, Matt Walker and does use an alarm clock I really really I'm usually doesn't recommend it but he does use
it. Yeah. Usually cinnamon after hour I am so human and I've had my sleep issues and I'd love to speak about that too but it's only just, you know, in the event that, you know, because I like to keep regularity to you've got to keep shows two things in balance and 704 just because you know,
Not be idiosyncratic. I don't know why. We always set things on these hard numbers. So, yep. So when you were gonna sleep
around 10:30. So using you as an example, because I imagine a number of people go to sleep at different times, with 10:30 is about, when I go see what 11 is for me, but so you go to sleep at 10:30. So, for that first, let's say three hours of sleep. What is the architecture of that sleep look like as compared to the last three hours of your sleep before morning?
Yeah. So I should note that.
That that sort of, you know, ten thirty to seven. That's just based on my chronotype and my preferential it's different for different people. I'm not suggesting that that's the perfect sweet spot for Humanity's sleep. It's just
my, but I imagines most people probably go to sleep somewhere between 10 and p.m. and midnight. And most probably my kind of midnight 5 a.m. and 7 a.m. or 5:30, and
7:30, yeah, at least in, if you look at sort of first world Nations, that's
That's a typical sleep profile. So when I first fall asleep, I'll go into the light stages of non-rem, sleep stages, one and two of non-rem. And then I'll start to descend down into the deeper stages of non-rem sleep. So after about maybe 20 minutes, I'm starting to head down into stage, three non-rem and then interstage for non-rem sleep. And as I'm starting to fall asleep as I've cast off from the usually with me murky Waters of wakefulness.
And I'm in the shallows of sleep stages. One and two, my heart rate starts to drop a little bit and then my brain wave pattern activity starts to slow down normally, when I'm awake, it's going up and down. Maybe 20, 30, 40 50 times a second. As I'm going into light non-rem, sleep, it will slow down to maybe 15 20, and then really starts to slow down down to about 2 of 10 or 8 cycles per second, 8 cycle, Waves per
And
then, as I'm starting to move into stages, three and four non-rem sleep, several remarkable things happen. All of a sudden, my heart rate really does start to drop. Oh, and I'll come back to temperature. I'm going to write temperature down because I always forget these things now, I'm solidly in the foothills of middle age. So as I'm starting to go into those deeper stages of non-rem sleep, all of a sudden, hundreds of thousands of cells in my
Cortex all decide to fire together and then they all go silent together and it's this remarkable physiological. Coordination of the likes that we just don't see. At during any other brain State
that's really interesting having recorded from the brains of animals and a little bit from humans. I don't think I've ever seen the entire cortex or even entire regions of Cortex light up like that. Yeah it's stunning. It's almost like this
beautiful sort of mentor a chant
All this sort of, you know, it's a slow inhale, and then a meditative exhale, inhale, exhale.
And these waves are just enormous in their size. In the body is capable of movement. At this time, there is no paralysis.
There is no paralysis, but for the most part muscle tone has also dropped significantly interest at that point. And then you will or I will then stay there for about another 20 or 30 minutes. So now I'm maybe 60 or 70 minutes into my first.
First sleep cycle, and then I'll start to rise back up, back up into stage, two non-rem sleep. And then after about 80, or so minutes, I'll pop up. And I'll have a short REM sleep, period. And then back down, I go again down into non-rem up into REM and you do that reliably repeatedly? And I will be doing that. And I do do that every 90 minutes. At least, that's the average for most adults. It's different in different species. What?
Changes to your question is the ratio of non-rem to REM within that 90-minute cycle as you move across the night. And what I mean by this is in the first half of the night, the majority of those 90-minute Cycles are comprised of lots of deep non-rem sleep. That's when I get my stage 3 and 4 of deep non-rem sleep, once I push through to the second half of the night. Now, that seesaw balance changes and instead the majority of those 90-minute Cycles are comprised either,
Of this lighter form of non-rem sleep, stage 2, non-rem sleep, and much more. An increasingly more rapid eye movement, sleep. And the implication that I was sort of speaking about pragmatically is, let's say that I have to and I usually never do early morning, flights or red eyes just because I'm a mess. If that happens. I'm not suggesting other people,
shouldn't. I'm suggesting just will not do that. Every time I've taken a red-eye or I've done that two or three days later, I get some sort of
General feeling of malaise. My brain doesn't work as well. I think red, I should be abolished, I for the pilots to, I me know, and follow and we can for the about those and for the emergency room, I mean, long shifts have been shown to lead to, you know, physician induced her errors that lead to a lot of fatalities. I mean, there are a lot of reasons why staying up too long or being up at the wrong times. If you're not adapted to is
just terrible. If the data in all of those cases, you know, I'm particularly Physicians to. There was some recent data looking at suicidality,
And the rates of suicide in training. Physicians are you know, far far above the norm and I don't suspect that, you know, their schedules are helping them. I suspect that sleep is a missing part of that explanatory equation, but I teach
medical students and and they, they're phenomenal. But they're yeah, they're under extremely challenged conditions. It's I shouldn't put them under. No, it was not, it's not optimizing performance, I have
one, sorry, I was sorry, no, no
this is important these
Important, digression of. I have one question which is you're saying that as across the night, a greater percentage of these 90-minute Cycles are going to be occupied by REM sleep as you progress through the
night,
I'm aware that they're based on work that you've done and and, and from your public education efforts and others that we have. So called circadian forces, and we have other forces that are driving when we sleep. And when we want to sleep at cetera without going into the details of those, have a simple question. The experiment is the following, let's say, God forbid, you are prevented from going to sleep at your normal time and you stay up for the four hours or five hours.
That normally, you would be in predominantly slow-wave sleep. Yep, if let's say you finally get to lie down at 3, a.m. a time when normally your sleep would be occupied mostly by rapid eye movement. Sleep. Yeah, will you experience a greater percentage of rapid eye movement sleep? Because of these. So called circadian forces, meaning that's what's appropriate for that time or will your system need to start at the beginning of the race that were that has? I'm referring to it.
Calling sleep. Yeah, and for if that's not clear to anybody, basically what I'm asking is, if you are forced to skip the slow wave Sleep, part of the night, will your system leap into rapid eye movement sleep? Or does it have to start at the beginning and get slow wave sleep? First, in other words, does one sleep state drive the entry to the next sleep State.
Great question. So, there is some degree of reciprocity between the Sleep States. I should note that when we drive one of those up, we often but not always see.
A change in the other, there are some farm ecologies that have shown an independence to that. And we've also played around with things like temperature. And sometimes you can, you know, nudge one and not seem too upset or perturb the other but to your, I think lovely point. The answer is, it's a mix but it's mostly the latter, meaning you will mostly go into your REM sleep phases and be sick.
Significantly deficient in your deep sleep. So, just because I start my sleep cycle at three am rather than at 10:30 p.m., it doesn't mean that my brain just says, well, I've got a program and I'm just going to run the program and the way the program runs is that we always start with first couple of hours of deep sleep. So we're just going to begin act number 1 scene 1, it doesn't do that now, I will get some deep sleep to begin with and part of that is
Because of how sleep Works based on how long I've been awake longer, I'm awake. There is a significantly greater pressure for deep sleep but we actually use exactly what you just described as an experimental technique to selectively deprived, people of one of those stages of sleep or the other. So we will do first half of the night deprivation and then let you sleep the second half so that means that you will be mostly deep sleep deprived. And you will still
We'll get mostly all of your REM sleep and then we switch it. So, you only get your first four hours, which means you will mostly get deep non-rem sleep, but you will get almost no REM sleep. So, in both of those groups, they've both had four hours of sleep. So, the difference between them, in terms of an experimental outcome is not the sleep time because they've both slept for the same amount. It's the contribution of those different stages. Now, we actually have more elegant methods for sort of selectively going in.
Scooping out different stages of sleep but that's the way we used to do it. Old school was just using this timing
difference and who suffers more of those that lack the early phase and where those that lack the later phase of the night sleep. In other words, if I have to sleep only four hours for whatever reason, am I better off getting the early part of the night sleep or the second half of the nights.
Depends on what your the outcome
measure is. So that gets right to the differences between slow-wave sleep and REM right? I was
Was probably misinformed, but my understanding a very crude understanding I should I should say
before I very much doubt so contract with someone like
you. Yeah. Which is that, that very nice of you. But the first part of the night the slow wave sleep is restorative to the musculature to motor learning and that the dream content tends to be less emotional. The second half of the night, being more emotional dreams and sort of the un-- pairing of the emotional load of our previous day and other experiences. So in other words, if I were to deprive, myself deprived myself,
Me of REM I would be hyper-emotional. Not maybe not as settled with the kind of experiences of my life, whereas, if I deprive myself of slow-wave sleep, I would feel if a more physical malaise. Is that correct? Or is that far too simple? And, and if it is too simple, please tell me where I'm wrong. No, I
think much of that is correct. And it's sort of that plus. So, for example, during deep non-rem sleep, that's where we get this. It's almost a form of natural blood pressure medication and so
When I take that away from you, the next day, were usually going to see autonomic dysfunction were usually going to see abnormalities and heart rate blood pressure. We also know that during deep non-rem sleep, that there is a certain control of specific hormones. For example, we know that the insulin regulation of sort of metabolism, meaning how will you look from a regulated blood sugar perspective, versus dysregulated pre-diabetic look of profile that
What deep sleep? Seems to matter. If we selectively deprive, you of that, we closed on them. Growth hormone is different, actually. So, that's that's a beautiful demonstration work. Growth hormone seems to be more REM sleep dependent and that's why we can come on to the effects of alcohol. And there was the some really impressive frightening data on, on alcohol. And it's disruption of sleep. But then we also know testosterone Peak levels of testosterone happened, during REM sleep,
the second half of the night. It
It's the second half of the
night. So it really just means that the your profile of mental and physical dysfunction will be different under both of those conditions. Which one would you prefer? I would prefer neither of them and it really depends on what you're trying to optimize for. So, it's just so complex, you know, sleep is just so pluripotent, you know, it's so physiologically systemic.
That it's almost impossible not to undergo. One of those two things just deep sleep deprivation or just REM sleep deprivation, and not show a profile that you would really prefer to avoid. And that's that, that's the reason from an evolutionary standpoint that we have preserve those stages of sleep. I mean, sleep is just so idiotic, you know, from an evolutionary
perspective or maybe waking is idiotic or
Waking is, you know, I well, yeah,
I think it's on your previous. Yeah.
I'm talking to, I got coming is very specific to me. Yeah, I am normally always an idiot when waking, but I think this, this idea that sleep, you know, is so profoundly detrimental to us. If you were to take it at face value, you know, you're not finding a mate, you're not reproducing. You're not foraging for food. You're not caring for young and worst of all You're vulnerable to predation on any one of those grounds sleep. Probably should have been
Liked it against but it wasn't sleep has fought its way through heroically and every step along the evolutionary path and therefore every
sleep
stage has also survived as best we can tell. What that means is that those are non-negotiable if Mother Nature had found a way to even just sort of, you know, thin slice. Some of that sleep from us, there would have been vast, I'm sure, evolutionary benefit.
It's but it looks as though she hasn't and I'm usually in favor of her wisdom after 3.6 million years. So,
yeah, it's it's incredible. I want to introduce a another gedanken experiment of the thought experiment. So, in this Arc of the night, Slow wave sleep, predominates early in the night and then REM sleep. There's a scenario that many people including myself experience on a regular basis which is they go to sleep, sleeping, just fine, 3-4 hours into it, they way.
Up. Yeah. They wake up for whatever reason. Maybe it was a noise, maybe the temperature isn't, right? We will certainly talk about sleep hygiene Etc.
They get up, they go to the restroom. They might flip on the lights, they might not they'll get back in bed. Hopefully they're not picking up their phone and starting to browse and wake up the brain through various mechanisms light and cognitive stimulation, etcetera. They go back to sleep. Let's say after about 10, 15 minutes, they're able to fall back asleep and then they sleep till they're more. Typical wait time. Yeah. How detrimental is that wake up episode or or event in terms of
Longevity learning Etc. I would love to sleep the entire night through every night, but most nights, I don't. And yet I feel pretty good throughout the day, some days better than others. And so if you were to evaluate that waking up a sewed and compare it to sleeping the whole night through what are your what are your thoughts on that?
So I think if you're waking up sort of frequently as you're describing, I would probably get your estate in order.
Because my guess is within the next year, you're going to be, you're going to be done for now. I'm kidding. You. Absolutely kidding you. It is Perfectly Natural and normal particularly as we progress with age, children tend to have typically more continuous sleep. Now, it's not that they aren't waking up for brief periods of time, they are. And in fact, we all do when we come out the other end of our sleep cycle, at the end of our REM sleep period of the 90-minute cycle.
Almost everybody wakes up and we make a postural movement. We turn over because we've been paralyzed for so long in the body will also like to shift.
If we ever look around, waiver open her eyes decision, you
sometimes people will open their eyes, but usually, it's only for a brief period of time and they usually never commit those Awakenings to memory, write your situation, and it's my situation as well. I usually now at the stage of life, I don't sleep through the night. I'll usually have a
Room break, and then I'll come back, that's perfectly normal. We tend to forget that in sleep science, we think of sleep efficiency. So of the total amount of time that your embed, how much of that percent time is spent asleep and we usually look to numbers that are above 85% or more as a healthy sleep efficiency. So if you to think about me,
Going to bed. And I spend, you know, let's say eight and a quarter, eight and a half hours of time in bed with a normal healthy sleep efficiency. I still may be only sleeping a total of seven and a half hours or 7 and 3/4 hours meaning that I'm going to be awake in total not in one long bout but I'm going to be awake for upwards of 30 minutes net some time
Sometimes that can be after a 10-minute, you know, dalliance have to having gone to the bathroom and I'm just gradually drifting back off again. Other times, it will just be for a couple of minutes and most of those you don't commit. So I think we need to stop. We don't need to get too worried about, you know, periods of time awake. Just because we're not sleeping throughout the night. I would love to do that too. And I remember when I that used to happen and it still happens, everyone usually yields great when I snapped it's a lovely thing.
But
surprised, right? I just know go now a
surprise. Yeah, it is a surprise, but for the most part I think we can be more relaxed about that where we have to be a bit more attentive though is if you are spending long periods of time, not being able to get back to sleep. And usually we Define that by saying, if it's been 20, 25 minutes. Normally that's a time when we would really say. Okay, let's explore this. What's going on? Let's see what's happening. The other thing is if
Happening, very frequently. So even if you're not awake for 25 minutes stretches but you're finding yourself waking up and being consciously aware that you've woken up for maybe six seven or eight times throughout the night and your sleep is very what we call. Fragmented the great science of sleep in the past five or 10 years has has been yes quantity is important but quality is just as important.
And you can't have one without the other in terms of a good beneficial next day outcome. You can't just get four hours of sleep, but brilliant quality of sleep and be unimpaired, nor can you get eight hours of sleep? But have very poor quality of sleep and be unimpaired the next day. So that's why I just sort of want to asterisk this idea of. Let's not get too worried about waking up and having some time awake, that's perfectly normal and
Natural. But if it's happening very frequently throughout the night or those periods of time, oh, long stretches of time, upwards of 25 minutes, then let's look into
it. Well, I can assure, you just helped a lot of people feel better about this Waking Up episode that I and many other people experience.
I hope so. Because I think it's really important that we, you know, I think I've been desperately guilty of perhaps, you know, early on being to puritanical
about, you know, sleep and and I've I've retrospect it and I've tried to explore why? This was the case, you know, it was almost sleep or else dot dot dot, you know? And at the time, when I was starting to write the book which was back in 2016, you know, sleep was still a neglected stepsister in the health conversation of today and I could certainly change and it's changing, you know, and not because of my efforts.
But I will say colleagues, I would say
Well, I it's a great that you give attribution to your other people involved and of course, it's a big field, but I think you've done a great service by queuing people to the importance of this state. Not just for avoiding Troublesome outcomes, but also for optimizing their waking State, it's really you know, I've used sleep as this heard that feels good but we're not aware of how it feels when we're in it necessarily. Yeah. It has tremendous benefits when you're doing it well, so to speak and it has tremendous
These deficits when you were not and I think I think it was an important thing for you to do to Q people to this issue. And I would say mission accomplished that people are aware of the need for sleep. I think that knowing that waking up in the middle of the night is normal provided it's not too frequent, is is great. And will also help people who may have been overly concerned about that. I do want to use this as an opportunity to raise something about the so-called
Berman schedule not to be confused with the huberman schedule. Fortunately no one has confused those yet. Some years ago there was a discussion about the so-called uberman schedule, meaning the Superman schedule. So that's huberman without an H, which I have nothing to do with you. Read your Nietzsche. This is my this will have a subtext but regardless who Berman schedule as I understand is one in which the person elects to
Sleep in 90 minute, bouts spread throughout the day and night in an attempt to get more productivity and or reduce their overall sleep. Need there was a paper published recently that explored whether or not this is good or bad for us maybe you just give us the take-home message on
that. Yes so these Open men like schedules and there's lots of different forms of that. They try to essentially pie chart the 24-hour period into short bouts of sleep.
With some shorter or no, well, slightly longer periods of wakefulness then short bouts of sleep, then wakefulness, you know, your I sort of made it. I think a quip it's almost like you're sleeping like a baby, you know, because that's the way that maybe 1990 middle sleeps that they all have, you know, these brief naps, then they're awake. They're asleep than the week and to the Chagrin of parents across the night. It's basically the same, they're awake, they're asleep. They're awake asleep. And that's more the, the schedule that these types of protocols
Have have suggested and there was a really great comprehensive review that found. Not only that they weren't necessarily helpful, but they were actually really quite detrimental and on almost every performance metric, whether it be task performance, whether it be physiological, outcome measures, whether it even be the quality of the sleep that they were having, when they were trying to get it. All of those were in a downward Direction and it's not surprising. If you look at
The way that your physiology is programmed, if you look at the way your circadian rhythm is programmed, none of that screams to us, that we should be sleeping in that
way. Well, chuckling because we always hear sleep like a baby, this is our babies sleep and I would say, don't sleep like a baby sleep like an adult. But yeah, I
mean it get your solid eight hours. Billy Crystal's line who's a, you know, a long-standing suffering Insomniac. He says, I sleep like a baby. I'm awake every 20 minutes, you know, and I think
Think this is another one of those demonstrations that when you fight biology you normally lose and the way you know, you've lost is disease sickness and empowerment. And I think if you sleep in accordance with the natural biological edict that we've all been given life tends to be both of a higher quality and a longer duration. Yeah, I
agree and along those lines. I'm as a vision scientist, I've been very excited by the work on these.
Non-image forming cells in the eye of the so-called melanopsin cells that have joined the brain about tight circadian, time of day. And I'm a big proponent of people getting some sunlight ideally sunlight, but other forms of bright light, in their eyes, early in the day. And when they want to be awake, yep, essentially during the phase of their 24-hour circadian, cycle, when temperature is rising, and then starting to get less light in their eyes as our temperatures. Going down intermit, later in the day, and in the evening, are there any adjustments to that?
At General theme that you'd like to add or is in any
way. No, I think that's exactly what we recommend right now which is try to get at least 30 to 40 minutes of exposure to some kind of natural daylight. Now, there may be parts of the world were you know
you're from your from a rather cloudy part of
the I am from. Yeah, Liverpool, England and the north west of England is not known for its beach resorts and fine weather.
I remember, I said, I went back home for a trip when I'd first been out in California. I thought why is the sky? So low, you know, it's just so, you know, constantly out we joke that in in the UK we usually have nine months of bad weather and then three months of winter and there that's your, that's your entire year of in terms of climate. But to come to your point, you're exactly right. Try to get that daylight. Now it can be, you know, working
I'm next to a window and you're getting that natural sunlight, but that natural sunlight is even on a cloudy day. In England is usually far more potent than anything that you'll get from indoor lighting, despite you thinking sort of, from a perception wise, maybe the that much closer than I would think.
Yeah, I've been sorry to interrupt. I've been, I don't know, a big Grand of, there's an app called light meter which will it's a free app. I've nothing to do with it. They will allow you to get a pretty decent.
Of the amount of light energy coming toward you and if you hold it up to a cloudy morning where you don't think it's very bright out, kind of a dismal day. You'll notice that they'll be a thousand, two thousand even, you know, 5,000 looks looks just being a measure of brightness, of course. And then you can point the same light meter toward an indoor light that seems very bright and very intense and it'll say 500, Lexa and you realize that the intensity as we gauge it perceptually is not really what the system is receiving. So outdoor light is key.
How do you how do you get this natural stimulation or I should just say, light stimulation early in the day? What is your typical? What does Matt Walker? Do
to get this light sandwich, I am no poster child but usually I will if I'm working I usually work out most days and I shopped around and I found a gym that has huge amounts of window, exposure facing to the east. This is sad, this is going to sound so ridiculous. You know, Matt Walker chooses a gym on the
This. I love it. The solar input. So he can, you know, there are a lot of criteria for
selection gems. This one is actually grounded in physiology and
biology, and so, and selfishness about my own sleep. Let's go.
So, you get your exercise and your light stimulation
sense, right? So yep. Yeah. And so you're
stacking cues for wakefulness early in the
day. Exactly. So both exercise and daylight are wonderful, cues Force Acadian Rhythm alignment and also circadian rhythm reset each day. And so I will use both
Exercise. I mean, I am I'm neither a strong morning type or a strong evening type and my preference to exercise is probably sometime in the middle of the day. Probably somewhere around 1, a 1 p.m. sorry, not one am but I'm usually working out probably around the sort of seven sort of 45 8 a.m. time. That's usually when I start my workout and there, I start with cardio spin bike facing a window. And luckily,
For the most part here in California. There's usually sunlight coming through but it doesn't matter to me. Because just as you said, even when it's a cloudy day, that looks coming through of light, the the the intensity is Splendid. So I would prefer to favor my exercise just because for efficiency to I want to get also working on the day, I'll try to match my exercise more with my circadian light.
Light exposure than I would probably if I'm going to do. I really want to crush your workout or do I want to just, you know, make sure it's a good workout. I would prefer to work out, you know, at a different time. But I like that because of the daylight and we can speak about exercise timing at some point because there's a lot of discussion around that when as the right exercise time to exercise during sleep and we can sort of bust some myths that are too. So I think you're spot on with the suggestion, get some morning daylight
To get that exposure. Usually at least 30 to 40 minutes, there was some great work. Recently, coming out in the Occupational Health domain where they moved workers from offices that we're just facing walls and, you know, didn't have any exposure to natural daylight and then they did a time period. During that study were they actually were in front of a window and working and they measured their sleep and their sleep time and their sleep efficiency, increased quite dramatically. I'm forgetting the numbers now. But
But I think the increase in total sleep time as well, over 30 minutes and the Improvement in sleep efficiency was five to ten percent, you know, and if you're batting an 80%, you know, sleep efficiency. Average were a bit concerned about that. But at 10% to that now you're in, you know, a great Echelon of healthy sleepers and all you did was just spend some time working in front of
Windows, that's great. And probably folks might want to consider spending a little less time with sunglasses, provided they can do that safely. You're
Etc. You're not alone with your exercise behavior and Facing East. So the one and only Tim Ferriss told me recently that his morning routine nowadays, consists of jumping rope while facing East to get the sunlight stimulation of otherwise and as Matt and I both know, it has to be of the eyes, right? Yeah. These portals are the only way to convey to the rest of the brain and body about the time of day and wakefulness along the lines of wakefulness.
Illness. Have a number of questions about caffeine. Yeah, the dreaded and beloved caffeine. Yeah, I love caffeine but I like it in relatively restricted periods of time. So I'm a big fan of waking up and even though I wake up very groggy allowing my natural wakefulness signals to take hold meaning. I wake up very slowly but I don't drink caffeine right away. I'm starved delay. Caffeine by look a little
Out, usually, 90 minutes to two hours. Okay? And that idea, came to me on the basis of my understanding of how caffeine and the adenosine receptor interact. I have a feeling you're going to pronounce adenosine differently than I
do. I will go, go, go go with the
Tennessee. I'll try to go with your Skillet tool and service skeletal
and is a synapse in signups. Shed you on
schedule. There we go. But but make it really simple for folks. How does caffeine work to make us feel?
More alert and does the timing in which we ingest caffeine play an important role in whether or not it works for us or against us. So maybe we just start with, how does caffeine work? Why is it that when I drink mate or coffee, which are my preferred sources of caffeine? Do I feel a mental and physical
lift? Yeah. So I'm going to suggest counter to what most people would think, drink coffee or mate is mate. Okay, yeah.
Whatever form you. Well, we'll come on
to sort of why I suggest that but when it comes to Coffee, I would say the dose and the timing makes the poison. So let's start with how caffeine Works. Caffeine is in a class of drugs that we call the psychoactive stimulants. So it works through a variety of mechanisms, one is a dopamine mechanism. Dopamine we often think of as a
Ward chemical or, but dopamine is also very much, an alerting neurochemical as well, and caffeine has some role. It seems to play in increasing dopamine but it's principal mode of action. We believe in terms of making me more alert and keeping me awake throughout the day is on the effects of adenosine and to explain what adenosine is from the moment that you. And I woke up this morning, this chemical adenosine has been building up in our brain
And the longer that were awake, the more of that adenosine accumulates
is it, um, may I ask, is it accumulating in neurons and glia or in the blood vessels where and N is it also accumulating in my body? Where is this adenosine coming from? And where is it accumulating?
Yeah. So the adenosine here that we're talking about that is creating the Sleep. Pressure is a central brain phenomenon and it comes from the neurons themselves combusting energy and as their combusting,
See, one of the offshoots of that is this chemical adenosine. Okay? And so as we're awake throughout the day and our brain is metabolically very active. It's accumulating in building up this adenosine. Now the the more adenosine that we have the sleepier that we will feel so it really is like asleep. Pressure is what we call it now. It's not a mechanical pressure don't worry your heads not going to explode. It's a chemical pressure.
And it's this weight of sleepiness, that we feel gradually growing as we get into the evening.
May I just interrupt you again to just ask, do we know what the circuit mechanism is for that? I mean not to go too far down the rabbit hole, but for the aficionados and for myself, we have brain mechanisms like Locus coeruleus that are released things that are brain areas. Looks really is just being a brain are of course, that release things that create that proactively create wakefulness. Yeah. So are those
On shutting down, as a consequence of having too much adenosine or are there areas of the brain that promote sleepiness that are nine coming activated? Because these, you can imagine both things working in parallel one or the other would accomplish the same end point. Yeah,
and it's, it's both. And so, there are two main receptors for adenosine. The a 1 receptor and the 8 2 receptor, and they have different modes of activating brain cells or in activating or decreasing.
NG their likelihood of firing and adenosine Works in this beautiful, elegant way, where it will inhibit and shut down the Wake promoting areas of the brain, whilst also, increasing and dialing up the volume on sleep activating sleep. I almost in a readable. So it's always a push a poor.
Yeah, I mean we could have a larger discussion at some point about that. Everything seemed dark edges, seeing light edges. Yeah our ability to smell or two cents.
Pressure on this Earth, everything is a push. It's great. Yeah, so this is another example, where as I am awake longer adenosine is released in the brain. And my wakefulness areas are being actively, shut down by that adenosine and my sleepiness brain area. So to speak are being promoted to be more active, is that
correct? That's right. And it's a very Progressive process. It's not like a step function were and sometimes that happens occasionally but it's usually because you've been too.
Of driving through and as will come on to have caffeine in the system and then all of a sudden you just hit a wall and it just you know engulfs you and you go from a zero to a the one of sleepiness within a short period time. What in all planes the
fatigue after a hard conversation, the desire to go to sleep or desire to go to sleep during a hard
conversation. That's an interesting. I think it's usually just based on personality type interactions and for the most part, not that
I've ever experienced that know
people with you don't, but with me, they all know.
No, I didn't. I didn't desire to some conversations. I'm halfway through them and I feel like I want to take a
nap. Yeah, right. And I would love to look at, you know, people sleep history. We've sort of seen that time and time again but and then it could be, you know, with with folks like me people just lose the will to live within about five minutes of speaking with me. So not that's dangerously is important and related, that's flattery that's great. But so the way that then caffeine comes into this equation, as I was
And it's usually a kind of a linear process, or maybe it's probably closer to an exponential in terms of your subjective feeling of sleepiness. And we haven't really been able to measure that in humans because normally, we, it's hard to, actually, you know, stick something into the brain and be, you know, sucking siphoning off stuff. Every couple of minutes as you could do in animal studies, and keep asking people, every couple of minutes, how sleepy do you feel how sleepy and track to see if there's a linear rise in, you know, adenosine which then
Creates an exponential rise in subjective sleepiness or what the Dynamics are. But I'm kind of nerding out. Caffeine comes into play here because caffeine comes into your system and it latches onto those welcome sites of adenosine, the adenosine receptors, but what it doesn't do is latch onto them and activate them. Because if it was doing that, then it would you know, in lots of ways, it would dial up more sort of
Sleepiness, it does. The opposite. The way that caffeine works is that it comes in competes with quite sharp elbows, with adenosine competitively, forces them, out of the way, hijacks that receptor by latching onto it. But then just essentially blocks it. It doesn't in activate. The receptor, it doesn't activate the receptor it functionally. In, activates it, in the sense that it takes it out of the game,
Him for adenosine. So it's it's like someone you know coming into a room and you're just about to sit down on the chair and caffeine comes in and just pulls out the chair. And you're like, well now I've got nowhere to sit and caffeine just keeps pulling out the chairs from adenosine and adenosine, even though it's at the same concentration in your brain, your brain doesn't know that you've been awake for, you know, 10 hours. 16 hours at that point, when you've downed a cup of coffee because
All of that adenosine that's still there. Can't communicate to the brain that you've been awake for 16 hours
because but the adenosine is still in
brains her ashes. So, the real
question is what happens when caffeine is dislodged from the adenosine
receptor unfortunate things happen. And that's what we call the caffeine crash, which is caffeine has a half-life, and it's metabolized and call what the half-life is. Yeah, the half-life is somewhere between five to six hours and the coolest.
To life, therefore somewhere between 10, to 12 hours, it's variable different people have different durations of its action, but for the average do five to six hours that variation, we understand it's down to a liver enzyme or set of liver enzymes of the class that we call the cytochrome p450 enzymes. And there are two I think last I delved into the data which is pretty recently. There are two Gene variants that will dictate the enzyme
Matic speed with which the liver breaks down caffeine. And that's why you can have some people who are very sensitive to caffeine. And other people who say, you know, I'm just doesn't affect me really that much.
At all the people that have a double espresso after a 9 p.m. dinner and yeah, sleep, just
fine. Well, I'm will come
early, subjectively they, things are
objectively. Yeah, and we should speak about that. That assumptive danger too. So then the caffeine is in the system. And after some time period, it will be
In active in the system. So let's say that. You know, I've been awake for 12 hours now and it's you know 8 p.m. and I'm feeling a bit tired. But I want to push through and I want to keep working for another couple of hours. So I have a cup of coffee, all of a sudden, I was feeling tired but I don't feel like I've been awake for 12 hours anymore because with the caffeine in the system, maybe only half of that adenosine is being communicated through the receptor to my brain.
Percent of the did, the adenosine is still there. Only half of it is allowed to communicate to my brain. So now I think I haven't been away for 12 hours of just being awake for six hours, feel great, then after a few hours, and the caffeine is starting to come out of my system. Not only am I hit with the same levels of adenosine that I had before. I'd had the cup of coffee several hours ago, it's that plus all of the adenosine that's been building up during the time that the caffeine has been in my
systems.
About an avalanche
of it is tsunami wave. Yeah. And I have a caffeine
crash and it's interesting because the caffeine crash at two o'clock in the afternoon. When you have work to do is a terrible thing. But what about the person, maybe this person is me in my 20s. Who says, I'm gonna drink caffeine all day long, and then I want the crash because at 9:00 or 10:00 p.m. If I stopped drinking caffeine at say, 6:00 p.m. and I crash then I crash into it.
Slumber a deep night of sleep. Yeah. Is that sleep really as deep as I think it is because given the half-life of caffeine that you mentioned a few moments ago, I have to imagine that having some of that caffeine circulating in my system, might disrupt the depth of sleep or somehow the architecture of sleep in a way that even if I get a tour, who knows even 10 hours of sleep, it might not be as restorative as I would like it to
be. Yeah. And that is the danger just sort of that, you know, those people that you
Scribe. Do you say I like a lot of them will speak with me to say look I can have two espressos with dinner and I fall asleep. Fine. A nice stay asleep because usually those are the two phenotypes that we typically see with too much caffeine. I just can't fall asleep as easily as I want to or I fall asleep but I just can't stay asleep and caffeine can do both of those things quite potent. Lee how
late in the day do you think is assuming somebody translate this folks? If you go to bed earlier or later you have to shift the hours accordingly but given
Somebody who typically gets into bed around 10:00 10:30 and falls asleep around 11:00 11:30. Yeah. When would you recommend they halt caffeine intake and I these are not strict prescriptives but I think people do benefit from having some fairly clear guidelines of what might be might work for them. Would you say cut off caffeine by what time of the day? I would usually
say take your typical bedtime and count back sort of somewhere between 10 to
Eight hours is probably getting a little bit close but take back sort of ten hours or eight hours of time. That's the time when you should really stop, you know using caffeine is the suggestion and the reason is because for those people who even just keep drinking up until you know the into the evening, you're right that they can fall asleep. Find maybe they stay asleep, but the depth of the deep sleep is not as deep anymore. And so there are two consequences. The first is that for meat and it can
Be up to by 30%. And for me to drop your deep sleep by 30 percent. I'd have to age you by between 10 to 12 years or you can just do it every night to yourself with a couple of espressos. The second is that you then wake up the next morning and you think, well, I didn't have problems falling asleep. And I didn't have problems staying asleep, but I don't feel particularly restored by my sleep. So now I'm reaching for three or four cups of coffee, the next morning, rather than just two or three cups of
Coffee. And so go, is this dependency cycle that you then need your uppers to wake you up in the morning and then sometimes people will use alcohol in the evening to bring them down because they're overly caffeinated and alcohol. And we can speak about that too. Also has very deleterious impacts on your sleep as well. So, you're right, that it's not just the quantity of your sleep, or even difficulties falling, or staying asleep. Can also be deep sleep. But here, again I think
You know, I don't want to be frightening people. And I mentioned this before, I think one of the real problems that I owe mistakes that I made because I didn't, you know, I'd never had much public exposure before the book and I was so saddened by, you know, the disease and the suffering that I was seeing as a consequence of a lack of sleep in our society and the fact that it wasn't really being discussed very much. I sort of came out, you know, a little bit, headstrong more than a little bit Headstrong.
I think I was, you know, perhaps to too much gas pedal and too little, you know, break as it were. And I don't think that's the right way to approach Health message within the public sphere. And I've become much softer in how I think about these things. I have ideas about what the ideal world looks like for sleep. But I also realized that none of us live in this thing called the
Real world we certainly do so you know, I want to be really mindful of that and I think I've done a really bad job of being sort of to forthright particularly for people who struggle with sleep. You know early on when I would offer these sort of messages about sleep. I want to be you know I want to be vertical when it comes to the science. I want to be faithful to the science but I also don't want to go out and scare The Living Daylights out of people particularly people who are struggling with their sleep because it's probably only going to make matters.
Us. So I've been beautifully schooled by learning how to be a slightly better. Public Communicator, I'm nowhere, near of the standing that that you are. You're very elegant and it's very intuitive to you. I'm still with training wheels but I'm getting a little bit better but I do I just want to say that when I'm speaking about caffeine because it sounds as though I'm very sort of overt about it but I will come back to why I say drink coffee but I just want to make that
point. Yeah well I appreciate you making that point and I'm sure our listeners will
L2, I still will stand behind my statement, which is that what you've done for the notion that sleep is vital for all aspects of health, and for performance, mental, and physical, and wakefulness, the message and the the packaging it was contained in and is has been clearly, clearly, net positive people needed to be queued to this. The I'll sleep when I'm dead mentality is one that I had. It's one that other people have people in.
Huge number of vital communities, not just your students, but also people this, the messaging that you provided and continue to provide has positively impacted. The first responder Community, the medical community. They're still steps that need to be taken the military community and of course, the civilian community. And so, I think these adjustments about, yeah, caffeine's okay. Just restrict it to the early part of the day, if you can most days. I mean, I think the law of averages it's like the light viewing Behavior.
I think it is critical to view sunlight or natural, some other form of bright light early in the day. But if you miss a day, it's not that your whole system is going to dissolve into a puddle of Tears. That'll that'll happen on the second or the third day. No, I'm kidding. You got a couple days biology Works in averages it except with respect to accident or injury, in a car accident, a car accident, right? You don't get to have three of those before the brain damage occurs, if the accident severe enough. Yeah. But with sleep behavior of these homeostatic, type behaviors or
Food, wine and chocolate sundae. Is it going to kill? You know every night? Yeah, it's going to make you demented and kill you early. We know this and so I think the the middle ground is often a hard place to achieve. So I think you've done a phenomenal job but I appreciate you raising these points and and I think it's clear that we all need to that we all can and should do certain things better including being gentle with ourselves from time to time when we deviate from these.
These ideal circumstances along these lines. I do want to talk about alcohol because I think caffeine and alcohol represent the the kind of two opposite ends of the spectrum. Clearly, there are other stimulants there, your adderall's and your high energy drinks that people use as but alcohol and caffeine are the most commonly consumed. Yeah. Let stimulants and and sedatives depressants as they're sometimes called. So what happens when somebody has a glass that we always hear a glass or two
Of wine in the evening, or a, or a cocktail after dinner. Yeah. Or before dinner? How does that impact their sleep? And then we'll be sure to Circle. Back in terms of what is reasonable range is of behavior when it comes to avoiding alcohol or if it's age-appropriate Etc, enjoying
alcohol. Yeah. So alcohol. If we're thinking about classes of drugs, they're in a class of drugs that we call the sedatives. And I think,
One of the first problems that people often mistake alcohol is often used as a sleep aid for people who are struggling with sleep when things like over the counter remedies Etc. Hubble remedies have just not worked out for them and alcohol and fortunately is anything but a sleep aid. The first reason that most people use it is to try and help them fall asleep. So
and this process of this event that we call falling asleep. I have to imagine is a process. It is like everything in
All GM and that that process involves in some weight. As we talked about push-pull before turning off thinking planning? Yeah, Etc. And turning on some sort of relaxation mechanism, I have to imagine that these two things are knobs turning in opposite directions. They raised us this outcome we call falling asleep, alcohol. It seems is helpful for some people to turn off their thoughts or their planning is that right?
Yes, it is. And so I think if we look at the pattern of brain activity,
Petit, if I were to place you inside an MRI scanner, where we're looking at the activity of your brain and what you drifting off. Some parts of your brain will become less active. Other parts will become more active and this is the push-pull modeled inhibition excitation, but alcohol is quite different in that regard. Alcohol is because it's a sedative what it's really doing is trying to essentially knock out your cortex. It's sedating, your cortex and sedation.
In is not sleep. But when we have a couple of drinks in the evening, when we have a couple of nightcaps, we mistake sedation for Sleep saying. Well, I always, when I have a couple of Whiskey's or a couple of cocktails, it always helps me fall asleep, faster in truth, what's happening is that you're losing Consciousness quicker, but you're not necessarily falling naturalistically asleep, any quicker. So, that's one of the first sort of things just to keep in mind. The second thing with alcohol is that it fragments your
Sleep and we spoke about the quality of your sleep being just as important as the quantity and alcohol through a variety of mechanisms, some of which are activation of that autonomic nervous system that fight or flight branch of the nervous system. Alcohol will actually have you waking up many more times throughout the night, so your sleep is far less continuous. Now, some of those Awakenings will be of conscious recollection, the next day, you'll just remember waking up
Many of them won't be and so, but yet your sleep will be littered with these sort of punctured Awakenings throughout the night. And again, when you wake up the next morning, you don't feel restored by your sleep, you know, fragmented, sleep or non-continuous sleep in this alcohol-induced way is usually not good quality sleep. That you feel great on the next day? The the third part of alcohol. In terms of an equation is that it's quite potent at
Blocking your REM sleep, your rapid eye movement, sleep and REM sleep is critical for a variety of cognitive functions. Some aspects of learning and memory seems to be critical for aspects of emotional and mental
health. You've described it before as a sort of self-generated therapy that occurs while we
sleep. Yeah. It's an overnight therapy. You know, it's emotional first aid, isn't it? Rather
don't get enough. Sleep are very easy to derail emotionally. Yeah, not that one would want to do that to people but we all sort of fall.
Heart. Emotionally are. I always think about almost like our skin sensitivity can be heightened. Yes, when we are sleep-deprived, our emotional sensitivity is such that when we're asleep deprives such that, it takes a much finer grain of sand paper to create that kind of friction. Yeah, it was bother us. It
threshold. Even online
comments. Bother us when we're asleep. And never when we're, I would
love to say that I never look at
Them. Except I look at my, should be right here. Maybe every one of them
will editorialize because the notion of not looking at comments, is, is unreasonable for to ask of any academic because academics? We are all trained to look at our teaching evaluations. Yeah. And just like, with online comments to ignore, 20% of them. No, I'm kidding. Look at them all in any event. So in terms of translating this to behavior, I'm not I don't particularly enjoy alcohol. I guess I'm might be
And in that sense. But I also have never really experienced the pleasure of drinking alcohol. I sometimes the like, the taste of a drink, but I never liked the sensation. So that's I don't have a lot of familiarity with this but many people do and I understand that. So let's say somebody enjoys a glass of wine or two with dinner and they dinner at 7 p.m. is that likely to disrupt their sleep at all? Let's just sort of, let's make this a series of
gradation and then
This is is yes I think once they just looked at a single glass of wine in the evening with Dina and I would be untruthful if I didn't just simply say, it has an effect and we can measure that in terms last year I actually less REM sleep and one of the fascinating studies, I can't remember. What do is, I think they got them close to a standard illegal blood, alcohol level. So maybe they were a little bit tipsy and
Yes, you see all of the changes that we just described they sort of lose Consciousness more quickly. They have fragmented sleep and they have a significant reduction in REM sleep, but what was also interesting because REM sleep, as we spoke about before, is a time. When some hormonal systems are essentially recharged and refreshed growth hormone, being one of them, that was well, over a 50%, 5-0 drop in their growth hormone release during alcohol laced, sleep at night, and you're out.
Doraemon is so
vital for metabolism and repair of tissues. And yeah, it's not
just by settlers essentially adults essential
along those lines. I just want to highlight the fact that this this information that you're sharing that growth hormone is released as strongly Tethered to the presence of healthy amounts of REM, sleep is interesting to me because I always thought the growth hormone was released in the early part of the night. Well, it is
released. Mmm.
Both of those but across the different stages. But what we also know is that when you disrupt REM sleep, there are those growth hormone consequences. So it's not an exclusive system. Just like with testosterone we can see changes throughout non-rem sleep. But if you ask when are the peak release rates of testosterone? It's right before we go into REM sleep and then during REM sleep
and of course, testosterone being important, both for males and females right for libido and tissue repair.
And well-being. Nobody regardless of chromosomal hormonal or any other background wants to have their normal levels of testosterone reduced acutely. That's just a bad it equates to a terrible set of psychological and physical
symptom. Yeah. And the mortality risk, that's associated with low testosterone is non-trivial? Taking answer? Right? Exactly. You know. So
Coming back to just the point on REM sleep, that you mentioned regarding emotional instability and we see that, that's one of the things, one of the most reliable signatures of just insufficient sleep, doesn't have to be sleep deprivation. What we've discovered over the past 20 years here at the Sleep Center is that there is no major psychiatric disorder that we can find in, which sleep is normal. And so I think that firstly told us there is a very intimate association between your emotional.
Cool health and your sleep Health. But when it also comes to REM sleep, I think what's fascinating is that it's not just about your emotional health, it's not just about your hormonal Health. We've also been seeing other aspects of you know cognition but then there was a report. I think it could have been about two years ago out of Harvard. I think it was Beck claimants group. They found that
and they replicated it into different large populations. If you look at the contribution of different sleep stages to your lifespan, REM sleep was the strongest predictor of your longevity and it was a linear relationship. Wasn't it sort of one of these U shape or J shaped curves that we often see with total sleep and mortality risk. It really was linear that the less and less REM sleep that you were getting the higher and higher your probability of death.
And then they did was that death due to natural causes or accident because I could imagine, if you're not get enough REM sleep, you're more likely to drive off the freeway step off a
cliff. I think it was. Old course, makes
bad decisions about anything in love relationships. Yeah, can
also be life-threatening? Yeah, I've tried to lean into that and claimed that I, with those bad relationship situations, though, I just didn't have enough rest last night. My darling, you know, REM sleep. Yes. And but she's far wiser than I thought. But so the
Did this great machine learning analysis, and I may get these numbers backwards, but I think for every five percent reduction in REM sleep, there was a 13% Associated increased risk of mortality. And I could have have to go back and check,
but to me,
and in the machine learning algorithm, what they ultimately spat out was that of, all of the sleep stages, REM, sleep is the most predictive of your longevity of
Your lifespan. So we often I hear people saying, how can I get more deep sleep or they sometimes say, how can I get more, dream sleep? And my answer is a question, why do you want to get more of that? And I'll say, well, isn't that the good stuff? And I'll say well actually all stages of it's all the good sleep. Yeah. Well it's
like the exercise question and it took decades for people to understand that moving around at for about a hundred and fifty probably a hundred eighty minutes.
A week at doing endurance type work Zone to cardio, its type where it is correlated with living longer feeling, better less, diabetes, Etc. There's really no way around it and you can you can ingest metformin until the cows come home. You can take nmn, we're all of which I think have their place in certain contexts. I'm a big fan of the work surrounding all those protocols like place. But without getting proper amounts of movement, meaning sufficient numbers of
Matter how many 12-minute exercise regimes, you follow /, what you need, that threshold level, and it sounds like the same is true of REM, sleep, and total amount of sleep. There's just you, you pay the piper somehow? Yeah, the return
on investment. I mean, to flip the coin, the return on investment is astronomical, you know, I think of sleep, it is, the tide that moves, you know, that raises all of those Health boats, and the most fundamental layer
of mental and physical.
Health, whenever people ask me, even though I'm not a physician, they'll ask me, what should I, what should I take, or what should I do? First question is always how was your sleep Greening? How well do you sleep every night? And how, how long you sleep? I always recommend your book, I always recommend your pocket, you know the podcast you've been a guest on etcetera who knows? Maybe you'll even release your own podcast and sometime soon and keep because I do think people need to hear from you more often. One thing I don't want to return to the the notion of
of Public Health discourse too much. But I do want to say one issue with books in general is that they can be revised but it's more or less a one and done kind of thing. Until the next book comes out one things. I like about the podcast format is that updates can be provided regularly Corrections and updates as new data come out. And so that's a wonderful aspect to this format and and hopefully the format that you'll be
yeah racing. I don't know, world needs to
hear more from you more often.
About sleep in its various Contours, not less. And so I do have a question about drinking alcohol. Yeah. Not that. We want to promote day drinking but let's say that. The one or two glasses of wine or a cocktail is consumed with lunch. Something that isn't traditionally done nowadays or in a late-afternoon happy hour cocktail and then one is going to sleep seven or eight hours later. Do you think that that will improve
Prove or somehow mitigate the effects of alcohol or if you have a drink, are you basically screwed for the next 24 hours?
No, I think that's going to be a time window dependency. Now, I don't know of anyone who's essentially done what you and I would like, which is the time separation. Dose-dependent curve were okay you drink at 10 a.m. then or 11 12 1 2 3 4 5 all the way up to you know 10:00 p.m. and estimate.
What is the blast radius and is it linear? Or is it nonlinear? Is it such that only when you drink in the last four hours? Do you just hit this exponential? And it's bad? Bad bad? Or is the some other curve that we could imagine there would be many possibilities? But certainly what we know is that the less alcohol and the less and more specifically, the metabolic byproducts aldehydes and ketones the the sort of the nefarious players. He's not the ketones that people are
all excited.
I know the other the other ketones. Yes, they can't make the chemists know what we're referring to, but it's
not about key to Genesis
is not about ketogenesis, there are Ketone bodies and that are released after ingesting alcohol that are not of the positive sort, correct. That a ketogenic diet might promote
right now. So I think in terms of that alcohol profile, we certainly know that as you are heading into the evening hours. Once again, timing and dose makes the poison
But I think it's also important once again, from that public message, then point and thank you. I think I am leaning into the sort of the podcast consideration Arena at some point but I don't want to be puritanical here, you know. I'm just a scientist and I'm not here to tell anyone how to live all I'm trying to do is Empower people with some of the scientific literature regarding
sleep and then you can
make whatever informed choices that you want now.
And like you it turns out I'm not a big drinker it's just because I've never liked the taste and I'm surprised that they haven't taken away my British passport because I don't like logger or beer. But I also want to say that life is to be lived to a certain degree. It's all about checks and balances. So you know, if I go out and, you know, I have an ice cream sundae. I'm not big on those either but you know, sure. I know that my, you know, blood glucose is not going to be ideal for.
For another 12 hours maybe that's just the price you pay for having some kind of relaxed, fun life. I don't want to look back on life and think gosh you know I lived until I was you know a hundred and eleven and it was utterly miserable, you know, right? So but it's all about some kind of a balance and and mine my job is not to tell people a prescription for life. It's just to offer some scientific information, alright?
Think you're doing a terrific job
All of that pee people are always say. We have all these neural circuits and if it's working properly, we all have a circuit that allows us to skip over information or as we wish wide. If the circuits between your brain and your thumbs are working, you can slide right along. You can drop to the next content. However, you like, I would like to ask about marijuana and CBD. This is a discussion that I think, five years ago would have ventured into the realm of illegal. But now, yeah, in many places, not all.
All medical marijuana is approved or is legal and certainly it's in widespread use certainly not recommending people do it. I have my own thoughts about marijuana CBD. I've been fortunate. I suppose that I don't particularly, like, marijuana or CBD. I don't even know if I've ever tried CBD. First of all, does marijuana, disrupt the depth of sleep, the architecture of sleep. And if so
As with alcohol and caffeine does when you ingest it or when it's in your bloodstream does relative to when you go to sleep. Does that played an important role? So does marijuana disrupt
sleep. Yeah, it does. And there's a pretty good amount of data on so we can break sort of cannabis down into two of its key ingredients. We've got THC tetrahydrocannabinol and we've got CBD and CBD is
Sort of the the less psych wards it. What we think of as the non psychoactive component. In other words, when you take CBD, you don't get high. If you take th see, you can get high. That's the psychoactive part of the
equation. Are both considered sedatives in the technical side.
No, they're not. Neither of them. Have that class right now.
THC can
seems to speed up the
The time with which you fall asleep. But again, if you look at the electrical brain wave, signature of you're falling asleep with and without that THC, it's not going to be an ideal fit so you could argue it's non-natural. But many people use THC for that fact because they find it difficult to fall asleep and it can speed the onset of at least non Consciousness. I guess the best way of describing it, but there are problems with THC and there are two fold.
The first is that it to but through different mechanisms seems to block REM sleep and that's why a lot of people when they're using will tell me. Look, you know, I definitely, I was dreaming. I don't remember, you know, many of my dreams and then, when they stopped using THC, let's say I was having, you know, just crazy crazy dreams. And the reason is because there is a rebound mechanism, REM sleep is very clever, and alcohol is the same way in this sense, it's the same homeostatic mechanism, some people will
I'll tell me, look, if I have a bit of a wild Friday night with some alcohol, you know, maybe I'll sleep late into the next morning and I'll just have these really intense dreams, so and I thought I wasn't having any REM sleep. Well, the way it works is that it's during in the middle of the night, really, when alcohol Blocks Your REM sleep and your brain is smart, it understands how much REM sleep. You should have had how much REM sleep you have, not because the alcohol has been in the system and finally, in those
Early morning hours when you're getting through to sort of, you know, six seven ATM. All of a sudden your brain. Not only goes back to having the same amount of REM. It would have had it. Does that plus it tries to get back all of the REM sleep? That it's lost. Does it get back all of the REM sleep? No, it doesn't. It never gets back all of the REM sleep, but it tries. And
so you have these really
intense periods of REM sleep, hence you have really intense bizarre dreams, and that's what happens. Also with THC, you build up this
This pressure for REM sleep. This debt for REM sleep, will you ever pay it back? Doesn't seem as though you get back everything that you lost but will you get back some of it? Yes, the brain will start to devour more because it's been starved of REM sleep for so long. But one of the bigger problems with THC that we worry about is withdrawal, dependency. So as you start to use, th see for sleep, there can be a dependency.
Hollering sense. So you start to need more to get the same sleep benefit and when you stop using, you usually get a very severe rebound insomnia. And in fact, it's so potent that it's typically part of the clinical withdrawal profile from THC from Cannabis.
And there's anxiety, withdraw, I you know, I don't ask anybody to change their behavior. We just as you said, we try and inform people about what the science says and
And let them make choices for themselves. People were regular pot smokers if you that many of will insist, they're not addicted and and maybe indeed they don't actually follow the profile of classical addiction. I don't know. I'm guessing some do some don't, but if you ask them. Well, what if I took away all marijuana consumption for, I don't know, two weeks that thought scares many of them. And many of them will experience intense anxiety, without marijuana which
You're perhaps not addiction, but a certain kind of dependency. And again, I, you know, I know many pot smokers, some of whom have jobs that are that are quite High performing and they manage
here in Buckley. I don't know any of them you know. That's right.
The what about CBD? I mean we hear so much about CBD. I've been a little concerned about the fact that the analysis of a lot of CBD supplements out there is confirmed that much like with melatonin the levels that are reported on the labels in no way.
Way, shape or form match, the levels that are actually contained in the various supplements sometimes. The levels are much higher than their reported on the labels other times, it's much lower. What does ingesting CBD due to the architecture and quality of sleep
right now? I don't think we have enough data to make some kind of, you know, meaningful sense out of it. I think the picture that is emerging however is probably the following firstly CBD does
Seem to be detrimental in the same ways that THC is. So we can start by saying it does it create create, you know, potential problems not of the nature necessarily that we see with THC. But the Devil is a little bit in the details from the data that we do have and it comes onto your valid point of Purity at low dose. CBD, can seem to be wake promoting so in lower doses, that
It's a sort of five or ten milligrams. I'm trying to remember some of the studies of the top of my head. There it actually may enhance wakefulness and cause problems with sleep. It's only once you get into the higher dose range that there seemed to have been some, you know, increase is sorry increases in sleepiness or sort of sedation like increases. And that's usually, I think above about 25 milligrams as best I can recall from the data. And then when we
In animal models. You typically see the same type of profile to. So then the question becomes a now again you just don't know about you know Purity, it's you very difficult although I think and again I'm not a user not necessarily because I, you know, have anything against it it's just that not, you know, necessarily my cup of tea, there are some firms that are now doing third-party independent laboratory tests, I don't know.
Know how gamed that is. So I've got no sensing some
supplement. Companies are quite honest and accurate about the amounts of various substances that are in their products and some are not. Yeah, and I think there's just a huge range. I think the FDA is starting to explore CBD. There are certainly, I saw some Grant announcements to explore. You have function of CBD. Most of the work on CBD is being done by the general public ingesting. It is and how they feel. I gave it to my dog who was a had some dementia-related sleep.
Is and it actually created a heightened wakefulness. It completely
soaking up his sounds as though, his
Bulldogs was, he's gonna get access to sleep. He's gonna take it, okay? Um, really messed him up. Took him to get away, he did better. But you know, that's, that's a canine so,
right? And it could have been, you know, sort of dose related to. But
binders are other things that are in there
shrekt. Yeah. And we, but right now, if we were to and I'm not making this statement, I don't think anyone can make the statement now, but if it ends up being
Being that CBD is potentially beneficial for sleep. How can we reconcile that mechanistically? And I think there are two me, at least, there are at least three candidate mechanisms that I've been exploring and thinking about the first is that it's thermoregulatory and what we found in some animal models, is that CBD will create a profile of hypothermia. In other words, it cools the body, the core body temperature down, and that's something that we know.
It's good for Sleep. The second is that it's an anxiety lytic that it can reduce anxiety, and that data is actually quite strong even with some functional Imaging work. That's been coming out recently showing that one epicenter of emotion called the amygdala deep within the brain is quiet and down with CBD. So I think that's at least a second. Non-mutex, great that's inclusive. You know, possibility, I think the third is some recent data that's come out. That was suggesting that CBD can
alter the signaling of adenosine. So it doesn't necessarily mean that you produce more adenosine, but what it can do is perhaps modulate the sensitivity, perhaps of the brain so that the weight of that same adenosine is weightier in its brain signal and therefore it creates this stronger pressure for sleep. So I think these are all tentative mechanisms. I think any one of them is viable I think all three
All viable together but right now I think does that sort of help think through the the tapestry of THC and
CBD very much so and actually it's a it's a perfect segue from we've talked about caffeine alcohol, THC and CBD, as sort of we framed them. Anyway as things that done in moderation at the appropriate times are probably okay for most people certainly not for everybody. There will be differences in sensitivity but that done at the incorrect.
Correct times. And certainly in, the incorrect amount will greatly disrupt this vital stage of life. We call Sleep CBD. It seems represents a kind of Bridge to the topic. I'd like to talk about next which is things that promote more healthy sleep or somehow contribute to enhancing the architecture and quality of sleep. So I'd love to chat for a moment about the kind of Grant the original. I should say that not the granddaddy, but the OG of sleep supplementation.
Which is melatonin. Yeah, the so-called hormone of Darkness, that's inhibited by light Etc, frame for us, melatonin in the context of its naturally occurring form. And then I'd like to talk about melatonin the supplement because as in my experience any time I say the word melatonin people think about the supplement melatonin which in itself is an interesting phenomenon that people are so cute to its role as something. You take, we often forget that this is something that we make in dog.
A gymnast lead. I'd love for you to comment in particular on even though we without necessarily getting into its precise nanograms per deciliter values. What are the typical amounts of melatonin that we release each night? And then I'd like to compare that to what is contained in? Say, Up 3, milligram or six milligram tablet that one might buy at the pharmacy, right? So I go to sleep at night has melatonin already kicked in before I shut my eyes and lay down my
head. Usually. Yes, if your system is working in the correct way.
As dusk is starting to happen to it. Let's say that you look at hunter-gatherer tribes who aren't touched by electricity. And so that's sort of the puritanical State par Excellence when it comes to electric light influence. And usually, it's as dusk is approaching that when melatonin will start to rise. And so when you lose the brake pedal of light coming through the eyes that normally acts like,
Hard brake pedal that stamps down and prevents the release and production of melatonin as that light brake. Pedal starts to fade with dusk. Then we ease off the brake pedal and melatonin, the spigot of metal temp melatonin is opened up and melatonin starts getting released and usually we'll see this Rising peak of melatonin sometime, usually an hour two hours later or around and it varies from different people.
Around the time of sleep itself, but it's already been on the March for some hours before you actually hit sleep itself. Interesting? And
I was always taught and I'm assuming it's still true that the only source of melatonin in the brain and body is the pineal gland. Is that still true?
Yeah, it seems to be from best that we can tell the pineal gland sort of meaning P like sort of shape. It's actually I think you see people
I'll say it's pee. Like I think if you look at the Latin derivative it's more, I think it's derived from Pine Cone, not P because in fact, if you look at the pineal, it is more pine cone shaped and so's aptly named
the human brain I've ever dissected. Or I confess I've disliked a lot because I teach neuroanatomy and have for years. I love looking at the pineal. It's the one structure in the brain. That's not on both sides. It's usually pretty easy to find and it's pretty good size. It looks like a, it looks like a p and it's sitting right there and
Remarkable that it releases this hormone assert probably our entire lifespan is inhibited by light the so our pineal starts to release this into the general circulation, I have to imagine we have melatonin receptors in the brain and body.
It's correct. So yep, essentially your brain has a Central master 24-hour clock called the suprachiasmatic nucleus that keeps internal time. Now it's not a precise clock if left to its own devices.
Has nothing that a Swiss clock maker would be proud of it runs a little bit long and leggy taking American
clock. The so good American watches. By the way Hamilton's are very
it's very much like a but we're not
famous for our time keeping or are punctuality for that might but the Swiss are
it's very, it's not quite Swiss, like it's more Berkeley like, which is very relaxed, you know, whatever. So in most adults at the average adult, I should say, your biological clock. Normally runs a little bit long. It's about
About 24 hours and 13 minutes. I think was the last calculation. But the reason that we don't keep drifting forward in time and kind of running consistently, you know more and later and later, 30 minutes by 30 minutes by 30 minutes, each day is because your central brain clock is regulated by external things such as daylight and temperature as well as food and activity. All of these are essentially different fingers that come along and on.
The wristwatch of the 24-hour clock will pull the dial out and reset it each day to precisely 24 hours. And I make that point because it knows 24-hour time, but it needs to tell the rest of the brain and the body, the 24-hour time as well. And one of the ways that it does, this is, by communicating a chemical signal of 24-hour, nurse of light, and day, using this.
Mon melatonin. And when it is at low levels, or it's non-existent, it's communicating the message, it's daytime and for us diagonal species. It says it's time to be awake yet at nighttime when dusk approaches and the break comes off melatonin. And we start to release it, then it's signals to the rest of the brain and the body. Look, it's Dusk and it's nighttime. And for us, Diane all species. It's time to think about sleep. So melatonin essentially,
Tells the brain and the body when it's day. And when it's night and with that, when it's time to sleep, when it's time to wake and therefore that's why melatonin helps with the timing of the onset of sleep. But it doesn't really help with the generation of sleep itself. And this is why we'll come on to what those studies of supplementation have taught it. So it tells the rest of
my brain and body, it's time to go to sleep in it, perhaps even aids with the transition to sleep, but it's not going to, for instance, ensure the overall
Sure, of sleep. Or it's not the conductor, that's guiding the Sleep Orchestra so to speak throughout the entire night.
Yeah. It's more like
the people that essentially take you to your seat and sit you down and give you your program, right?
Exactly. Yeah. It sort of the, the fall less sophisticated analogy, I have is melatonin is like the starting official at the hundred meter race in the Olympics. That's a better in public or calls all of the Sleep races to the line. And it begins the Great
Eight, sleep race better is allergy by the way, becoming a researcher but he doesn't participate in the race itself. That's a whole different set of brain, chemicals and brain and brain regions, which then brings us on to perhaps the question of supplementation, which is, is it helpful for my sleep? Well, I sleep longer, will I sleep better? And if I am, what doses should I be taking?
Sadly, the evidence in healthy adults who are not older age suggests that melatonin is not really particularly helpful as a sleep aid. I think there was a recent meta-analysis that demonstrated when it looked at all of the different sleep parameters, melatonin and a meta-analysis for those, not knowing what that is. It's a scientific sort of method that we use where we gather all the individual studies and we put them in a big bucket and we kind of do this.
Kind of statistical fancy sleight of hand and we tried to come up with a big picture of what all of those individual studies tell us. And what that meta-analysis told us is that melatonin will only increase total amount of sleep by three point nine minutes on average minutes minutes percent. Not and it will only increase your sleep efficiency by 2.2%. So it
really does as they say in certain parts of California, that's weak sauce.
Weak sauce affect. The Soleus is not strong, the force is not strong in this one. When it comes to a tool that in healthy people who are not of older age, it doesn't seem to be especially beneficial now, you know, results can vary. Everyone is different. Of course, there were talking about the average, the so-called average human adult
here. Well, melatonin in defense of what you're saying and also, I should mention, I have a colleague at Stanford Jamie's. I'd sir. Oh, wonderful Chuck's. I sir.
Is Lab at Harvard Med where we also trained, terrific sleep researcher. And I asked him about melatonin, and he essentially said the same thing that you just said, which is very little, if any evidence that it can improve sleep. And yet, it's probably the most, commonly consumed so-called
sleep. A hundreds of million dollars
industry. Yeah. So it's either massive placebo effect or its operating through some other mechanism related to quelling anxiety. Prevails? Yeah. That's is
actually interesting. You know, there are some studies where you do see some, you know effects now.
When you do the grand average of all cities, it just doesn't seem to have an effect. But let's assume that for some people it does have an effect. That's not again, be to the completely dismissive of that. How could it have that effect? One of the reasons that I've become a little bit more bullish on melatonin from a Sleek perspective and then melatonin more generally for a, maybe you can speak about this too as a counter measure and when you're undergoing insufficient sleep, there are
To all two different routes. They're the first reason that I think it could have a sleep benefit for some people is not because it helps in the generation of sleep, we know that it doesn't, it's because it to seems to drop core body temperature. Mmm,
there it is in surgery and I'm fascinated you stays more and more by temperature as maybe not just a reflection of brain State and wakefulness and sleep, but actually a lever that is quite powerful. And it's both and with all the interest in ice bath and hot shower.
And saunas and stuff. Something that we will definitely touch on temperature. Variation is so key. So if melatonin is dropping body temperature by a degree or so, something that you've said before, can help induce a sleepy State maybe that's what's allowing
people to get in that swamp sleep. Suppose the I don't think melatonin by itself will drop it by it sort of you know a degree something you know degree celsius and for order in us to fall asleep and stay asleep across the night, we do need to drop our core body temperature by about
About 1 degree Celsius or about 2 to 3 degrees Fahrenheit. And that's why it's always easier to fall asleep in a room that's too cold than too hot. I think that that's one potential Avenue that we are considering thinking more deeply about when it comes to melatonin and then the other is melatonin as an antioxidant. But let's let me table that for now because I'll just get a sidetracked. That's what we know so far. About melatonin.
In terms of its implementation benefit or lack thereof two final points that I shouldn't forget. One is the only population where we typically see some benefit, and it often is prescribed is in older adults, because as Elder, meaning, 60, and older, yeah, 60 65 and older because, as we get older, you can typically have what's called calcification of the pineal gland, which means, that, that gland, that's releasing melatonin doesn't work as well anymore as a consequence, they
They tend to have a flatter overall curve of melatonin release throughout the night. It's not this beautiful, lovely Peak and this bullhorn message of its Darkness, please get to sleep. That's why older adults, can have problems falling asleep or staying asleep. It's Not The Only Reason by sure any stretch of the imagination but it's one of the reasons and it's why melatonin supplementation in those cohorts older adults, especially older adults with insomnia, people have thought about that as maybe inappropriate
This
case along those lines. If we were to compare dosages I don't our do we know how much Melatonin is typically released into the bloodstream per night and can we use that as a kind of a rule of thumb by which to compare the typical amount that someone would supplement typically the supplements for melatonin that I see in the pharmacy and elsewhere and online range? Anywhere from 1 milligram to 12 or even 20 milligrams, my guess is
That a normal nights release of melatonin typical for somebody in their 20s. 30s 40s would be far lower than that, my correct or
wrong? Yeah, it's a many magnitudes lower and this is one of the problems is that I see that. Do I see typical doses are, you know, five milligrams or 10 milligrams and of course you know if you're a supplement company you know putting 10 milligrams versus five milligrams, if that's what you're actually doing, which will speak about purity as well.
It's
kind of like the Super Gulp sighs. Nobody wants to lower price, they just want you to, you know, we'll just give you more for the same price and that's how will compete. So it's been this escalating arms, race of melatonin concentration and it really does not look meaningful for, you know, for sleep in any way, what we've actually found is that the optimal dose is for where you do get sleep benefits in the populations. That we've looked at
Or somewhere between 0.1 and 0.3 milligrams of melatonin. In other words, the typical doses are usually 10 times 20 times. Maybe more than what your body would naturally expect. And this is what we call a Supra physiological dose. In other words, it's far above, what is physiologically normal? You know, and to put that in context. Imagine I said to you, I want you to eat 20 times as much
food today.
You can use testosterone as example. Let's, you're gonna take three hundred times. The normal amount of testosterone. We know that would have tons of deleterious effects,
right? Terrible. Yeah. And yet,
you can do this. What one thing that I'm concerned about about these super physiological levels of melatonin is that many years ago actually here at Berkeley. When I was a graduate student, we would inject animals which were seasonally breeding animals with melatonin, and the consequence of that was that their gonads
either their testes or ovaries would shrink many hundred hundred fold, or more. In other words that they would go from having nice healthy sized ham. Cert testicles what a hamster would consider healthy size for a hamster and they would shrink to the size of a grain of rice. So from like an all-men's to a grain size of a grain of rice. I had to see that only once for me to be very concerned about super physiological levels of melatonin and I realized that melatonin does different things in different species. We are not hamsters. We are not seasonal breeders season.
Restricted readers. There might be more breeding During certain Seasons. I don't know those data, but nonetheless hormones are powerful and and sure there is an optimal and sometimes we see that going slightly above endogenous levels for certain hormones, not always can have beneficial effects and sometimes it can have detrimental effects. I'm just concerned about taking high levels of a hormone that has effects on the reproductive axis and that's one of the
Reasons why I get very concerned when I see people. Really getting aggressive about melatonin supplementation, taking a hundred 10500. Sometimes even 10,000 times the amount that we would normally release. That's, that's my concern, although it's not nested in any one specific human study. I just, I just don't like to see. I certainly don't want to see other people and I don't want to personally take a hormone that's known to be androgen suppressive.
At high levels. Why would I? Why would I take that? That's a very nice ask
myself. I think it's a very you know good point and if you look at some of the evidence around you know melatonin is lethality if you want to go to that extreme for the most part you know it's pretty safe that you
mean you can take a lot of it
before you die, right? Exactly. Yeah. But I don't know that that's actually going to be you know yardstick for because you know you really need to think about your you know your health not just whether the shooting is going to
Kill you or not as the decision Matrix through, which you probably pop a pill. And it comes on to this concern around melatonin, because there was a steady. I think it's one that you mentioned to where they looked at over. I think it was at least over 20 different brands of melatonin supplements. And what they found, is that based on what it said on the bottle, versus what was in the capsules themselves, it ranged from. I think it was 83 percent less than what it said on the
oil to four hundred and seventy eight percent more than what it says on the bottle. Now, if you're if that's a 10 milligram, you know, pill and it's four hundred and seventy eight percent more than 10 milligrams and were already at 10 milligrams at many tens of times, more than is a physiological rather than a Supra. Physiological dose, we do need to be a bit thoughtful.
Yeah. Remember those hamsters?
Well, and I do appreciate the Deep dive on melatonin because I think people need to understand that it's nuanced. It's a matter of dosages and timing Etc, and then it may have its place as you mentioned in older individuals, and I should mention that, I'm an avid consumer of supplements that I believe in for me and I have been for a very long time so I'm by no means anti supplement. Some supplements, I refuse to take or avoid taking others. I am quite a bit.
We take and along those lines. I personally, and I don't know what your thoughts on this are, but there are a few things that I've personally found beneficial. I'd love your thoughts on them and I would love it. If you would tell me that everything I'm about to refer to as Placebo, that would be fine. So, that's what we do. We're scientists, we argue and then, and then we remain friends in as it goes away. So magnesium, there are many forms of magnesium. Magnesium, citrate is
As we
know, as a terrific laxative, magnesium malate seems at least from a few studies seems to relieve some of delayed onset muscle soreness, doesn't seem to create a kind of sedation, two forms of magnesium that I'm aware of magnesium by glycinate and magnesium, three, and eight. Yeah, we believe, based on the data, can more actively cross the blood-brain barrier. So you put in your gut but some of that needs to be in your brain. In order to have the set of effect. What are your thoughts on magnesium? Supplementation, do you supplement with
Magnesium. And what, what studies would you like to see done? If they haven't been done already. So I don't
Supply Mount with magnesium, but I do think three and eight is interesting because of that higher capacity to cross the blood-brain barrier and actually have a central nervous system affect. And the reason that that interests me is because the sleep is by the brain of the brain and also for the brain as well as for the body.
We just don't have a particularly good set of studies that have targeted exclusively three and eight. We do have lots of studies that have just looked at magnesium in general for sleep. And overall, the data is uncompelled going to stand for a while. I was confused as to why where did this come from this kind of myth of magnesium. So, I started looking back into the literature and I've best traced it, at least as far as
Can tell to Ellie studies showing that those who are deficient. In magnesium also had sleep problems. They had other problems too. Of course, but sleep problems were one of that set of squall. I that came from having lower magnesium and when they supplemented with magnesium and try to restore those levels, some of those sleep problems dissipated. And then, that seems to have gotten lost in sort of some game of sort of, like, Whispers
Around the room and it's become translated into people who don't have sleep problems, who are healthy sleepers and who are healthy in general, and who have healthy normal levels of magnesium. If they take more magnesium, they will sleep better. And the data really there, it's not good. Once again, the only study that I've seen, where magnesium did have some efficacy was in a study with older adults. I think they were 60 to 80 years old. It may have been exclusively women now, I think about it, and they also had in
Omnia and in that population you did see some benefits and my guess is that? Because it's an older community as well. They were probably probably deficient in magnesium. So they fit the former category of Simply when you're deficient and you restore, you can help sleep sort of return to normal. But if you are not deficient and you're healthy and you're not old and you don't have insomnia and your supplemental thinking that it provides sleep right now, the data isn't supportive of that.
But I just don't think we have enough three and eight data to actually speak about that, because it could just be a blood-brain barrier issue so far with the other
forms. So maybe some additional studies looking specifically at 3:00 and 8:00 or by glycinate would be, would be less for magnesium is involved in. So many cellular processes, you can imagine that this effect if it truly exists is as we say in science in the noise. Meaning it's in the it's in the Jitter of the data but to isolate the real Effect one needs to do some more refined studies.
What are some things that are of interest to you? If not things that you happen to take, these are not things that I personally take mostly because I just haven't experimented with them. Valerian root is one, tart cherry and kiwi fruit. Tell me about tell me about valerian root tart. Cherry and kiwi fruit. This is new to me. I'm have certainly heard of them and tart. Cherry and kiwi. Sounds delicious.
But what, what's happening with valerian root tart, cherry and kiwi. And are we talking about eating tart cherries, and Kiwis and Valerian Roots? Yeah,
time out taking them in pill form, usually it's implemented but it's also both for tart cherries. And for kiwis it's the actual, you know, fruit themselves, Valerian often touted as a beneficial sleep aid and lots of people swear by it too, but the evidence is actually quite against
L, really not that it makes your sleep worse. But of, at least the seven good studies that I've been able to find and typically, these are of the nature of what we call a randomized, placebo, crossover design, and I won't bore people with what that means. It's sort of what a cigar d solid. Yeah. It's one of the sort of gold standard methods that we have. When we're looking at interventions that he such as drugs to these, five of the seven found, no benefit of valerian root on sleep. Then to out of the
Even the data was just insufficient. I think it was a power issue where they just couldn't make any strong conclusions. And then I think there was the most recent study I think looked at two different doses of valerian I could have this wrong and they just fail to find any effects once again. But the stunning part of that paper, as I recall, they have this big table with all of the different sleep metrics.
They looked at, and there were well over 25 different things that they tried to see if Valerian impacted, and none of them were significant, which stuns me, because from statistical probabilities, we know if you just randomly perform, 25 statistical tests chances are probabilistically, you'll just get one significant result by random chance. And even with random chance on their side, they still couldn't find a benefit of valerian. So, some valerian root might be
Be
worse than nothing at all. If there is a so to
speak. I mean again placebo effect. We are we can think about that too. And I would say that if you feel as though it's having a benefit for you and with all the caveats that we have with supplements, things like melatonin Purity concentration, Etc. You know, maybe it's no harm, no foul. But I'm not a, you know, a medical doctor and I don't tell anyone about. We have all of these disclaimers about not recommend or
and will enjoy these things. I mean, I always say, you know, we're not Physicians, we don't prescribe anything.
Signed to some Professor. So, we profess things, it's up to people to be responsible for their own health, not just to protect us, but to protect themselves. I do want to hear about tart, cherry. Yeah. We fruit. What's the
story there change? Isn't it? I was, you know, I am kind of a hard-nosed scientist when people, you know, some years ago started saying, oh, tart cherries. It's thing or kiwi fruits. I was thinking, oh my goodness.
It's the sounds and been California little to. Yeah, I know. Yeah, the sun is softened me some, but I thought book. One of the things that we have to do as scientists is be as open-minded as possible. And I should not be so quick to dismiss. So I went to the literature has just started reading as much as I could about it. And there were three really good randomized, Placebo crossover trials with tart cherries and what they found was that in one study, it reduced,
The amount of time that you spent awake at night by over an hour and then the other two studies, one of them found that it increased, the amount of sleep that you got by 34 minutes. The other it increased, the amount of sleep that you got by 84 minutes which you know, these are. And what's striking is that? They were independent studies. I think meaning that they were from independent groups and these were you know, some of these guys, you know, Ian girls, I know
pretty well and
there weren't you know, and trust there were right. I really trust their work to they ingesting actual tortures of their drinking the juice or in capsules it was juice. So
they in all three studies it was juice. Although you can I think as a supplement you can buy it in a capsule and we've got no idea whether that showing just the benefit or not. What was also interesting in. I think it was that last study where they got an increase in sleep by 84 minutes, it also decreased a daytime napping
significantly that's one that I could sir.
Make use of I do, I love my son of time, you know? But I'd love to skip them to write and we can speak about naps and such of The Upside and downside of that, which then made me think, well, if that's the case, maybe the net net benefit on, sleepover all is no different. It's just that it decreases. The amount of time that some people were taking to sleep during the day and giving it back to the night, but that wasn't the case. Because if you added the total amount of sleep, that they were getting without tart cherries, both naps and nightly sleep combined.
Still, when you took tart cherries, you still got a net sum benefit after several amount of sleep. So, you know so far when it comes to supplements and those types of studies, they're good studies and the data looks interesting, but as a drug itself, you know, if this was clinical drug, you know, three studies that are somewhat small in nature and have some positive benefit. That's what we would call preliminary data of, maybe a chin scratching.
So yeah. And depending on the margins for safety one, might think well given that it's a tart cherry as opposed to some pharmaceutical Union prescription for then you know some people their threshold to experiment with supplements is quite low. Some people, their threshold is quite High. I feel like, you know, there are two categories or at least two categories of folks, out there people who hero, tart cherry can improve sleep, and we'll run out and try it and people who hear. Well, that sounds crazy. Why would I do that?
But of course, we have to remind people, that tart cherry isn't really what we're talking about. Presumably if this is a real effect and sounds like, it might be that there's a compound in tart, cherry. It's right. That if we were to call it whatever, whatever, five Alpha six, you know, some molecule, if we referred to it by its technical name, then people would say, oh, that sounds like a very interesting technical way to approach sleep, but doesn't sound very natural. So both groups are a little bit misguided in the sense that people who think that everything that comes from naturally occurring,
In Foods, plants, etcetera, things that grow out of the ground that that's all safe. That's not true. And people that think that Pharmaceuticals are the only if it's not evidence with the purified molecule than something's not of utility. Well, that's certainly not true somewhere in the middle. I think lies the answer which is sounds to me like tart cherries, at least an intriguing potential, sleep aid, intriguing, potential, sleep aid, and I'm underscoring potential. I'm certainly intrigued by it to the point where I might experiment a bit.
But I'm an experimenter for myself. Before I ask you about kiwi, I've had quite good results from taking something called apigenin, which is a derivative of chamomile. But in supplement form, I think I take 50 milligrams about 30 minutes before sleep and I subjectively experience a better night's sleep. So as we got, I don't measure I confess, I don't measure my sleep, I'm not a sleep tracker guy but you know, there are few
Papers out there. They're not what we would call Blu-ray published in Blue Ribbon journals, but but they have control groups and it looks somewhat interesting. And there when I say apigenin people get somewhat entry do this molecule chamomile has long been thought to be a sedative, a mild sedative. But a sedative I do drink chamomile tea. Do you take apigenin? What are your thoughts on
epogen? Yeah, II don't. And I have looked into some of the data regarding sleep as well, right now, from best, I can tell it.
It's mostly subjective data rather than objective, hard sort of sleep measures and that's why right now. I, you know, it's sort of unclear, not no comment but just unclear not dismissing it because I think you and I both scribe to the idea of absence of evidence is not evidence of absence. So keep your mind open, at least, I tell it to myself. I think if you're finding a benefit and you can do what I would think of, if I
Personally experimenting, which is both the positive and negative parts of the experiment. What I mean by that is let's say that I now want to think about some kind of a sleep supplement. I will take some kind of Baseline set of recordings for a month and I will just gauge where I'm at sort of supplement free then I'll go on for a month to whatever I'm thinking of taking and I don't, you know, supplement but let's say that I want to and I experiment with that.
And I feel as though based on my metrics, be them objective from my aura ring will be them subjective from whatever I'm, you know, writing down in the morning and both are important and valid subjective and objective. We like both in the Sleep world and I think, okay, look, it's clearly that the it seems to have some kind of an effect. The key thing, however is then do the negative experiment, which is now, come off it for another month and see two things, get worse. And if I can see that,
Bidirectionality, then I'm starting to think. Maybe I'm believing this a little bit more so that's the way I would sort of, typically approach, you know, a supplementation regiment. If I were to do it and that's just me, that's just the way my mind works,
but, no, that's great. I think it's very, very scientific and organized in a way that allows you and would allow other people to make very informed decisions for themselves. I like that. I like to think, in terms of of
Violating any aspect of our biology that behavioral tools? Always are the first line of Entry. Yeah, then nutrition. Everyone has to eat sooner or later even if you're fasting. Then perhaps supplementation, then prescription drugs and then perhaps brain machine interface devices that used to induce something and those can be done in combination. But what concerns me is when I hear people say well what should I take without? Thinking about their behavior, their light viewing Behavior, Etc. But of course, these things
In combination.
I think it's, you're right. That there's many when it comes to sleep, there are many low hanging fruits that don't necessarily require you to, you know, put sort of exogenous molecules in other words, things like supplements into your body or you know, use different types of drugs to help you get there. Now when it comes to prescription sleep aids I think I've been again a little bit too forthright. We know in clinical practice that the
Maybe a time, and a place for things like sleeping pills. They are a short-term solution to certain forms of insomnia, but they are not recommended for the long term. And we also know that there are lots of other ways that you can get a sleep help, or you can get a sleep Curative profile from things. Like cognitive behavioral therapy for insomnia which is a non drug approach cycle and quite effective. From what I understand, they have just as good a tip of sleeping pills, great data.
More effective in the long term. There's a recent study published that after working with that therapist, some of the benefits lasted almost a decade, you know, now if you stopped sleeping pills, usually you have rebound insomnia, where your sleep goes back to being just as bad, if not worse. And I think the same is true. When we think about supplementation, there are so many things that are easy to implement when it comes to sleep. That don't require venturing out into those Waters. And again, we're not here to tell anyone about what
whether they should venture or not, that's completely your choice. All I'm saying is that if you want to think about optimizing your sleep, there are a number of ways that you can do it that don't necessarily require you to swallow and I think or inject anything called, you know, smoke anything core, right?
Every which the margins of safety are quite quite wide, right? That's that's the other one. Yes, sir, I think. So. Speaking of low-hanging fruit, I don't know how low hangs in reality, but what about kiwi? They're delicious to me.
Anyway. Yeah, the humble kiwi fruit.
I'm not shouldn't be mistaken for the, the flightless bird of New Zealand, which is the native bird that were talking about the Kiwi. The fruit here, which those trees and shrubs are mostly southeast, Asia, kiwi, fruits have been previously touted as potentially having asleep benefit which again got me curious. And I first threw it out to my knowledge, there's really only one published human study, that's of
Any value. But what they did find was that it decreased the speed of time with which it took you to fall asleep.
These are we were ingesting the whole kiwi.
So, it's ingesting. The whole queer skin. Is can people
cringe when they see me? Well, I don't need this. No, no, no. I
think the idea is some of the good stuff and I'll come onto. This may actually be in the skin
itself. Thank you. You just you, I just want you to help me win. A bet. I'll give you your
okay. Okay. Yeah, you can pay me later, by the way, there's skin is used. And then, I know he just told me to say that. So he went to the no, he did not.
So the skin seems to be part of this potential sleep equation. And that study yet, they you fell asleep faster and you stayed asleep for longer and you spent less time awake throughout the night. And I just thought, well, you know, that's one study. What can you really do with that? There is another study however, in an animal model, which is, you know, a little bit more interesting. And once again they found a very similar phenotype that the
Rats are sorry, they were mice. The mice fell asleep faster, and they also spent longer time in sleep. The Sleep duration also increased, what was also interesting mechanistically and this is not the mechanism that I think ties together. Tart cherries, kiwi, fruit, and you know, things like melatonin because I think the could be one common binding mechanism. What they found in the animal study is that they could block those kiwifruit sleep.
And if it's using a Gaba blocking agent, now, Gaba Gaba, which is stands for gamma-aminobutyric acid is one of the major inhibitory neurotransmitters of the brain. It's kind of like the really occurring, sedative, right? A sort of. Yeah, it's the kind of the red light on the traffic light signal. You know. Others are green. Light, gabbar is red light. So by playing around with some sort of clever drugs to manipulate the system,
They could prevent the benefit of the kiwifruit by sort of buggering around with the Gaba receptor. Meaning that perhaps part of the kiwifruit benefit on sleep was mediated by the brains natural inhibitory neurotransmitter system called the Gaba system side. And I thought that was that was kind of in that convinced me a little bit more that maybe there's something here to read into. So to be determined again, here is the banner but it, you know, talk
Cherries and kiwi fruits. The data surprised me is because in part, I was so preoccupied with being, you know, a bit pure issue about in a bit snobby thinking, though. Come on, that's definitely not going to work. Well, this is our car around, I look
forward to a day when supplements are no longer called supplements because at the end of the day, whether or not something has an affect whether or not it's a whole kiwi fruit or a derivative kiwi, fruit will depend on the molecular compound. And as you mention this,
Potential mechanism via the Gaba system. That's I that we both a scientist get excited about mechanism. Because when you can try some mechanism and a pathway, it provides a rationale, a grounding for why kiwi of all things or tart, cherry of all things might help increase Total Sleep time. I'd be remiss if I didn't mention or ask about tryptophan and serotonin, I can anecdotally. Say, when I've taken tryptophan, the precursor to serotonin
On and, or serotonin itself, I have a horrendous night sleep. I fall asleep, very easily and I experienced ridiculously vivid dreams, neither-pleasant-nor-painful Pleasant is kind of a mishmash and then I wake up and I experienced several days of insomnia that and I've done the positive control in the negative control at all, the variations thereof to confirm that at least for me supplementing, with serotonergic age.
Agents is a bad idea for me. Yeah. And tryptophan is a common sleep, supplement and sleep aid. That's discussed, the normal architecture of sleep involves the release of Serotonin, but in a very timed and regulated way. What are your thoughts about serotonin in sleep? If you had to kind of put that into a nutshell? And then why supplementing sup with serotonin and or its precursor tryptophan might be a good.
A bad idea for somebody.
I think one of the potential dangers is that based on what's going on in your body that can change the absorption of natural sort of tryptophan and serotonin uptake within the brain itself. So I'm always thoughtful when you're playing around with that mother nature dynamic as it were the data as you described as a little bit all over the map. Some people say that it
Knocks them out. Other people say just like you do. It has a terrible impact on my sleep and when I stop it's pretty bad for a couple of days. It seems to have this lingering after effect.
I think what could be happening here is, we need serotonin to just as you described be modulated, in very specific ways during the different stages of sleep. If you look at the firing of the brain, epicenters were serotonin is released and there's a bunch of them in the brainstem what you find and the release of Serotonin to when we're awake. It's usually in high concentrations as we start to drift off to sleep it.
Some but not necessarily dramatically as we're going into non-rem sleep. But then when we go into REM, sleep serotonin is shut off. The other. One of the other neuromodulators noradrenaline, also shut off. REM sleep, is the only time during the 24 hour period, where we see noradrenaline and serotonin or norepinephrine completely shut down. When I say serotonin were also talking 5-HTP, sorry, 5-ht that
Just its chemical name here. So whether it would be speaking about serotonin or 5-ht. It's the same thing nor epinephrine or adrenaline, both of those need to be shut down for you to produce REM sleep. The other one of the other neuromodulators that then ramps up to produce. REM sleep, is acetyl, choline. So these three neuromodulators have this, incredible reciprocal dance that they have for you to generate what is called a natural architecture.
Of sleep throughout the night. It's the push-pull again, it's a push-pull again, you know, it's, you know, it's chest and back, it's, you know, whatever you want to think of the. That's why I think if you're trying to increase dramatically drive up, your serotonin levels at night and that sustained throughout the night when you're trying to get into REM sleep, you could be artificially, fragmenting REM sleep. Now I don't know the date, I don't think anyone's really got no data but that's why I would be if you were to say
Matt, two years time. That's the data helped me understand the potential mechanism or let's design some experiments. Where would you go first? I would say, let's look at the disruption of REM sleep, non-rem sleep reciprocal regulation because, you know, you need serotonin to be, you know, up at one time down at another.
So I I agree with everything you said and I'm personally never taking tryptophan or serotonin again, unless there's some clinical reason for that that I would need
Do that.
I want to ask about some other Pro sleep behaviors, but before I do that, let's talk about naps. I love naps. I come from a long history of Nappers. My dad always took a nap in the afternoon. I take a 20 or 30 minute nap, or I do a practice, which I took the liberty of coining. NSD are non sleep, deep breath. Some sort of just passive laying or changing out, their feet up elevated. Sometimes people do you where I'll do Yoga Nidra all do.
Hypnosis or something that sort but 20 or 30 minutes of that has, been very beneficial for me to get up from that nap or period of minimal wakefulness. We'll call it and go about my day, quite well, and also fall asleep. Just fine. What are the data on naps? Do you nap? And what are your thoughts about keeping nap short, meaning 20 to 30 minutes versus getting out past 90 minutes to hours. So
For you personally naps. Yay. Nay or
Ma I don't nap and I've just never been a habitual
Napa is that because you don't feel sleepy in the afternoon or because we don't feel sleepy
just harder than I
am. I wouldn't say hadiya I may be
less capable of falling asleep, but mostly Ragbrai afternoon. No, no, I don't drag them. They don't nap because you don't feel a need to nap. That's right. Yeah.
Yep. Now it's not that, I am immune to what we call the postprandial dip in alertness. I definitely feel as though there can be this kind of Afton all afternoon low were, you know I'm not quite as on as I was at 11 o'clock in the morning and we know the physiology to that which brings us back to whether we were designed to nap.
So for
naps, we've done lots of different studies and other colleagues have done these. That these two naps. Can have some really great benefits, we found benefits for cardiovascular health blood pressure. For example, we found benefits for levels of cortisol. We found benefits for learning and memory and also emotional regulation. How long are the Naps
typically in those studies anywhere
between 20 minutes to 90 minutes? Sometimes we like to use a 90-minute window so that the participant can have a full cycle of
And therefore, they get both non-rem and REM sleep within that time period. Then when we wake them up, we usually wait a period of time to get them past, what we call Sleep inertia, which is that kind of window of grogginess where you say to your better, half? Look, you know, darling, please don't speak to me for the first hour of the drive, don't anything right now. After the first hour of waking up, you know, I'm not just I'm just not the best version of myself so we wait for that time, period. And then we do some testing and we've done some testing before and after, and we look at the change and that's
It's how we measure, what was the benefit of naps. The reason why we sometimes do 90 minutes so that they get all of those stages of sleep. And then we correlate, how much benefit did you get from the nap? And how much of that benefit was explained by what REM sleep? You got what deep sleep? You got white sleep. You got. So that's the only reason that we use that as an experimental tool. What we've also found is that naps of as little as 17 minutes can have some quite potent effects on, for example, learning.
None of this is novel NASA. Pioneered this back in the 1990's and during the missions, they were experimenting with naps for their astronauts and what they found was that naps of little as twenty six minutes improved Mission performance by 34% and improved. Daytime alertness bite, 50% and it bursts what was then called the NASA nap culture throughout all terrestrial NASA.
Staff during that time period. So it's long been known that naps can have a benefit naps. However, can have a double-edged sword, there is a dark side to naps, and it comes back to our story of adenosine and sleep pressure. The longer were awake. The more of that sleep pressure adenosine that we build up, but what I didn't tell you is that when we sleep, the brain gets the chance to essentially clear out that adenosine. And after about 16 hours of wakefulness,
Then after about eight hours of sleep, eight hours of sleep, seems to be able to allow the brain to decrease its adenosine levels, back to normal. And so naturally, we should start to wake up which also aligns with your circadian rhythm. And those are two separate processes. But with about eight hours of good quality sleep, seven to nine hours for the average adult. We are free of all of that adenosine. We've evacuated, it essentially out of the brain and we wake up, naturally, feeling refreshed.
The reason that naps can be potentially dangerous is that when you nap, you are essentially opening the valve on the pressure cooker of sleep pressure and some of that sleepiness is lost by way of the nap. So for some people and not all people and you're a great example of this, some people. However, if they are struggling with sleep at night and they nap during the day, it makes their sleep problems even worse. So for people, with insomnia,
It, we typically advise against napping and the advice is, if you can nap regularly and you don't struggle with sleep at night, then naps are just fine, but if you do struggle with sleep, stay away from naps. If you are going to nap, try to limit your naps, try to cut them off a bit, like sort of caffeine, maybe, you know, eight to sort of 12 hours, maybe not that, you know, far off maybe sort of 7 to 6 hours, is a good rule of thumb. Try not to nap, essentially late.
Late in the afternoon. And if you do take a nap and you want to maintain your, you don't want to have that grogginess hangover, that can happen after a full night of sleep. For the first hour, try to limit it to about 20, 25 minutes and that way you don't go down into the very deepest stages of sleep. Which I've, if I rent you out of with an alarm, then you just kind of feel you almost feel worse for the first hour after the
nap, I've definitely experienced that. If I oversleep certainly if the
On goes down during my nap and I wake up and light. Overall, lighting conditions have changed, I find it very hard to jolt myself back into the evening and it can screw me up. Yeah, I try and keep those naps. Pretty brief and I should say, I'm very happy to hear. You mention individual differences and why some people might want to nap. And other people might not want to nap. I have a colleague. Leaching low will be familiar to many neurobiologist, but of course, we say absolutely spectacular scientist member of the
National Academy Howard Hughes investigator, just Phenom and has a ton of energy, but years ago, I learned that he always takes a nap in the afternoon so much, so that when he travels to give seminars at other universities, he will tell his post-launch per host. Whoever it is that he's supposed to meet with may I have your office for 30 minutes of are sometimes, 30 minute, discussion or 60 Minute discussion because I like to take a nap and he does that and then give us his talks or two
In the afternoon and academic culture and he describes the effect of the nap for him, the short naps in the afternoon being so profound for his productivity. That's actually what inspired me to start feeling, okay, about my desire to nap. And so I think, for me, that was great Vindication for those that might feel guilty about wanting a nap, but I takes a heart, your note about avoiding naps, if you have trouble falling and staying asleep, because I think that the I know I have family members who also if they now,
Nap there a wreck, they can't sleep. Yeah, I think
it's just we've often been very Pro sleep with sort of the Sleep community. So I think it's good to always point out these potential dark sides of any aspect but you're absolutely right. No one should feel guilty about getting the sleep that they need and I think that's been one of the big problems in society. Society has stigmatized sleep with these labels of being slothful or lazy and we're almost embarrassed, you know to tell Colleen,
Is that we take a nap? I think sleep is a right of human beings and either for think that sleep is a civil, right? Of all human beings and no one should make you feel and proud of getting the sleep that you need.
Well, I love that and I know it's an important point. I also feel that one of the best ways to beat your competition in any Endeavor is to outlive them. So now that we know that sleep can enhance
Longevity and lack of sleep. Can shorten one's life. That's all the justification. I need anyway. Can somebody sleep too much? Is it possible to get too much sleep?
It's a very good question and there are probably two things to say about it. There is a condition that we call hypersomnia, but that's a mixture of things. It's where people have either a very high sleep need or they are
He sleepy during the day and they're typically falling asleep and these can happen in a variety of different clinical. Contexts, one of the places where we've often seen hypersomnia believed to manifest is in depression, but if you look at some of those studies, it turns out it looks more as though. Those people are simply reporting being in bed longer but not necessarily sleeping longer and that fits very well with one of the profiles that we know of
Depression, which is anhedonia you don't get pleasure from normally pleasurable things so you just don't want to go out into the world. You don't want to interact because you're depressed. So what do you do? You just stay in bed. Like, and that was watching TV, right? And that just looks as though, you know, when people say what time, did you go to bed? And what time did you get out of bed? The mistake made in that question is, okay, that's how much time they're sleeping when you should have said, what time did you fall asleep? And what time did you wake up? And the answer could be very different.
That's hypersomnia from a clinical context.
Can you sleep too much, though? One of the data points that argue is, yes, that's possible. Is when we look at all, cause mortality certainly, what you find is that using The Sweet Spot of seven to nine hours when you start to drop below seven hours, there is a relationship, which suggests that the shorter your sleep, the shorter, your life short sleep in that regard predicts. All-cause mortality. But it's again, not a linear relationship. Like the one that we've seen with REM sleep, once you get past nine hours, the mortality curve.
I stopped going down and then once you get further 10 11 hours it hooks back up again. It's almost like a j shape tilted over a little bit and reversed. So there's this strange hook. What's going on here right now? Sleep science has at least two non-mutually exclusive explanations for this. The first is that, if you look at some of those populations, the idea is that the whatever was causing them illness and took their lives was just too much for
or sleep to deal with. However, we know that when we get sick, one of the things that we do immediately in this whole mechanism and inflammatory mechanism cytokine mediated, when we get sick, we want to sleep more, we just want to curl up in bed, and sleep it up, sleep it off. So the argument there is that it's not that sleep was killing, people prematurely it was that these people were calling on this, the help of sleep, they were calling on this thing called The Swiss army knife of Health that is sleep.
But whatever it is that they were facing was just too powerful for sleep to overcome. So it artificially looks as though more sleep leads to a higher risk of death. When sleep was actually responding to the mortality risk and it lost the battle. That's one argument. The second is that we know that Sleep Quality and poor sleep efficiency is a very strong predictor of all-cause mortality. And when you look at people who
Will often report sleeping longer amounts 10 or 11 hours? They typically report, having very poor quality sleep so because their quality of sleep is poor, they just try to sleep longer to try and get some of that back. So again here now it's poor quality sleep masking as too much sleep, leading to this artificial hook which looks like mortality. That's a second explanation.
A third, which is more of a good Duncan, which is just the kind of like a thought experiment, and I'm all of this mentality. I don't know how many other people share this. I actually think that could be a thing as too much sleep physiologically. I think it's possible. But the reason I think that is because it's no different than food water or oxygen, can you overeat? Yes you can, can you under eat it? Of
course, light light in the early part of the day or throughout the day. Wonderful light late in the day right now.
Detrimental bi-directional, you know, for water. Can you over hydrate - noot noot Rima? It can lead, you know, it
happened in the 1990s and
2000 with the Ecstasy craze were governments, were saying you're dehydrating, your dancing all night, please drink water, and they drank too much water there. Blood electrolytes, when you know, all over the place, and they were having cardiac arrests or stroke that people were dying and they were dying because of excessive hydration. Can you get too much oxygen hyperoxia Mia?
And it can cause free radical damage which can be profoundly harmful and kill. Brain cells. Can you sleep too much, you know, which is the fifth element of the life equation? You know, alongside you know, food water oxygen, you know, so forth. I should say can't even count. Clearly. I'm sleeping. Well, yes, I think there could be that possibility are most people in danger of getting too much sleep.
Contrary, if you look at the data so but I don't dismiss that idea. I think it's it's possible.
It's a very thorough and very nuanced and you have a very clear answer. So I it's so interesting to think that a lot of the data that out there that talking about being in bed, too long, that it's just trying to compensate for the actual fragmentation of sleep. So, the what I'm coming away with is that there are many paths to this and both positive and things to avoid.
Wide. But the idea is to get most nights a similar amount. Probably seven to nine hours somewhere in there of high quality sleep. That this notion of Sleep Quality is going to become. I would hope a phrase that more people think about and learn about and cultivate as a practice, when asked about a set of behaviors that I'm at least I'm aware of at least. One company is starting to track in their sleep monitoring device and that's
Orgasm and sex orgasm, and masturbation topics that are, you know, are somewhat sensitive. But from the perspective of biology, none of us would be here. Were it, not for sperm, meets egg in some fashion, either in a dish or in Vivo. But what what are the data? As, you know, them to be, or maybe your Labs, even doing this kind of work and exploration about the
roll that sex orgasm masturbation play in, getting to sleep and staying just asleep and Sleep Quality. Certainly those behaviors and those of physiological events have been part of our evolutionary history. Right? What's the story there? What can we say about this in terms of science and there is a
practice? Yeah, I mean it's almost that caricature of, you know, in the movies were you know, a couple makes love and then all of a sudden you just sort of
Is snoring. You know that happens with the idea that it's somewhat Sumner genic that it's sleep promoting.
Well the post orgasmic increase in
prolactin. Well that's is. There is is
is interesting what to be a set? A naturally occurring. Sedative, they
presumably has a function and an oxytocin has that. Also that benefit were you see, you know, dissipation of the fight-or-flight branch of the nervous system which has to happen for you to fall asleep. That's why we often see, you know here.
The Sleep Center will see a phenomenon called wired and tired where people say, look, I am so
desperately tired. I am,
I just, I'm so so tired, but I can't fall asleep because I'm too wired. So your sleep Drive, you're desperately tired. It's there but because you're wired because you've got too much sympathetic, activation too much cortisol as well. You can't fall asleep. It's a, it's an impressive, roadblock to anything like good sleep. And it's one of the
Principal mechanisms that we now believe stress and physiological activation. That is the underlying cause of many forms of insomnia. But coming back to sex, the data is actually quite compelling that both either subjectively assess Sleep Quality, or objective amount of sleep sex that has resulted in orgasm and I think it's that latter part that typically needs to happen and what
Imagine so that, you know. So between two mutually exclusive individuals were both are, you know, beneficial in terms of receiving an orgasm.
Yeah, I would say, any discussion about sex, we were referring to consensual age appropriate.
Species. Appropriate
context approach. Wow, I would never even gone. Looks easy from there because I Stephen doing that
and people will come up with all sorts of ideas. So I think that age appropriate, I think age-appropriate consensual content context appropriate and species-appropriate covers all the bases. But if I miss any, put them in the comments section and we'll be sure to take note.
Yeah. No I think that's that's really well said an important to say so the data is the when you look at couples who have orgasm,
Also, however, found benefits of masturbation and it's not frequently spoken about but what it takes, if you do some surveys, it turns out that people will often use masturbation as a sleep tool if the struggling with sleep. And I know this is a sounds almost like a strange conversation or it's a taboo conversation. But I think we just need to be very open about
started off in science. One of the things I worked on early in my career not the very first topic was the topic of
Of early influences of hormones, estrogen and testosterone on sexual development of the brain and body. And when you are weaned in a laboratory, like that, regardless of what era you look at sex, and it's behaviors and it's hormones and it's physiologies as a scientist. And so I think that's to be clear. What we're doing here? We're exploring these. These behaviors from that from that perspective. I mean one thing is for certain, everyone is here because a sperm and an egg.
Either in a dish or in Vivo as we said before and at least in 2021, there's no way around that fact. Yeah. And what preceded, that is typically this act we call sex and sometimes, hopefully, I like to think orgasm is associated with that sexual activity.
Masturbation is one
dimension of. That is something that I think it can and should be discussed if in fact, there are data that relate it to
sleep. Yeah, and both of those roots seem to lead to
Asleep benefit. Now, I'm not saying that it's all about the orgasm. I think, as we spoke about, with oxytocin, there is some degree of / bonding that if you have a partner and you experience, you know, an intimate loving you, no relationship that involves that, then you can have hormonal benefits that are sleep. Promoting that may not necessarily be seen if you're just engaging. You know, in the solo singular Act of masturbation,
So what we certainly know and I am not someone to take any advice on when it comes to anything, relationship-wise or sex-wise. That's a different episode. Yeah. Certainly and that's not a podcast series that I'm going to be releasing anytime soon. It's going to be mostly about sleep, although I will touch on I'll release a podcast on sleep and sex, but that's the data that we have so far. We also know that it works both ways though, and it's commonly this the same way with sleep.
No sleep and exercise, sleep and diet, how you eat can affect how you sleep, how you sleep can affect how you eat, same with exercise. And it turns out it's the same way with sexual behavior to. So, here, we're talking about whether sex can help with sleep, can sleep help with your relationship and sex. And the answer is, yes, it can. Firstly, we know and we spoke a little bit about this that the reproductive hormones are under profound sleep regulations. Esther,
And
testosterone estrogen testosterone as we hear. So often say sauce as well, but women who
or I should say anyone who's interested in having higher levels of estrogen or normal healthy levels of estrogen. I presume the data show for estrogen, what the data also show yet. Similarly, for testosterone will change. If you get too little or poor quality of sleep, both sex, steroid hormones, as they're referred to testosterone and estrogen which are present in both males and females and every variation thereof are going to be diminished.
Below normal
healthy yells, crap, sturgeon testosterone FSH in women, aqui hormone in the regulation, for Kieffer conception, of course, all of these sex hormones seemed to become significantly disrupted when sleep Becomes of short quantity or poor quality. We also know that in women sleep disruption can usually lead to menstrual cycle disruption. We know this particularly from
evidence in shift working women were, they are nighttime, shift workers, they struggle with sleep during the day, often menstruation is disrupted or even becomes impaired, but we also know it works this way, not just for sex hormones, but for sex itself, for example, we found that for every 1 hour of sleep, extra sleep, that a woman gets her interest in becoming sexually intimate with her partner increases by
14% which is, you know, that's a non-trivial amount. And then the final part of, I think this equation when it comes to sleep and sex is your your relationship itself. And there's some great work here from UC Berkley by Professor Serena Chen and what she found was that restless nights mean for far more brutal fights in your relationship and they did this in invites members of different, elegant ways, and
Buster as well. I mean, not that
I've ever had conflict in
relationships me like, you know, I just this is a day trader at, I've never experienced that at all, so I'm they found reliably. That sleep would predict higher likelihood of relationship conflict. Secondly, if you got into that conflict, the chances of you resolving. It were significantly lower when the parties had not been sleeping. Well, part of the reason is, because when you are not, well, slept your empathy,
Earthy goes down. So you're not, you're taking more of an abrasive stance with your partner rather than a more agreeable stance with your partner. So it almost every dimension of a human loving relationship. Sleep, can have a dramatic impact.
I think these are really important things to underscore. One of the most common questions I get because there seems to be a community of people on the internet that are obsessed with this.
I don't know who they are because it's all all this internet stuff is shouting. Into Atomic getting comments back in written form. It's a very bizarre so conversations Otis so to speak. Is whether or not sexual behavior itself, lowers, our increases testosterone and I went into the data which expands many decades. Actually both animal studies in human studies and it seems just to underscore this as long as we're talking about this subject, that it does seem that,
Sexual activity sex between two people.
Does seem to increase testosterone in both. There is this question about orgasm or no orgasm. And ejaculation know ejaculation. And, and indeed, there, do seem to be some effects of restricting ejaculation and males as a form of further increasing testosterone. So sex without ejaculation further increasing testosterone, but the data are not clean. Okay? Presumably because organizing these sorts of studies and getting truth in self-reporting is probably.
To get from from subjects. But but it everything sort of points in the direction that provided that the relationship is a healthy one. It's consensual, it's age, appropriate context appropriate species-appropriate that sex between two individuals does seem to increase the sex trade hormones, testosterone and estrogen toward healthy ranges and what I'm hearing. Now, this sort of, Gestalt of, of the discussion we just had, is that that to can promote
Sleepiness, restful States and quality sleep. And I think this is an important conversation that just hasn't been held enough. I mean sooner or later both in the US and elsewhere, we're going to have to acknowledge that. We are biological organisms of some sort and that we have choice in life about all these things from supplementation to sex or no sex Etc. But that they have profound effects on our core biology. I mean, it's fascinating to me that the areas of the hypothalamus
The preoptic area the super optic areas those areas which the names might not mean anything to anybody besides Matt. And I sitting here but those areas sit cheek to jowl with each other in the hypothalamus and control sleep and sex. Yeah, the trigger of orgasm the appetite for food?
Yep, it's a cool water for electrolytes. I mean, the hypothalamus is kind of a
festival of of neurons with different booths for different just swimming in behaviors. Most
Lecture in the brain, but it's the orchestrator of a fast number of our behaviors disproportionate in terms of its size versus effect. Yeah, I don't
think you can go to this hypothalamic Festival without at least seeing all the booths, whether or not you decide to
visit them, know that Master analogy.
So so I'm so I'm glad that we've broached that conversation and I hope people will will think that we've approached it with the appropriate level of sensitivity. It's an important one that we're going to hear more about what
Way or the other people are certainly thinking about this, if not engaging in these sorts of behaviors or avoiding them. So the more we can understand about the biology the better. And so thank you for bringing that topic up because For the record, Matt tabled it for discussion.
I said we could just like chatting outside and I think we'd said something about. Yes and have sex. I said yeah we can go that absolutely interesting after absolutely
I want to touch on just remaining topics. One is, are there any unconventional sleep tips or things about sleep that we've overlooked if we covered everything great. But you know, here to keep the room cool we here because of this temperature phenomenon and the light aspects, the considerations about alcohol. CBD marijuana, cognitive-behavioral tart, cherry fruit
Louise. Perhaps, Perhaps, please don't.
Put me on the hook. Yeah. Thought Jerry's. Yeah. I was just offering what I know. Nobody's and these are
considerations and and whether or not people batch these things. I won't even list them off now because they're too many jokes that one when it could make
and I have no affiliation with any of these products or well. I'm gonna take out a doc in a kiwi company. No, I'm not.
But the question I have is about any unconventional or lesser known things or maybe you do things or you think about things just in a purely
exploratory way as a scientist of the, you know, the the, what if kind of things that, you know, what, if it turns out that, and I here, I just, I, I've got a blank there for you to fill in.
I think, you know, beyond the standard, you know, fair that I've dished out plenty of times of sleep, hygiene of, you know, regularity temperature, Darkness, alcohol caffeine. And we've spoken about all of those. What are some more unconventional tips? I
The first one, which is unconventional along the lines of naps. If you've had a bad night of sleep, let's say that you're starting to emerge with insomnia and you've had a bad night of sleep. The advice. And I learned this from my wonderful colleague, Michael Perlis, do nothing, what I mean by that is, don't wake up any later. Don't sleep in the following day to try and make up for it, don't nap during the day, don't consume
Caffeine to wake you up to try to get you through the day and don't go to bed any earlier to think that you're going to compensate and I can explain all of those things, but if you wake up later, you're not going to be sleepy until later the evening. So you're going to go to bed at your normal time and you won't be sleeping your think. Well I just came off a bad night of sleep and now I still I can't even get to sleep and it's my normal time it's because you slept in later than you would otherwise Andrea.
Reduce the window of adenosine accumulation before your normal bedtime. So don't go, don't wake up any later. Don't use more caffeine for the reasons that are obvious because that's only going to crank you and keep you awake. The following night or decrease, the probability of a good following night of recovery sleep. Third I mentioned don't take naps because once again, that will just take, you know, naps particularly later in the afternoon. I almost liken them to snacking before a main meal. It just
Takes your appetite off the edge of that main meal of sleep. So don't do it and then finally don't go to bed, any earlier, resist and resist and go to bed at your normal time. What I want to try and do is prevent you from thinking, I had such a bad night last night and I normally go to bed at 10:30. I'm just going to get into bed at nine o'clock because last night was just so bad but that's not your natural bedtime and it's not aligned with your natural chronotype because presumably you kind of know something about that. Are
Only take evening time. You're trying to sleep in harmony, which is usually how you get best quality sleep, but you go to bed at 9:00. And my body is not ready to sleep at nine o'clock. But I'm worried because I had a bad night of sleep last night, so I get into bed. And now I'm tossing and turning for the first hour and a half, because it's not my natural sleep window. But I just thought it was a good idea and if I didn't know anything about sleep, I would think all of these same things too. So I'm not finger-wagging. But after if I have a bad night of sleep
And I am not immune just because I know a little bit about sleep doesn't mean I don't have my bad night. I do doesn't mean I haven't had bouts of insomnia in my life I have. But after a bad night of sleep, I do nothing. I don't do any of those four things. I think the second tip I would offer in terms of unconventional is have a wind down routine. Many of us think of sleep as if it's like a light switch.
That we just jump into bed and when we turn the light out sleep should arrive in that same way, just the binary you know, it's on or it's off. Sleep is a physiological process. It's much more like Landing a plane. It takes time to gradually descend down onto the terror firmer of what we call good solid sleep at night. Find out whatever works for you and it could be light stretching. I usually meditate for about 10 or 15 minutes before bed. Some people like
Reading. Try
not to watch television in bed that's usually advised too much light too much light too activating. You know, you can listen to relaxing podcast although we can speak about technology in the bedroom too but have some kind of a wind down routine. It's
You know, it's almost like, you know, you wouldn't race into your garage and come to a screeching halt from 60 miles an hour. You typically down shift your gears and you slow down as you come into the garage. This is same thing with sleep too. So that's the second thing, have some kind of a wind down routine, find what works for you, maybe it's taking a hot bath or a warm shower and then stick to it. Just we do this with kids all the time. We find out what their bedroom. Sorry their bedtime. Regiment is
Then we just stick to it Faithfully because we humans are the same way to the third thing is a myth don't count sheep as a study done here at UC Berkeley. I didn't do this today. I wish it did. It was by my colleague Professor Allison Harvey, and they found that counting sheep actually made it harder to fall asleep. It made matters worse as a Kanter. Sorry counter measure to that. What they did find was that taking yourself on some kind of a mental walk. So think about
Out a nice walk that you take in nature or a walk on the beach, or even a walk around an urban environment and visualizing that, that seem to be beneficial. The other thing about sort of that idea of Shifting Focus away from your mind itself, get your mind off itself. As a good piece of advice catharsis. You can try to write down all of the concerns that you have and do this. Not right before bed.
But usually an hour or two before bed, some people call it a worry journal. And to me it's a little bit like closing down. All of the emotional tabs on my browser because if I shut the computer down and all of those tabs are still open, I'm going to come back in the morning, the computers Red Heart, the fans going, because it didn't go to sleep, because it couldn't because there were too many tabs active and open. I think it's the same way with sleep as well. So try to think about doing that. So, just vomit out always
Your concerns on the page.
Like my 3:00 a.m. waking is often associated with me, writing down the list of things that I forgot to do that. I need to do. Yeah. And in, once I eventually wake up from a the later night, second half of the night sleep that stuff seems much more tractable and reasonable, but it sure would be great to get that stuff out of the way before sleep. Well, there's also some think that I don't think
people have spoken about a lot and I'd like to research it, which is
Difficulty and anxiety at night in the dark is not the same difficulty and anxiety in the light of day. And when we have those thoughts at night, it
comes with a magnitude of rumination and catastrophize
ation. That is disproportionate to that, which you were described when you are awake.
And I don't know
what's going on about the brain and thought, and emotion at the time, I've got a bunch of theories as to why. And that's why. I like the idea of closing up, zipping, up, all of those different components, just get them out on the page, and it feel and I at first thought this just sounds like who it sounds very Berkeley. It's kind of come by. Are we all hold hands and you know walk home at the end of the day.
But then this the data started coming out really good studies from good people and they found that keeping one of those journals decrease the time. It takes you to fall asleep by 50% 5 0 and then you know it's well on par with any pharmaceutical agent.
Oh AB. So I'm convinced that what I've long thought that the worries and concerns and ideas I have at 3:00, 4:00 a.m. I've learned to not place any stock in them. Yeah, because every something I'm glad that you might decide to eventually look at this.
This in your laboratory because I like something is melted away or altered. I suspect it's in the regulation of the autonomic nervous system that it makes sense. Why I concern at 3:00 4:00 a.m. ought to evoke more of a panic sense than a concern sounds and certainly that's my experience although not fortunate to not suffer from full-blown panic attacks but everything seems worse at 3:00 4:00 a.m. yeah. Provided you're awake and
we need to sort of look into that because you know, if you look at suicide
Great to around the 24-hour clock face disproportionately higher rates in those middle sort of night hours. So now I don't know if that's causative or not but something, you know, it could just be that that's the time when we're mostly lonely and we're by ourselves and that's the reason. So it's got nothing to do with sleep all the night time. I don't know. So that's the third thing. I think the fourth sort of little tip I would give that's unconventional is remove all clock faces from your bed.
Room,
including your phone,
including your phone and resist. Checking it now, I know and I can speak about the phone to that Genie of technology is out of the bottle and it's not going back in anytime soon. So we've got to think a scientist and sleep scientist, you know, as to what we do with, you know, phones in the bedroom,
it years ago. I was a counselor at a summer camp. I worked with at-risk kids, and the there was a phrase that comes to mind here. It's be a channel, not a damn, because when you try and damn certain kinds of behavior,
Physically. Damn, certain kinds of behavior, not morally. Damn it that to it, just creeps over the edge and you get and you get a waterfall. So it has a channel, the phone and devices have to be worked with and negotiated
not, right? And you know, think about those mindfully to but clock faces remove all of those because if you are having, you know, a tough night knowing that it's 322 in the morning or it's
88. In the morning, does not help you in the slightest and it's only going to make matters worse than better. So, try to remove all clock faces and I think that's one of those other tips that some people have found helpful. But those would be sort of some slightly unconventional, I guess more than your stock Fair of here are the five tips for Sleep hygiene tonight. So
those are terrific sleep tips and several of which, if not, all of which I'm going to incorporate Matt, this has been an amazing.
Amazing Deep dive on sleeve and it's positive and negative Regulators.
It's, I hope it hasn't been too long and I don't know, this has been great cuts it down. Shortened it to, you know, the five minutes of
meaningful stuff that I offered, but absolutely not every it is chock-a-block full of valuable takeaways. It's been tremendously fun for me to dissect out this incredible aspect of Our Lives that we call sleep with a fellow scientist and a fellow public educator. I want to say. So,
Several things. First of all we should say where people can find you, although it shouldn't be that difficult these days. You're a very present on the on the internet, for better for worse. I think it's wonderful that you're out there look. It's a Public Health Service that you're doing, no one requires you or any other scientists to get out and share this information. My sense of you knowing you a bit and from following your work, very closely with your scientific work in detail and your public face.
Educational work. Is that you very much want the best for people and it's an interesting thing as a scientist or a clinician to know that the that certain answers exist that we don't have all the answers, but that there is a better path, there are better ways and people can benefit in a myriad of ways. So for that because I know that to be very genuine in
you
you want the best for people and you're offering tremendous advice and considerations and people can take
It or leave it. I that's the way I view it. I also want to thank you for taking the time out of your day to to sit with me here and have this discussion. It's well, it's a privilege, it's a
delight, you know? You and I I think what like kind and lots of ways and I take you as a shining example of how you can effectively connect with the public and I know that we've had our conversations before we ever sat down to have together about, you know, how to think about communicating with the public.
Can the pros and cons of that and I've just loved your opinions. I've been drinking it all in. And then, I think the third thing I'd like to say is thank you for being such an incredible sleep Ambassador, the series that you've released on sleep, the way that you speak about sleep. The way that you moderate and of champion sleep. It is remarkable. So, thank you for just being, you know, a brother in arms in that way we are
and thanks for those
Those those words 99% of, I discussed there was the work of you and your colleagues in the Sleep field. So proper acknowledgement but thank you. Where can people learn more about what you're doing? Currently and what's coming? Next? You're on
Twitter. I am on Twitter, I typically tweet as the Sleep Diplomat, so it's no. It's just sleep. Diplomats leads to her well, Mass Leawood, Diplomat on Twitter, sleep, Diplomat.com website. If you want to learn more about
Science that we do here. It's human sleep science.com. It's the center for human sleep science. You can pick up a copy of the book if you want. It's called why we sleep. If you're curious about sleep, that's one path to take in. Its is there another like you
day in the in the
future? I think there maybe. Yeah, I think there are
many, many millions of people will be very happy to hear that. I
think it's starting to take hold and then
As we discussed, I am more than kicking around the idea of a short-form podcast, rather than a long-form, not long form. Because I don't have the mental capacity, or the interviewing just keep ability that someone like you has. So it will probably just be monologue short form. So if there is some interest, I'll probably do that as well. So those are the ways that people can find me. But overall, if you're interested in sleep, just listen to
That's the last thing I can
tell. All right, well, now now we're batting back and forth the, the vector of action so to speak, but I do hope you'll start a podcast, however, brief or lengthy. These episodes turn out to be because I do believe that's a great venue to get information out in other world and we don't just want to hear more from Matt Walker. I speak for many people, we need to the work you're doing is both influential but more importantly it is important work. It
It has the impact that is needed, especially in this day and age where science and medicine public health and the issues of the world Etc are really converging. So, I know I speak on behalf of a tremendous number of B. When I just say, thank you for doing the work you do and for being you and thanks for being a good
friend likewise to. And by the way, I just going to note that it was nice, that the two of us, both got the Johnny Cash memo about how it's a dress today.
It seems that there were both kind of we got that same memo which will mean nothing to people who are listening, but if you're watching the video, you'll probably see what I mean. Andrew, thank you for taking this time. Thank you so much.
Matt, thank you for joining me for my discussion with dr. Matt Walker, please also check out his podcast, the Matt Walker podcast, a link to that podcast can be found in the show notes. If you're enjoying this podcast, please subscribe to us on YouTube on YouTube. You can also leave us comments.
And suggestions for future episodes and guess in the comment section as well. Please subscribe to us on Apple and on Spotify and apple, you can leave us up to a five star review. You can also support us by checking out our patreon account. That's patreon.com slash Andrew huberman. And there you can support us at any level that you liked. Please also check out our sponsors mentioned, at the beginning of this episode links to those sponsors can be found in the show notes during this episode. And in many previous episodes, we discussed some
That's one issue in the supplement industry is that many supplements don't contain what's listed on the bottle. We therefore have partnered with Thorn that's th OU are any Thorn supplements because Thorn supplements have the highest levels of stringency in terms of the purity of the ingredients and precision with respect to what's listed on the bottle is actually what's contained in. Those supplement bottles, if you'd like to see the supplements that I take for sleep, and for other things, you can go to Thorn.com the letter U /.
Huberman. And there you'll see all the supplements that I take and can get 20% off any of those supplements as well as any other supplements. That thorn happens to make that's Thorn th orn e.com, the letter U /, hubermann and last but certainly not least, thank you for your interest in science.
