Dr. Matthew Walker
Appearances
Modern Wisdom
#883 - Dr Matthew Walker - The Science Of Perfect Sleep
You might be the British man with the best hair that I know.
Modern Wisdom
#883 - Dr Matthew Walker - The Science Of Perfect Sleep
Deep non-REM is where you get these incredible, deep, powerful, slow brainwaves that are just epic.
Modern Wisdom
#883 - Dr Matthew Walker - The Science Of Perfect Sleep
And the depth, the size of those brainwaves and how dense they are, the number of them that you're having is another great measure of the quality, the electrophysiological quality of your sleep versus the, are you waking up lots throughout the night and therefore you're spending a lot of time awake, that sleep efficiency, that's another measure of quality.
Modern Wisdom
#883 - Dr Matthew Walker - The Science Of Perfect Sleep
Honestly, if you just focus on these four main principles, you're 80% of the way there. So quantity is what we used to espouse in sleep as the measure of good sleep, which is somewhere between seven to nine hours for the average adult. And there is variability. The next one is quality.
Modern Wisdom
#883 - Dr Matthew Walker - The Science Of Perfect Sleep
So they're sort of orthogonal, but both bleed into this kind of second silo of sleep quality. So QQ, next one is regularity, going to bed at the same time, waking up at the same time. And you think this sounds fairly rudimentary and basic. Part of the reason is because you have a 24 hour master clock in your brain. And that clock thrives under conditions of regularity.
Modern Wisdom
#883 - Dr Matthew Walker - The Science Of Perfect Sleep
And when you feed it signals of regularity, like going to bed and waking up at the same time, it improves both the quantity and the quality of your sleep. That's what I used to preach as why it was important. until there was a great study published probably two and a half years ago. And it was, I think, over 300,000 individuals that they tracked with sleep assessments over a good period of time.
Modern Wisdom
#883 - Dr Matthew Walker - The Science Of Perfect Sleep
And then they looked at them across a much longer lifespan period of time. And they looked at mortality risk. And they also looked at different forms of mortality risk, cancer mortality risk, cardiovascular disease mortality risk. And they measured sleep quantity.
Modern Wisdom
#883 - Dr Matthew Walker - The Science Of Perfect Sleep
Sure enough, just like we've seen in many other studies, using that sweet spot of seven to nine hours, the shorter your sleep, the shorter your life. Short sleep predicted all-cause mortality. That's the quantity measure. They looked at regularity. regularity demonstrated the same thing.
Modern Wisdom
#883 - Dr Matthew Walker - The Science Of Perfect Sleep
Those who were in the lowest quartile, those who were least regular, highly erratic, they had far higher rates of mortality relative to the people who were in the top quartile who were incredibly regular. How did that compare to the quantity in terms of predictive power? Genius. And that was the brilliance of the study that really made me double down on regularity.
Modern Wisdom
#883 - Dr Matthew Walker - The Science Of Perfect Sleep
Because then what they did, they said, well, if we've got these two measures, quantity and regularity, let's not look at them individually. Let's put them in the same statistical model and do a Coke Pepsi challenge between the two. And all of us in the sleep field, you know, you're betting that quantity is going to be the more powerful statistical variable. It wasn't.
Modern Wisdom
#883 - Dr Matthew Walker - The Science Of Perfect Sleep
Regularity beat out quantity in predicting all-cause mortality, cancer mortality, cardiovascular mortality. Now, it's not to say that you can get away with short quantity of sleep, even if you're highly regular, you know. Getting four hours of sleep at the same time every night, you still have markedly elevated mortality risk.
Modern Wisdom
#883 - Dr Matthew Walker - The Science Of Perfect Sleep
But nevertheless, I was pretty stunned by how powerful that was and made me even, someone who was pretty regular before, get a bit more evangelical about it, you know?
Modern Wisdom
#883 - Dr Matthew Walker - The Science Of Perfect Sleep
We'll get back to talking to Matthew in one minute. But first, I need to tell you about Mantis sleep. There are thousands of dollars of lights pointed at my face right now. But because of Mantis sleep mask, all I can see is complete blackness. Literally, it feels like I'm in pitch black at the moment. That's why I'm a massive fan of them.
Modern Wisdom
#883 - Dr Matthew Walker - The Science Of Perfect Sleep
The problem with most sleep masks is that they're made with cheap materials, they let too much light in, they push up against your eyelids, and they're just uncomfortable, especially for side sleepers. Look at that. You can see here how amazing the inner part of the eye mask is, where it doesn't touch your eyelids at all.
Modern Wisdom
#883 - Dr Matthew Walker - The Science Of Perfect Sleep
And I think this is probably... Actually, I need to jump in on the quantity before you even move on. Yeah. Quantity of sleep, time in bed, time asleep.
Modern Wisdom
#883 - Dr Matthew Walker - The Science Of Perfect Sleep
Mantis masks were made with all of this in mind to make the perfect mask for all types of sleepers, made of soft, breathable materials. They've got an adjustable strap that can fit even the weirdest shaped head. Dr. Mike Israetel, this could be for you. I use this mask every night when I'm at home. I use it when I'm on travel. There's one in every single travel bag I've got, even for midday naps.
Modern Wisdom
#883 - Dr Matthew Walker - The Science Of Perfect Sleep
This thing is unbeatable, so comfortable, and they've got a 60-night sleep trial. So you can buy it and sleep with it on for 59 nights. If you don't like it for any reason, they'll give you your money back. Plus, they offer free US shipping and they ship internationally. Right now, you can get 10% off the best sleep mask
Modern Wisdom
#883 - Dr Matthew Walker - The Science Of Perfect Sleep
On the planet by going to the link in the description below or heading to mantasleep.com slash modern wisdom and using the code modern wisdom at checkout. That's M-A-N-T-A sleep.com slash modern wisdom and modern wisdom. A checkout. How big of a wobble are we talking in terms of tolerance here? People can't just go to sleep at the same time, the same minute, every single night.
Modern Wisdom
#883 - Dr Matthew Walker - The Science Of Perfect Sleep
What's an acceptable tolerance window for swings? And is there a difference for going to sleep time versus waking up time? How can people navigate this regularity landscape? Yeah, beautifully put.
Modern Wisdom
#883 - Dr Matthew Walker - The Science Of Perfect Sleep
So it's a two by two, you know, is it offset versus onset of sleep, getting into bed, get out, which is the more powerful? Right now, we don't know which one you should keep as more regular. We haven't been able to dissect that yet. However, to your question, what's the amount of wiggle room? I'm describing here in terms of the four macros, this ideal world of good sleep.
Modern Wisdom
#883 - Dr Matthew Walker - The Science Of Perfect Sleep
And it turns out, drum roll, None of us live in the ideal world. We all live in this thing called the real world. So just for goodness sake, stop being so puritanical. It turns out that you've got a wiggle room of about 15 to 20 minutes on either side of it. So there is some degree of play in the system. But not much. But not too much.
Modern Wisdom
#883 - Dr Matthew Walker - The Science Of Perfect Sleep
Astute question. Most of us conflate the former for the latter, and it's potentially dangerous. So... If you are a good sleeper, you will have what we call a sleep efficiency of at least 85%. So sleep efficiency of the time that you're in bed, what percent of that time are you asleep? And really good sleepers will have, let's say, 80% to 90% sleep efficiency.
Modern Wisdom
#883 - Dr Matthew Walker - The Science Of Perfect Sleep
And this is to not have sleep regularity have a negative impact on your mortality outcomes? Is that the measure that we're looking at? Correct.
Modern Wisdom
#883 - Dr Matthew Walker - The Science Of Perfect Sleep
Or just your mortality in terms of cancer, or your mortality in terms of cardiovascular disease, or all of the mortality... Buckets thrown together into a big old mix. Presumably including car accidents and all manner of other things that can occur. Correct. By way of microsleeps and all of that.
Modern Wisdom
#883 - Dr Matthew Walker - The Science Of Perfect Sleep
That's the way that a lack of sleep will pop you out the gene pool, you know, very quickly rather than chronically through disease and sickness.
Modern Wisdom
#883 - Dr Matthew Walker - The Science Of Perfect Sleep
Okay. So talk to me, you know... people might not be able to work out what the different quartiles would be. If 15 to 20 minutes of wiggle room for both going to sleep and waking up, I would actually guess that most people, more people in terms of regularity will have their wake time versus their sleep time in that most people have a thing that they need to do.
Modern Wisdom
#883 - Dr Matthew Walker - The Science Of Perfect Sleep
The alarm goes off and whether you like it or not, you are up. for many people, the same isn't true when you go to sleep. So I'm going to imagine that there's more wobble on the bottom end, less wobble on the top end. But talk to me about... What's the upper quartile and what are we looking at here? How deep does the trough go of swings?
Modern Wisdom
#883 - Dr Matthew Walker - The Science Of Perfect Sleep
Yeah, the highly irregular people were somewhere between two to two and a half hours variable. So in other words, they may have an offset of going to bed or waking up or just some wiggle room of an hour difference. You know, one side of their mean and then an hour, the other side of the mean.
Modern Wisdom
#883 - Dr Matthew Walker - The Science Of Perfect Sleep
So again, it doesn't sound like too much. I mean, how many times have you watched one extra episode of Game of Thrones or something? And then, oh, fuck. That's me at the bottom quartile of wiggle room. And then maybe you wake up later. Maybe you haven't got work in the morning.
Modern Wisdom
#883 - Dr Matthew Walker - The Science Of Perfect Sleep
You know, I mean, God, I said this to you before we got started, but I was running night clubs for my entire 20s, 15 years. And the first time I ever had a stable sleep and wake pattern was COVID as an adult. The first time I ever had it, I would go... Dunning? Yeah. I mean, it's crazy. I also have to say to you, it must be interesting for you.
Modern Wisdom
#883 - Dr Matthew Walker - The Science Of Perfect Sleep
I wonder whether you've ever considered how many years of life you've saved on the entire planet, because I certainly know that before your first episode on Rogan, I didn't care about sleep. Yours was the first time when you spoke to Joe, I think it was 1109, the podcast number. And... That was the first time that I ever thought, oh, I really need to care about this.
Modern Wisdom
#883 - Dr Matthew Walker - The Science Of Perfect Sleep
Like, you know, the number of doctors or surgeons that end up back in the same hospital after they've gone home to do this thing. But that was me. So I would, you know, wake up at, say, 10 or something like that. Get up, I'd train, a bit of a walk, do whatever I needed to do, work. And then I'd set off to go to Manchester from Newcastle at...
Modern Wisdom
#883 - Dr Matthew Walker - The Science Of Perfect Sleep
7 p.m., get there at 9.30, set up the club, run from 10 until 2, 2, cash the till, which is the most cognitively demanding task before you're about to finish, get back in the car, 2.30, drive back to Newcastle, get in at 5 a.m. And I did that once a fortnight for four years.
Modern Wisdom
#883 - Dr Matthew Walker - The Science Of Perfect Sleep
There would also be one night in Newcastle where I'd be up until at the very least 2.30 in the morning because I was cashing the till at one of our, we would call it a domestic event, one of the home games as opposed to an away game.
Modern Wisdom
#883 - Dr Matthew Walker - The Science Of Perfect Sleep
and uh you know i'd alternate that with my business partner and then there was you know just the vacillations of being a 20 year old club promoter in the north of england so you know that was all of that stuff was happening and uh yeah that happened until i was 32 and then you know covid comes along and that's the first time in my entire life that i go to bed and i wake up at the
Modern Wisdom
#883 - Dr Matthew Walker - The Science Of Perfect Sleep
Did you feel subjectively any, and be truthful, just- Yeah, yeah, yeah. I mean, look, for me, the single biggest determinant in my mood is my sleep. If I'm underslept, also if I've slept in, a lot of that's to do with the story that I tell myself. I think I wanted to start becoming a morning person. And I thought, oh, you know, genetic night, maybe we can get onto it.
Modern Wisdom
#883 - Dr Matthew Walker - The Science Of Perfect Sleep
So even if you're in bed for seven hours... you're not getting seven hours of sleep. You're looking at close to six. Correct. So to get at least the minimum, according to the CDC, of seven hours, you actually have to be on average in bed maybe about eight, eight hours and 15 minutes.
Modern Wisdom
#883 - Dr Matthew Walker - The Science Of Perfect Sleep
Genetic night owls, early birds. I must be one in night owl thing. It's like, God. maybe, but also you've had to survive in this industry for the last 15 years. So maybe your body's just compensating for what it is that you have to do. But I found that the quality of my mood, the quality of my thoughts, my emotional regulation, these things took a marked...
Modern Wisdom
#883 - Dr Matthew Walker - The Science Of Perfect Sleep
turn for the better, I found myself being able to regulate my appetite more, what it was that I wanted to eat. Even if I was getting the eight hours, because I wasn't getting ripped around by basically doing shift work, that didn't happen. Yeah, a lot of things, my ability to introspect changed as well. Lots of things. Yeah.
Modern Wisdom
#883 - Dr Matthew Walker - The Science Of Perfect Sleep
And isn't it, it's almost like being in a room where the refrigerator compressor is turns off and it's only when it turns off that you realize it's been on all the time. Right. I just thought that was the same. Exactly. And it's only when you finally disengage from the brutality of that schedule, do you realize, my God, this is not me in my thirties.
Modern Wisdom
#883 - Dr Matthew Walker - The Science Of Perfect Sleep
There's a different form of me sitting underneath all of this.
Modern Wisdom
#883 - Dr Matthew Walker - The Science Of Perfect Sleep
Well, I mean, this is the bizarre thing when you start to think about who are you and what what does it mean that you have a nature well okay you have a nature you have a disposition for anger or discomfort or introspection or sadness or happiness or whatever it might be joy okay let me double your testosterone just that one intervention Now let's see what you think you is.
Modern Wisdom
#883 - Dr Matthew Walker - The Science Of Perfect Sleep
Well, you are still you, but also the daily experience of you, the sort of landscape that you inhabit internally and the way that you show up externally has probably changed at least somewhat. Okay, let me chop your sleep in half. What does that mean? Like, who are you on half the amount of sleep for two weeks? Yeah. Who are you now?
Modern Wisdom
#883 - Dr Matthew Walker - The Science Of Perfect Sleep
Well, you're still you, but we have this sort of sense of who we truly are, which is kind of like a best version of us, like a flourishing, thriving version of us. And then we have this other one, but again, as you say, you know, kind of like the, uh, the Stockholm syndrome of our own sleep deprivation or sleep irregularity, maybe, um,
Modern Wisdom
#883 - Dr Matthew Walker - The Science Of Perfect Sleep
We don't know who we could be or who we are with regards to that. And over the last 18 months, I've been fighting with sleep again, sort of really trying to dial in sleep quality and struggling quite a lot. And that again makes me quite, okay, well, who is, what is it that I'm fighting with here? How much of this is me and how much of this should I identify myself with?
Modern Wisdom
#883 - Dr Matthew Walker - The Science Of Perfect Sleep
And how much of this is just a byproduct of what's going on at the moment? It's really interesting. Yeah.
Modern Wisdom
#883 - Dr Matthew Walker - The Science Of Perfect Sleep
And you've also got to ask yourself the question at some point, what is it that I want out of life? Because I think so often in life, the professional gun goes off and you're off into the rat race. And the thing is, even if you win the rat race, at the end of the day,
Modern Wisdom
#883 - Dr Matthew Walker - The Science Of Perfect Sleep
you're still a rat so why not just stop and look up and firstly ask do i even want to be running in that direction and do i want to be this physiologically kind of distraught person by way of that run that this life is is enacting on me and that's what it was with and now being shortened as well and you're right precisely and also it's not just that we're going to live a shorter life
Modern Wisdom
#883 - Dr Matthew Walker - The Science Of Perfect Sleep
So it's a really astute point that we sort of misconstrue the question of total sleep duration as total time in bed. And you have to subtract one from the other. And that's why I think there is some...
Modern Wisdom
#883 - Dr Matthew Walker - The Science Of Perfect Sleep
But that shorter life is going to be more likely filled with disease and sickness, which is not your lifespan, but your health span. And I think what you're describing is we do a large amount of work in sleep and mental health. And I would say that one of the most sensitive faculties that is...
Modern Wisdom
#883 - Dr Matthew Walker - The Science Of Perfect Sleep
that takes a nosedive like a dart into the ground when you are even sleep-shortened versus totally sleep-deprived is your mood and your emotional stability. And we understand all of the brain mechanisms as to why, but when you're getting sleep, a la the COVID experience, my guess is that you woke up and you are now dressed in a different set of psychological clothes.
Modern Wisdom
#883 - Dr Matthew Walker - The Science Of Perfect Sleep
And sleep is almost like a set of emotional windscreen wipers that it just adds the rose back into the tint of your life glasses every single day. And when you look, it's not necessarily, and we've done these studies, when you are underslept, it's not as though you slide down into the negative more and you experience negative things more negatively. You do somewhat. Right.
Modern Wisdom
#883 - Dr Matthew Walker - The Science Of Perfect Sleep
The main thing is that you lose the pleasurable feelings of normally pleasurable things. That's what we call anhedonia. Sleep-induced anhedonia. Correct. And anhedonia is the principal underlying feature of depression. And that's why we see such strong links between sleep.
Modern Wisdom
#883 - Dr Matthew Walker - The Science Of Perfect Sleep
In fact, in the past 20 years of studying, we have not been able to discover a single psychiatric condition in which sleep is normal. To me, that is one of the most, I think, demonstrable indications of this tenuous link between your sleep health and your mental health. They are so intertwined. And there's a lovely quote by an American entrepreneur, E. Joseph Kosman.
Modern Wisdom
#883 - Dr Matthew Walker - The Science Of Perfect Sleep
And he once said that the best bridge between despair and hope is a good night of sleep. And that's exactly what the data demonstrate.
Modern Wisdom
#883 - Dr Matthew Walker - The Science Of Perfect Sleep
legitimacy in looking at say sleep tracking data because at least that will tell you total sleep time I mean that was absent of you know exactly that was the biggest realization I've I uh looked at my end of year review for whoop and um I've worn this thing for 1600 nights since way before they were a
Modern Wisdom
#883 - Dr Matthew Walker - The Science Of Perfect Sleep
What else is there to say on regularity? So we mentioned gold standard, 15 to 20 minutes of wobble for sleep time, 15 to 20 minutes of wobble for wake time. Yep. Black standard at the bottom end, bottom quartile, Two hours of wobble. So from when you typically on average would go to sleep an hour earlier, an hour later, and the same at your wake time.
Modern Wisdom
#883 - Dr Matthew Walker - The Science Of Perfect Sleep
Is there anything else to say when it comes to regularity?
Modern Wisdom
#883 - Dr Matthew Walker - The Science Of Perfect Sleep
I think there is. I think it's probably you. You came onto it beautifully with the Netflix description, which is where most of us get hammered with our regularity is the front end of sleep, going to bed.
Modern Wisdom
#883 - Dr Matthew Walker - The Science Of Perfect Sleep
And the Netflix phenomenon is really what we call sleep procrastination, which is you are plenty tired enough to sleep, but there are things that are getting in the way, be it online shopping, checking social media and what to do about that. I would just at least say set a to bed alarm, not just a wake up alarm, but a to bed alarm. It goes off one hour before bed.
Modern Wisdom
#883 - Dr Matthew Walker - The Science Of Perfect Sleep
maybe even let's just say 30 minutes before bed and live in the real world. At that moment, at least dim down half of the lights in your house and see if you can do at least a digital detox. Fine, keep watching your Netflix on your TV, but for the most part, see if you can put your phone away. My goodness, that's the other thing that will activate you. We used to think it was the blue light,
Modern Wisdom
#883 - Dr Matthew Walker - The Science Of Perfect Sleep
from tablets and screens. And there was a great study from Harvard that indicated certainly one hour of blue light exposure before bed blunts something called melatonin, which is this bioactive nighttime hormone, which signals sleepiness. And it certainly did that. And it disrupted sleep.
Modern Wisdom
#883 - Dr Matthew Walker - The Science Of Perfect Sleep
And we were all on the good bus of blue light is, you know, the nefarious agent that will, you know, fleece you of your sleep. Then came along some great work by a guy called Michael Gradazar. And he actually argued now, I think very powerfully, it's not the blue light. It's that these devices are attention capture devices, right?
Modern Wisdom
#883 - Dr Matthew Walker - The Science Of Perfect Sleep
And they are designed to ruthlessly fleece you of your attention economy. And my goodness, are they good at doing it, because they've spent hundreds of millions of dollars developing that technology. And as a consequence, you become so cerebrally activated that it masks your state of sleepiness.
Modern Wisdom
#883 - Dr Matthew Walker - The Science Of Perfect Sleep
So you could be saying, okay, if there was an electromagnetic blast that came through Austin at 11 p.m. at night, you would normally say, look, I'm not sleepy until midnight. And I just don't feel sleepy right now because I'm on my phone and you're getting activated. All of a sudden that goes out within 10 or 15 minutes, you actually get hit by this wall of sleepiness and you think,
Modern Wisdom
#883 - Dr Matthew Walker - The Science Of Perfect Sleep
Jesus, actually, I'm pretty sleepy. Because it hits the mute button on the signal, the physiological signal of sleepiness, because it overdrives it with activation.
Modern Wisdom
#883 - Dr Matthew Walker - The Science Of Perfect Sleep
Well, I mean, the converse, which is pretty easy. I think that you're so right as well, that there is something triggering about, activating about that kind of use. You're involved, it's engaging, you're sort of thinking about stuff. It's kind of passive, but boring at the same time, but also engaging. Very interesting.
Modern Wisdom
#883 - Dr Matthew Walker - The Science Of Perfect Sleep
any therapy pill uh bills that you have to uh have after seeing me and being confronted by me send them to me i will pay for them oh my goodness fantastic well uh what a good opening to it it is it is what it is um talking about sleep today we had a lot of conversations about it on the show previously but i really want to dig into some sort of more rare insights that people probably know that they need to know but don't yet know so just to get started
Modern Wisdom
#883 - Dr Matthew Walker - The Science Of Perfect Sleep
But I used to use it if I was stuck in traffic or whatever, and I was tired after driving back, I would make sure I had a really compelling YouTube video on. So I would use that effect on the opposite side. You would reverse engineer it. Yes, it'd keep you awake. Exactly correct.
Modern Wisdom
#883 - Dr Matthew Walker - The Science Of Perfect Sleep
The biggest realization, I've said, I think Whoop's great and you can sign up for it if you want, but I can tell you what the realization is, the main realization that you're all going to come to, which is eight hours in bed does not mean eight hours of sleep. That's the biggest realization. Everybody comes away from it. They go, well, I was sure I was in bed for eight.
Modern Wisdom
#883 - Dr Matthew Walker - The Science Of Perfect Sleep
Quick note, talking with Matthew really drives home how much our overall health depends on the basics, like getting a good night's rest, which is why I've been prioritizing tracking my health more closely. And Function has made it unbelievably easy to get a clear picture of what's happening inside of my body. They run lab tests twice a year that monitor over 100 biomarkers.
Modern Wisdom
#883 - Dr Matthew Walker - The Science Of Perfect Sleep
They've got a team of expert physicians that then take that data and put it in a simple dashboard and give you insights and actionable recommendations to improve your health and lifespan. They track everything from your hormones to your nutrient levels, two key areas that affect your sleep.
Modern Wisdom
#883 - Dr Matthew Walker - The Science Of Perfect Sleep
They even screen for 50 types of cancer at stage one, which is five times more data than you get from your annual physical. Best of all, Dr. Andrew Huberman, Dr. Walker's colleague, is their scientific advisor, so you can trust that the data and insights you receive are scientifically sound and practical.
Modern Wisdom
#883 - Dr Matthew Walker - The Science Of Perfect Sleep
Getting your blood work done and analyzed like this would usually cost thousands, but with Function, it's only $500. Right now, you can get the exact same blood panels I get and bypass their waitlist by going to the link in the description below or heading to functionhealth.com slash modernwisdom. That's functionhealth.com slash modernwisdom. I'm interested in... I saw a study a little while ago.
Modern Wisdom
#883 - Dr Matthew Walker - The Science Of Perfect Sleep
I don't know whether it ever got replicated. Looking at e-readers... and looking at the effect of e-readers, most of them now, you know, the best Kindles have got a warmth level as well as a brightness level. Have you looked at... A lot of people want to read, but if you're reading and you're reading a paper book, that means you've got to have a light on. Light's quite bright.
Modern Wisdom
#883 - Dr Matthew Walker - The Science Of Perfect Sleep
So you can go to a Kindle and you can pull that down, but that's a screen. Have you looked at anything to do with light exposure from e-readers impacting sleep quality? Really interesting.
Modern Wisdom
#883 - Dr Matthew Walker - The Science Of Perfect Sleep
And that's actually a great way to continue... to engage with digital media in terms of reading if that's all you're doing. So the page is black, the text is a cream or a white, therefore the amount of looks that's coming from the screen is already lower versus because obviously the background is the far more dominant constituent of that page. So black paper, white text, that's perfectly fine.
Modern Wisdom
#883 - Dr Matthew Walker - The Science Of Perfect Sleep
You've got to be a bit careful in terms of what you're reading. If it's the content, you know, if it's all sorts of salacial stuff, then, you know, maybe the heart rate is going in the wrong direction. But for the most part, that's completely fine. But I would say... Two things about your phone.
Modern Wisdom
#883 - Dr Matthew Walker - The Science Of Perfect Sleep
If you have to take the phone into your room, because again, I don't want to be puritanical, that genie of the phone being in the room is out the bottle and it's not going back in, no matter what I say. Two rules. If you can, you can find some software that can try to turn the screen monochromatic so everything goes black and white.
Modern Wisdom
#883 - Dr Matthew Walker - The Science Of Perfect Sleep
I thought I got eight hours. And he goes, well, he told me that I was actually only in bed for seven and a half. I kind of had a bit of a bad night's sleep. So I had like six, 15 of sleep last night. I thought I was in bed for eight. You go, that's a red pill that everybody needs to take.
Modern Wisdom
#883 - Dr Matthew Walker - The Science Of Perfect Sleep
And it's pretty surprising at how reduced in terms of the activation.
Modern Wisdom
#883 - Dr Matthew Walker - The Science Of Perfect Sleep
And my phone's next door. Let me show you this. I'm going to... Hang on. Wait there, people. I promised people who are listening, we did not plan this. This is completely... So you'll know... There's a accessibility function that allows you to turn things grayscale. Have you ever seen anyone do that? Oh, that's genius. And turn all of the blue off and turn it just red. So you can see here.
Modern Wisdom
#883 - Dr Matthew Walker - The Science Of Perfect Sleep
How in... How on earth did you do that? Just internally on iPhone. So you go into Settings and Accessibility, and then the same as you triple-click to go grayscale, the same function, but you just use the slider on the red side. You kill all of the color except for red, and that means it's so much darker.
Modern Wisdom
#883 - Dr Matthew Walker - The Science Of Perfect Sleep
So when you do this, especially if you need to use it a little bit later on in the evening, you just triple-click, and it goes from... You just stack the two things, which is first, it's almost monochromatic,
Modern Wisdom
#883 - Dr Matthew Walker - The Science Of Perfect Sleep
But second, it's desaturated the blue light and it's the blue light, which is the lower wavelengths that are most deleterious to harming your melatonin. It's that black belt strategy. Blue light. By the way, do you know why it's the blue light that's so bad for your melatonin?
Modern Wisdom
#883 - Dr Matthew Walker - The Science Of Perfect Sleep
Why it's so powerful in terms of... Is that because when the sun is lowest in the sky in morning, it's... Oh, when the sun is highest in the sky, sorry, it's more blue. And when it's lower and it's going through more atmosphere, it's redder. Is that why?
Modern Wisdom
#883 - Dr Matthew Walker - The Science Of Perfect Sleep
Some of that is true, but it's not the main reason. It's because where we evolved from, evolved from the ocean, from the sea. And there, because of the way that light is refracted through water, the principal color of the sea, of the ocean, are blues. And so where we evolved our circadian rhythm originally was under the water.
Modern Wisdom
#883 - Dr Matthew Walker - The Science Of Perfect Sleep
And the way it was regulated was using light, but the color of light under the water was principally blue because it was kind of desaturated from the reds and the yellows. Isn't that amazing? That's so crazy. This isn't even reptile brain. This is fish. Oh, no. This is, you know, reptiles, amphibian, fish. We are way before, you know, avian and mammalian, you know, sort of emergence.
Modern Wisdom
#883 - Dr Matthew Walker - The Science Of Perfect Sleep
Yeah. So I think it's one of those areas that is not highlighted enough. And that's why you can actually then come on to the second of the cues, which is quality. And that in fact is efficiency, sleep efficiency. Well, there's two ways we measure quality. The first is sleep efficiency. So as I said, I want to see you at least asleep 85 to 90% of the time that you're in bed.
Modern Wisdom
#883 - Dr Matthew Walker - The Science Of Perfect Sleep
And by the way, it's only in birds and mammals that we see this thing called REM sleep or dream sleep. And it's a surprising thing. We still don't understand what that tells us about the functions of REM sleep. REM sleep is the principal stage in which we dream. And with every living species that we've studied to date sleeps.
Modern Wisdom
#883 - Dr Matthew Walker - The Science Of Perfect Sleep
What that means is that sleep probably evolved with life itself on this planet and fought its way through heroically every step along the evolutionary path. Ergo, if sleep doesn't serve an absolutely vital function, it's the biggest mistake the evolutionary process has ever made, and we now realize why it didn't make a blunder.
Modern Wisdom
#883 - Dr Matthew Walker - The Science Of Perfect Sleep
But what's interesting is that what first came into being was this thing called non-rapid eye movement sleep. And for millennia, there was no rapid eye movement sleep. There was no dream sleep. Something happened when we went from amphibians, reptiles, and fish up to birds and mammals. Now, birds and mammals evolved separately in two separate lineages from reptiles, amphibians, and fish.
Modern Wisdom
#883 - Dr Matthew Walker - The Science Of Perfect Sleep
Birds have REM sleep, mammals have REM sleep. What that means, firstly, is that REM sleep evolved twice independently in the course of evolution. When you see the same thing evolve twice or more times, like eyes, for example, it tells you that it's probably a fundamental trait of a living species.
Modern Wisdom
#883 - Dr Matthew Walker - The Science Of Perfect Sleep
So what we don't still understand though is why do birds and mammals require, why did REM sleep emerge into being? Now we've got some theories because one of the differences is that birds and mammals regulate their temperature. We are homeotherms. We get the ability to control our core body temperature. All of those other species don't.
Modern Wisdom
#883 - Dr Matthew Walker - The Science Of Perfect Sleep
So it has to be something to do perhaps with metabolic control to produce thermoregulation. There's probably other theories too, but nevertheless, going back to the evolutionary story and we'll come back to, I haven't forgotten the final T for QQRT, but I've put forward a theory that sleep actually never evolved. Why do we think that sleep evolved?
Modern Wisdom
#883 - Dr Matthew Walker - The Science Of Perfect Sleep
Why don't we think that sleep was the default state of all life and it was from sleep that wakefulness evolved? I've always been confused why we don't... Well, because you wouldn't be able to survive if you just slept, but you could survive if you just woke. The idea would be though, that if sleep is this initial default state, it is enough to support life and its existence.
Modern Wisdom
#883 - Dr Matthew Walker - The Science Of Perfect Sleep
And some of those species could reproduce potentially asexually. So you wouldn't have to necessarily be awake to find a mate. You could at least have a proto version of life. And the proto version requires this stasis state that we call sleep.
Modern Wisdom
#883 - Dr Matthew Walker - The Science Of Perfect Sleep
It would somehow accumulate nutrients by falling through gravity. Correct.
Modern Wisdom
#883 - Dr Matthew Walker - The Science Of Perfect Sleep
You know, think of, you know, there's any manner of static living organisms that stay in place that don't move around. But then at some point, there was enough evolutionary pressure to demand this thing called movement and demand higher levels of consciousness. And it was... So... That's one way of seeing it. I think the other is, let's say wakefulness came first.
Modern Wisdom
#883 - Dr Matthew Walker - The Science Of Perfect Sleep
Why don't we then just have wakefulness? Why do we need sleep? Sleep is clearly the price that we pay for wakefulness. That's another way around that we can see it. So I've gone off on an evolutionary tangent there based on your brilliance, but I can always come back to the final T if you like. Yes, please.
Modern Wisdom
#883 - Dr Matthew Walker - The Science Of Perfect Sleep
Timing. So timing, so QQRT, timing sounds like regularity and you think, hang on a second, that's one and the same. It's not. Timing is your chronotype. Are you a morning type, evening type, or somewhere in between? If you're an evening type, the headline piece of news is it's not your fault because it is largely genetically determined.
Modern Wisdom
#883 - Dr Matthew Walker - The Science Of Perfect Sleep
If you are staying in bed, let's say for nine hours and your sleep efficiency is 70, maybe 65, then my recommendation is perhaps surprising. Do not get into bed that early and do not stay in bed that late. I want to cinch you down to maybe even just six and a half hours of time in bed.
Modern Wisdom
#883 - Dr Matthew Walker - The Science Of Perfect Sleep
There are at least 22 different genes that dictate your morningness or your eveningness. And therefore, you don't really get to decide. It's gifted to you at birth. And it's very hard to change. They tried it with a great study out of Australia where they took night owls who were kind of 1, 30 a.m., 2 a.m. type people.
Modern Wisdom
#883 - Dr Matthew Walker - The Science Of Perfect Sleep
And they gave them, I think it was a total of 11 different rules, and I'll forget some of them, but it was wake up two hours earlier. As soon as you wake up, have breakfast. Right after that, get at least 30 minutes of daylight. Don't nap. Cook caffeine off after midnight. Don't nap in the afternoon. In the afternoon, if you go outside, you've got to wear shades, start to get dimness already.
Modern Wisdom
#883 - Dr Matthew Walker - The Science Of Perfect Sleep
Eat two hours earlier and make sure that you're eating at least three hours before bed. And then make sure you get into bed at least an hour and a half before you normally would do.
Modern Wisdom
#883 - Dr Matthew Walker - The Science Of Perfect Sleep
and they were able to bring those night owls back by about 60 minutes but if you're going to bed at 1 30 a.m normally and you drag back you're still a 12 30 a.m type person and that was extra imagine trying to do that every day for the rest of your life with those 9 to 12 different rules the adherence to that protocol is probably going to be very difficult and sustainable throughout life
Modern Wisdom
#883 - Dr Matthew Walker - The Science Of Perfect Sleep
So even with all of that extreme, it's hard to do. Why is your chronotype knowledge important? By the way, you can just go onto Google and just type MEQ test, which stands for morningness, eveningness, questionnaire test. It takes about three minutes and it gets you about 80 to 90% accurate close to your actual genetic information. chronotype distinction.
Modern Wisdom
#883 - Dr Matthew Walker - The Science Of Perfect Sleep
So it's a pretty good test for what you are. You probably already know what you are. You can probably answer it by a simple question. If we put Chris on a desert island, nothing to wake up for, no responsibilities, no clocks, no nothing, what time do you think your body would naturally like to go to bed and naturally like to wake up?
Modern Wisdom
#883 - Dr Matthew Walker - The Science Of Perfect Sleep
And the reason, by the way, I say your body rather than what time would you, you're already too biased by society's predilection to to morning types are the best types. You know, it's the early bird catches the worm type mentality. So to which I would say, by the way, that the second mouse gets the cheese, but let's move on. I would still say though, that it's so difficult to fight against that.
Modern Wisdom
#883 - Dr Matthew Walker - The Science Of Perfect Sleep
And we see this also at the sleep center. People will come in and say, I've got terrible sleep onset insomnia that I get into bed for the first hour and a half, two hours, I'm awake, I just can't fall asleep, I've got insomnia. And then we do a chronotype test with them. And for some of them, what we find is that they're a night owl. They'd like to go to bed at midnight.
Modern Wisdom
#883 - Dr Matthew Walker - The Science Of Perfect Sleep
But because of the way life is structured for them, they're getting into bed at 10 p.m. And they're awake for the first two hours. They don't have insomnia. They have a mismatch between when they're trying to sleep versus when their biology wants them to sleep. And when you sleep in synchrony with your chronotype, you get a beautiful distribution of quantity and quality.
Modern Wisdom
#883 - Dr Matthew Walker - The Science Of Perfect Sleep
When you fight against your biology, you normally lose. And the way you know you've lost is typically disease, sickness, and bad sleep. So that's why I would always try to emphasize your chronotype as a critical last component.
Modern Wisdom
#883 - Dr Matthew Walker - The Science Of Perfect Sleep
So I think I'm probably a pretty good example of somebody that was like a, how would you say, chronotype fluid. Oh, you're a genius, Chris. I love it. Being in my 20s, and like I say, I was adamant. I'm just, you know, I'm a night owl. I...
Modern Wisdom
#883 - Dr Matthew Walker - The Science Of Perfect Sleep
And we've already said, well, hang on a sec, six and a half hours of time in bed is too little to get seven hours of sleep by the mathematics, even maybe six. But what I'm going to do by way of constraining your bedtime there is force efficiency out of your system. I go to the gym. I'm there for an hour. I start working out. I do the 11th rep, pull out my phone.
Modern Wisdom
#883 - Dr Matthew Walker - The Science Of Perfect Sleep
finished my every single assignment at my two degrees at uni were all done at three in the morning you know that was sort of where i came alive i used to have my most my most sort of creative moments between about 10 p.m and maybe one in the morning i could really sort of drill down um and then covid comes along and i was i was already starting i mean this is after your episode on rogan had come out so i'd already realized i needed to start to prioritize sleep in a
Modern Wisdom
#883 - Dr Matthew Walker - The Science Of Perfect Sleep
covid comes along i was like well i'll just see what happens i guess and i started to get myself a morning routine that was unnecessarily elaborate and then i over the last what four four and a half years since that came along my natural wake time now is 7 a.m if you don't put an alarm on i will get up at 7 a.m i will go to bed at the moment i'm going to bed at like 7 p.m or 8 p.m which i need to have a chat with you about yeah but uh
Modern Wisdom
#883 - Dr Matthew Walker - The Science Of Perfect Sleep
I will get up at 7am and I don't know, I don't know how much of it, you know, the chronotype thing, the night owl, early bird or something in between, although useful and powerful, I worry will be used by a lot of people to justify their poor or obsessive sleep habits in whichever direction that they kind of want to rationalize that they should take it. Like I say, it's so natural.
Modern Wisdom
#883 - Dr Matthew Walker - The Science Of Perfect Sleep
I understand that. Absolutely. I mean, I was somebody that had Stockholm syndrome from his own industry. You know, whatever, the prison guards had become my friends because I did what I needed to do in order to be able to survive in the world that I was living in. But liberated from that, free from that for four years, right, where I was no longer having to do this.
Modern Wisdom
#883 - Dr Matthew Walker - The Science Of Perfect Sleep
I was actually incentivized to maybe get up a little bit earlier because I train and then prep and do the episodes and so on and so forth. Oh, well, it seems like my body works in a different way. So, yeah, very fluid in that regard.
Modern Wisdom
#883 - Dr Matthew Walker - The Science Of Perfect Sleep
yeah and i think you know you so we definitely need to have a discussion if you're going to bed that early because i'd love to see your sleep efficiency nevertheless i think what that what that teaches us is much like sleep deprivation you don't really know that you are sleep deprived when you're sleep deprived your subjective sense of how well you're doing when you are not getting sufficient sleep is a miserable predictor of objectively how you're doing with insufficient sleep
Modern Wisdom
#883 - Dr Matthew Walker - The Science Of Perfect Sleep
And the analogy you could use is a drunk driver at a bar. They've had three or four pints. They've had a couple of shots. They pick up the car keys and they say, I'm fine to drive home. And you say, I know that you think you're fine to drive. Trust me, you're not. Let me just grab your cab. I'll take your car keys.
Modern Wisdom
#883 - Dr Matthew Walker - The Science Of Perfect Sleep
And it's also the same with your natural chronotype tendencies versus overdriving it and trying to force yourself to be, let's say, a night owl when you're actually not a night owl. I would also say that when you start to get very regular and you sleep in harmony with your chronotype, you start to not need an alarm.
Modern Wisdom
#883 - Dr Matthew Walker - The Science Of Perfect Sleep
And that's the other strange thing, by the way, human beings seem to be the only species that will deliberately deprive themselves of sleep for no apparent good reason. And often when people say, how do I know if I'm getting enough sleep? One question I'll ask is if your alarm goes off in the morning, You wake up, but if your alarm didn't go off tomorrow morning, would you sleep past your alarm?
Modern Wisdom
#883 - Dr Matthew Walker - The Science Of Perfect Sleep
If the answer is yes, then it tells me that your body's not done with sleep. And no other species does that. They just sleep until they're done with sleep. But we will naturally terminate that for all sorts of different reasons. And so I like the idea that you will wake up no matter what at 7 a.m. It tells me something about your unique biology.
Modern Wisdom
#883 - Dr Matthew Walker - The Science Of Perfect Sleep
I'm there looking at Twitter, you know, looking at Chris Williamson's content. And then, you know, I'm chatting to people. I'm not efficient. And maybe I am only working out for 30 minutes. Next day, someone comes in, two bouncers on the door. You've only got 25 minutes in the gym. First couple of days, I'm just as lazy. And I get maybe 40% of my workout done and I get ejected.
Modern Wisdom
#883 - Dr Matthew Walker - The Science Of Perfect Sleep
Now, my guess is that even if I put you into bed at 2 a.m., you're probably not going to sleep the same duration that you would do otherwise. 7 a.m. I'll be awake. and wrench you out at 7 a.m. So you're getting closer to understanding what your biological rhythms are, at least at sleep offset.
Modern Wisdom
#883 - Dr Matthew Walker - The Science Of Perfect Sleep
Talk to me about the relationship between timing and regularity, because it seems like those two are intrinsically linked. Some people might have even confused it. Yeah. How important is it to get regularity if we're getting enough of it?
Modern Wisdom
#883 - Dr Matthew Walker - The Science Of Perfect Sleep
Like sleeping during the day, but staying up at night, you already mentioned kind of dampened it a little bit for the night owls to say, well, you know, it's not your fault and so on and so forth. But I imagine that there is some predictive power for mortality for people that are waking and sleeping more aligned with when the sun is up, when the sun goes to bed, et cetera.
Modern Wisdom
#883 - Dr Matthew Walker - The Science Of Perfect Sleep
more aligned if they're sleeping in harmony with their chronotype. So if evening types are sleeping like morning larks, their sleep quantity is shorter, their sleep quality is far worse. And that's the reason why they have higher rates of mental illness, psychiatric conditions, higher rates of diabetes, higher rates of obesity, higher rates of hypertension, stroke, and heart attack. So
Modern Wisdom
#883 - Dr Matthew Walker - The Science Of Perfect Sleep
you can see that the consequences of fighting back against that biology. Now, it can also work the opposite way too. If you've got a morning type that's sleeping like a night owl, which rarely happens in society because society is so biased. Exactly. But you are the archetypal example. What happens there is that you are going to bed late and you will necessarily, you will still be short slept.
Modern Wisdom
#883 - Dr Matthew Walker - The Science Of Perfect Sleep
Now, the night owl that's getting forced to sleep like a morning type is going to struggle to sleep on the front end, because they're not ready for sleep. Your problem is the opposite. You are going to bed far later than you would normally naturally like to do, and you will fall asleep ever so quickly.
Modern Wisdom
#883 - Dr Matthew Walker - The Science Of Perfect Sleep
The problem is you want to get your seven to nine hours and sleep later into that morning, but you're awake at seven.
Modern Wisdom
#883 - Dr Matthew Walker - The Science Of Perfect Sleep
That was less of a problem when I was younger. Again, this whole thing sort of started when I started to get regularity. It was like, I don't know, I was an MMA fighter. from a sleep perspective and sort of just sometimes ground and pound and sometimes stand up game. And other times it was Brazilian jujitsu, whereas now I've just pivoted into one particular type.
Modern Wisdom
#883 - Dr Matthew Walker - The Science Of Perfect Sleep
So I think, um, giving myself a little bit more structure has resulted in a kind of lock-in with my sleep that I didn't have before. I was able to shift that window around. And again, maybe it was not too dissimilar to, um, squeezing down sleep so that you get sleep efficiency, but
Modern Wisdom
#883 - Dr Matthew Walker - The Science Of Perfect Sleep
Everybody that's a shift worker that's listening to this, or most of the people that are shift workers, because I would imagine if you couldn't deal with it, if you were insufficiently sleep flexible when it comes to moving around your shift work, you would have lasted a couple of years and been like, I can't keep doing this. It's just going to kill me.
Modern Wisdom
#883 - Dr Matthew Walker - The Science Of Perfect Sleep
So yeah, again, we're very adaptable, at least for me, we're very adaptable. I had a full Intellix DNA genetic screen done, which was the super uber, Platinum, everything, everything, everything. Nothing came up for sleep. A bunch of stuff for sort of dopamine, epi, norepi, but nothing really came up for sleep. So that was kind of interesting to me. So I guess a question I've got
Modern Wisdom
#883 - Dr Matthew Walker - The Science Of Perfect Sleep
By day three or four, the pressure that's built up for me to want to exercise and get it all in is so high that I go into the gym, my phone's down on the counter. I speak to no one and I blast through my workout and I get it done. It's the same with sleep. I build up night after night, this increasing hunger where your system was lazy before it had inefficiency.
Modern Wisdom
#883 - Dr Matthew Walker - The Science Of Perfect Sleep
What happens to all of the Qs, the R and the T, as we age over time? What starts to get manipulated and changed in terms of all of those as we grow up, as we get older? Yeah, bloody great question.
Modern Wisdom
#883 - Dr Matthew Walker - The Science Of Perfect Sleep
The first two Qs get much harder. It's much harder to get the same amount of sleep that you did in your 30s, 20s or 40s when you're 60, 70 or 80. And this is one of the myths in sleep. People used to think, well, older adults need less sleep. And if you look, they'll on average get maybe six, six and a half hours of sleep.
Modern Wisdom
#883 - Dr Matthew Walker - The Science Of Perfect Sleep
What we now understand is that older adults still need the same amount of sleep as they did when they were in their 40s. The difference is their brain simply can't generate the sleep that they need. And I've always been perplexed by that mentality of people just saying, well, older adults get less sleep, so older adults need less sleep.
Modern Wisdom
#883 - Dr Matthew Walker - The Science Of Perfect Sleep
That's the equivalent of saying, well, older adults have weaker bones because older adults just don't need bones that are as strong in later life. No, we don't say that. We treat them with calcium and resistance training to try to maintain that bone density. Why don't we take the same mentality with sleep? So firstly, quantity gets much harder. It's harder to generate the sleep.
Modern Wisdom
#883 - Dr Matthew Walker - The Science Of Perfect Sleep
And we know why, because as we get older, just like our body deteriorates. our brain also deteriorates. The problem is that your brain does not deteriorate in a homogeneous manner. What I mean by that is some parts of your brain rapidly deteriorate, or at least more rapidly than other parts of the brain.
Modern Wisdom
#883 - Dr Matthew Walker - The Science Of Perfect Sleep
And when we've mapped that, what we call brain atrophy, and you can almost play a movie now where you look at it across decades and you can see these beautiful morphological changes in the brain, The two areas that, or at least one of the main areas that generates your deep non-REM sleep is right here in the frontal lobe, right in the middle, called the medial prefrontal cortex.
Modern Wisdom
#883 - Dr Matthew Walker - The Science Of Perfect Sleep
That area is the epicenter for the generation of deep sleep. And that degrades most rapidly when we get older. So unfortunately, the aging brain is a sleep-dependent aging brain. It's especially... sort of ravaged by the process of chronology relative to other parts of the brain. So that's the first issue. The second is quality.
Modern Wisdom
#883 - Dr Matthew Walker - The Science Of Perfect Sleep
And quality is here coming back to you are nice and continuously asleep for most of the night versus you're awake, you're asleep, you're awake, you're asleep, or you're awake for long periods of time. That is much more like age-related sleep. If I were to show you Sort of the, what we call the hypnogram of sleep, which is what you see on your sleep trackers.
Modern Wisdom
#883 - Dr Matthew Walker - The Science Of Perfect Sleep
It looks time of night along the horizontal axis. You've got this different sleep stages and you go on this beautiful rollercoaster ride, REM, non-REM. But then if you look at the aging brain, you've just got all of these kind of like a dolphin going up, surfacing for wakefulness all the time. It's fragmented sleep, poor quality of sleep.
Modern Wisdom
#883 - Dr Matthew Walker - The Science Of Perfect Sleep
Part of the reason is because the release of melatonin is not in the standard beautiful where melatonin peaks just before you go to sleep, stays high and then drops down low. You just get this really flat profile of melatonin as you get older. Secondly, you've got the sleep generating, the deep sleep generating brain regions deteriorating. So you can't stay in deep sleep.
Modern Wisdom
#883 - Dr Matthew Walker - The Science Of Perfect Sleep
You surface in these lighter stages where you're more vulnerable to being woken up. And then the other sort of component of age-related sleep decline comes on to the aspect of your chronotype decline. You are given your chronotype at birth, but it's highly age dependent in terms of where you're sleeping on the clock face.
Modern Wisdom
#883 - Dr Matthew Walker - The Science Of Perfect Sleep
And after a while, it's essentially like hitting the reset button on your Wi-Fi router. I retrain your brain to realize I don't have eight and a half, nine hours of time in bed anymore to be lazy. He's only giving me six and a half hours. I've got to get busy.
Modern Wisdom
#883 - Dr Matthew Walker - The Science Of Perfect Sleep
So as, let's say, a six-year-old, we all wanted to be awake with the adults at the weekend and try to stay awake. And we would try and try. But, you know, I just remember at nine o'clock being kind of like lifted up to bed because I'd fallen asleep. It used to annoy the living daylights out of me.
Modern Wisdom
#883 - Dr Matthew Walker - The Science Of Perfect Sleep
So there, even though I'm mostly a neutral, I'm kind of like an 11 to 7.30 kind of guy, there, I still had my neutral chronotype. But as a child, my neutral chronotype was sort of 9 to 6 a.m. in the morning. And then as I got older, I moved forward in time and I found my adult sweet spot.
Modern Wisdom
#883 - Dr Matthew Walker - The Science Of Perfect Sleep
But then per your question, as you get older in late life, now you start to regress back and you become more childlike. You want to go to bed earlier and wake up earlier. It's the reason that if you go to Florida, you know, when you've got a lot of retirees, you've got the early bird special where people now are eating at 4.30.
Modern Wisdom
#883 - Dr Matthew Walker - The Science Of Perfect Sleep
You know, they finish their meal, they're home by eight and they're in bed by nine because they've regressed. But even if you take, you know, 180-year-olds in Florida, you'll still get a distribution of some people wanting to go to bed at, you know, 8.30 p.m., others more close to 10 p.m. There's still the variability of morning types and evening types.
Modern Wisdom
#883 - Dr Matthew Walker - The Science Of Perfect Sleep
It's just that where that morningness and eveningness sits on the 24-hour clock face gets dragged around across the lifespan. I know that's a complicated way, but does that make some sense? Absolutely. Yeah, it makes complete sense.
Modern Wisdom
#883 - Dr Matthew Walker - The Science Of Perfect Sleep
You might have heard me say that I took my testosterone level from 495 to 1006 last year. And one of the supplements I used throughout that was Tonkat Ali. I first heard Dr. Andrew Huberman talk about the really impressive effects that tons of research was showing, which sounds great until you realize that most supplements don't actually contain what they're advertising. Momentous.
Modern Wisdom
#883 - Dr Matthew Walker - The Science Of Perfect Sleep
makes the only NSF certified Tonkat Ali on the planet, which means it's tested so rigorously that even Olympic athletes can use it. And that is why I partnered with them because they make the most carefully tested, highest quality supplements on earth.
Modern Wisdom
#883 - Dr Matthew Walker - The Science Of Perfect Sleep
So if you're not performing in the gym or the bedroom, the way that you would like, or if you just want to improve your testosterone naturally, Tonkat Ali is a fantastic research back place. to start. Best of all, there is a 30-day money-back guarantee, so you can buy it completely risk-free, and if you do not like it for any reason, they will give you your money back.
Modern Wisdom
#883 - Dr Matthew Walker - The Science Of Perfect Sleep
And all of a sudden you've got 95% sleep efficiency because as soon as you get into bed, you are asleep and you sleep almost through the night. Then gradually I will step you back out. If you start to get lazy again, we stitch you back up again. And gradually, that's how we retrain the system.
Modern Wisdom
#883 - Dr Matthew Walker - The Science Of Perfect Sleep
Plus, they ship internationally. Right now, you can get a 20% discount off all their products by going to the link in the description below or heading to livemomentous.com slash modernwisdom using the code modernwisdom at checkout. That's L-I-V-E-M-O-M-E-N-T-O-U-S dot com slash modernwisdom and modernwisdom. at checkout. One question I had, do sleeping positions matter? Why?
Modern Wisdom
#883 - Dr Matthew Walker - The Science Of Perfect Sleep
Why do people have habits when it comes to their sleeping positions?
Modern Wisdom
#883 - Dr Matthew Walker - The Science Of Perfect Sleep
It's really interesting that people say, I'm a back sleeper, I'm a side sleeper. That's not really true. You will typically sleep in almost all of those positions throughout the night. It's just what is the dominant position. And when people say, I am a X sleeper or Y sleeper, you're just talking about what you typically do more often relative to the other positions.
Modern Wisdom
#883 - Dr Matthew Walker - The Science Of Perfect Sleep
More people are side sleepers than front sleepers or back sleepers. About 60% of people are most often side sleeping. Position doesn't matter with probably two exceptions, although one of them has an asterisk, which is I don't want to skirmunger. The first is definitive.
Modern Wisdom
#883 - Dr Matthew Walker - The Science Of Perfect Sleep
If you are snoring, if you have sleep apnea or undiagnosed, if you know anyone who's snoring and they have not been tested for sleep apnea, go and get them tested. Or if you are, go and get tested. It's real easy to figure out if you're a snorer or not. Download an app. I have no association with them. It's called Snore Lab, Snore L-A-B, Android Apple.
Modern Wisdom
#883 - Dr Matthew Walker - The Science Of Perfect Sleep
You open it up, you hit record, you place the phone down by your bedside, it listens to your snoring, and then at the end of the night, you can see the amount of snoring, and it grades it from quiet, moderate, loud, and epic. Yeah. And you see these Richter shocks throughout the night.
Modern Wisdom
#883 - Dr Matthew Walker - The Science Of Perfect Sleep
The worst still, you can then go and tap at any moment in your night and you can listen to yourself gasping for breath and snoring. Because snoring, what happens when you snore is that the airway starts to partially collapse. And when it starts to partially collapse, like a straw that gets bent, sort of, you start to get these fluctuations, these eddies in the airway. And that's the sound of...
Modern Wisdom
#883 - Dr Matthew Walker - The Science Of Perfect Sleep
That's the partial collapsing of the airway. When the airway collapses completely, the straw goes flat effectively. That's when you stop breathing entirely. And you can be there for 15, 20 seconds, and your blood oxygen saturation just starts to plummet.
Modern Wisdom
#883 - Dr Matthew Walker - The Science Of Perfect Sleep
And at some point, your brainstem, which picks up the ratio of the gases in your bloodstream between carbon dioxide and oxygen, says, break glass in case of emergency. Wake him up. We've got to wake him up. And that's the moment where you hear, and you gasp and you're back up again. As a consequence, you're never going into deep sleep. You stay in those shallows of sleep.
Modern Wisdom
#883 - Dr Matthew Walker - The Science Of Perfect Sleep
What about the reverse when it comes to sleep quality? That somebody is staying in bed for a good amount of time, but that quality doesn't seem to want to change. Cinching it down doesn't really seem to make that much of a difference. They're just... Waking up too much throughout the evening. They're not hitting REM. They're staying quite light.
Modern Wisdom
#883 - Dr Matthew Walker - The Science Of Perfect Sleep
Now, mild sleep apnea, if you have these, what we call apnea events, and apnea is a word, it's beautiful. Pnea is breath from a Latin derivative. Anything in medicine that has the word A before it is usually the absence of it. You know, arrhythmia, the absence of a normal rhythmic heart. Apnea is the absence of breath. And mild sleep apnea is you having maybe five to 15 of the events per hour.
Modern Wisdom
#883 - Dr Matthew Walker - The Science Of Perfect Sleep
That's how we grade it. For each hour of sleep, how many of these events are you having? Mild sleep apnea, let's just call it 10 events. And you're asleep for eight hours.
Modern Wisdom
#883 - Dr Matthew Walker - The Science Of Perfect Sleep
Imagine if I were to come in and say, tonight, Chris, I'm going to come into your room and for the entire night, maybe 80 times throughout the night, I'm going to come in and I'm going to throttle you around your throat to the point where your oxygen saturation drops below 80%. Do you think you're going to feel good by tomorrow morning? The answer is no.
Modern Wisdom
#883 - Dr Matthew Walker - The Science Of Perfect Sleep
But so many people are living with undiagnosed sleep apnea. We think at least 80% of people who have sleep apnea are undiagnosed right now. And that will put you in an early grave.
Modern Wisdom
#883 - Dr Matthew Walker - The Science Of Perfect Sleep
Is snoring the same as sleep apnea?
Modern Wisdom
#883 - Dr Matthew Walker - The Science Of Perfect Sleep
No, it's not. You can have snoring and it will not classify as sleep apnea. You still want to understand why you're snoring, but nevertheless, you can just get a very simple home test. In fact, you can look at your risk for sleep apnea already. Go online and type in the search term stop-bang-questioner.
Modern Wisdom
#883 - Dr Matthew Walker - The Science Of Perfect Sleep
And again, it takes probably two minutes to fill out and it will give you a risk hazard ratio of how likely is it that you have sleep apnea. And it correlates very well with an at-home sleep apnea test. So it's a good quick proxy. I love SnoreLab though. That's another great way to frighten yourself into understanding what's exactly happening.
Modern Wisdom
#883 - Dr Matthew Walker - The Science Of Perfect Sleep
So all of which to say, I think I'm forgetting how we got here, but nevertheless- Sleeping positions. Sleeping position is one of those situations where when you are lying on your back, you are allowing your airway the direct access to this thing called gravity. And when gravity is present with back sleeping, it's far easier to pull that straw flat shut.
Modern Wisdom
#883 - Dr Matthew Walker - The Science Of Perfect Sleep
I think it is the greatest cry of a midlife crisis that you are ever going to see. It's a total train wreck. I'm suggesting that no one told me the pandemic was over and that you can get your hair cut. Right.
Modern Wisdom
#883 - Dr Matthew Walker - The Science Of Perfect Sleep
So that's why we typically don't like people with sleep apnea sleeping on their back. The old school approach, gosh, when I was coming up to sort of start to treat was, or to at least get you away from a back sleeping position, was you would ask the gentleman, usually the more heavy set, you would ask them, find a t-shirt from your wife, usually smaller.
Modern Wisdom
#883 - Dr Matthew Walker - The Science Of Perfect Sleep
and get that t-shirt that has a pocket on the breast. And then I want you to wear that tight t-shirt back to front. And then I want your wife to take a tennis ball before you sleep and put it in the pocket. And every time you roll over, it's so uncomfortable that you train yourself out of back sleeping. Wow.
Modern Wisdom
#883 - Dr Matthew Walker - The Science Of Perfect Sleep
They're getting up earlier than they want to, et cetera, et cetera.
Modern Wisdom
#883 - Dr Matthew Walker - The Science Of Perfect Sleep
And so that's the way, that's the old- Is that, so why do we have preferences for sleeping position? Is this chronotype? Is this just habitual?
Modern Wisdom
#883 - Dr Matthew Walker - The Science Of Perfect Sleep
Can we train ourselves up to be- Usually based on your skeletal ergonomics and how you want to sleep. It's also in part driven absent of your body based on your mattress.
Modern Wisdom
#883 - Dr Matthew Walker - The Science Of Perfect Sleep
And so that's why, you know, having a mattress that's at least supportive enough where you don't get that banana bowing, because if you are a front sleeper and you're sleeping on a poor mattress, then all of a sudden you just get this every night, this bending of the spinal cord and you're lying there.
Modern Wisdom
#883 - Dr Matthew Walker - The Science Of Perfect Sleep
Yeah. At that point, we've got to then start to ask if we've driven enough pressure in the system, what we call sleep pressure or sleep debt, and you are still waking up throughout the night. First, medical conditions. Let's do blood work. Let's see if you're suffering from a sleep disorder like sleep apnea, restless leg syndrome.
Modern Wisdom
#883 - Dr Matthew Walker - The Science Of Perfect Sleep
I might just say, okay, today for eight hours, I'm going to have you compressed into this banana shape lying on your front. And then at the end of that eight hours, get up and, you know, do 10 jumping jacks and feel great. Not so much. So you've got to be mindful of the position. So I would say sleeping on your back, if you're a snorer, not so great.
Modern Wisdom
#883 - Dr Matthew Walker - The Science Of Perfect Sleep
There is some evidence that sleeping, and I'm going to forget which side it is now, I'm trying to think of my anatomy, but sleeping, I think it's on your left side, based on how your gastrointestinal system is working, leads to a greater degree of GERD, which is gastric reflux. In other words, getting heartburn, just get reflux. Interesting. So that's...
Modern Wisdom
#883 - Dr Matthew Walker - The Science Of Perfect Sleep
The second one though, really, that I was going to mention is sleeping on your front or on your back may not necessarily be ideal because what they found is that during sleep, and this is a quick tangent, I'll come back to it, but another one of the new functions of sleep is brain cleansing.
Modern Wisdom
#883 - Dr Matthew Walker - The Science Of Perfect Sleep
That when we go into sleep, your brain essentially has this sewage system that kicks into high gear and it washes away all of the metabolic detritus that's been building up across wakefulness. Because from a biochemical perspective, wakefulness is low-level brain damage. Sleep is your sanitary salvation.
Modern Wisdom
#883 - Dr Matthew Walker - The Science Of Perfect Sleep
And two of the pieces of metabolic detritus that that sleep system will cleanse your brain of are beta amyloid and tau protein, which are the two culprits that underlie, we believe, the Alzheimer's disease cascade.
Modern Wisdom
#883 - Dr Matthew Walker - The Science Of Perfect Sleep
And what's interesting is that when you are sleeping on your side, these are animal studies, they found that that cleansing system is more efficient than when you're sleeping on your back or your front. And what they did was they showed this in rats and in mice. And then I was watching this, I was at the conference, they started to show you pictures in the wild of every single animal sleeping.
Modern Wisdom
#883 - Dr Matthew Walker - The Science Of Perfect Sleep
What was common across all of them, no matter how they contorted their body, the common ingredient was that their head was always on one side or the other. As if that was the natural sort of tendency, the predilection of how sleep was optimally designed.
Modern Wisdom
#883 - Dr Matthew Walker - The Science Of Perfect Sleep
And they argued that the reason for that is because that's when you get greatest optimality of flow of this, what we call the glymphatic cleansing system. Now, I would say that I haven't seen strong replication of that, nor have I seen any evidence that that's true in human beings. Human beings are very odd species. Our head is tilted 90 degrees relative to many others.
Modern Wisdom
#883 - Dr Matthew Walker - The Science Of Perfect Sleep
Think about a giraffe, a donkey. Think about a dog, a cat. their head is lifted up in line with their spinal cord.
Modern Wisdom
#883 - Dr Matthew Walker - The Science Of Perfect Sleep
When we went from being quadrupeds to bipeds, one of the things that had to happen because we were walking on all fours with our head out like a dog, if you then stood up on your back legs but kept the head in that same position, all you're doing is looking, getting a very deep interest in clouds. So our head tilted down 90 degrees. And so that means that our ergonomics of the head
Modern Wisdom
#883 - Dr Matthew Walker - The Science Of Perfect Sleep
If we exclude all of those that you're medically healthy, then we have to ask, what are you doing in your life? Exogenous components, principally. Caffeine, alcohol, light, and the principal one that we don't talk about is stress and anxiety. If there is a principal reason why most people in society, absent sleep disorders, are not sleeping well, It's because of this wired but tired phenomenon.
Modern Wisdom
#883 - Dr Matthew Walker - The Science Of Perfect Sleep
And the cranium may be very different to animals. So I think the jury is out. And I don't think that's any good reason for you to start worrying about, oh my goodness, I've got to get my head to the side. And if I'm not, if it's down on the pillow or I'm on my back, don't worry about that.
Modern Wisdom
#883 - Dr Matthew Walker - The Science Of Perfect Sleep
Is there anything else to say on snoring, people that snore, why we snore, and then sort of progressing through that to treat sleep apnea?
Modern Wisdom
#883 - Dr Matthew Walker - The Science Of Perfect Sleep
I would simply say that... Coming back to being insufficiently slept and that mood dysregulation and you not knowing what you, the true self, actually was, is ever more true in untreated sleep apnea patients. And I remember we were doing a study with one group and we started to treat these individuals. Now, there are numerous new treatments out there.
Modern Wisdom
#883 - Dr Matthew Walker - The Science Of Perfect Sleep
If you have mild sleep apnea, you may not need one of these masks, these nasal pillows. which are called CPAP machines, C-P-A-P, and it stands for continuous positive airway pressure. This little nasal pillow pushes pressured air up your nose and it acts like an airway splint. to keep the airway open so it doesn't collapse.
Modern Wisdom
#883 - Dr Matthew Walker - The Science Of Perfect Sleep
Now, if you have severe sleep apnea, I know that these machines can be invasive, although people like ResMed have really great machines now. The old school kind of mask, fighter pilot Tom Cruise, those were tough to live with. Now they're much better.
Modern Wisdom
#883 - Dr Matthew Walker - The Science Of Perfect Sleep
Nevertheless, I would say, even if you feel as though you're struggling to sleep because of this kind of pipe that's coming off you, that's still far better than you sleeping without it and having the horrific oxygen desaturation and minimal sleep quality that you get otherwise. So nevertheless, if you have mild sleep apnea, you now have these mandibular augmenting devices.
Modern Wisdom
#883 - Dr Matthew Walker - The Science Of Perfect Sleep
So it looks like a sports gum guard, top and bottom, but it's hinged. And what it tries to do is move the lower jaw forward by just a couple of millimeters. And what's fun is that you can do this test at home, lie on your back and just sort of lie there and start making the snoring noise. So I can make the snoring noise and then just try to move your jaw forward. actually much harder to snore.
Modern Wisdom
#883 - Dr Matthew Walker - The Science Of Perfect Sleep
And it's a tiny change anatomically in the jaw, but it can make a vast difference. So now these new mandibular devices are out there. There's all sorts of new ways. There are also, some people obviously rightly don't wish for this, There are more invasive surgeries where you'll put a neurostimulator that stimulates the airway and forces it open. And that saves you from having the CPAP machine.
Modern Wisdom
#883 - Dr Matthew Walker - The Science Of Perfect Sleep
And some people end up... Permanent CPAP machine. Yeah, it's a permanent CPAP machine.
Modern Wisdom
#883 - Dr Matthew Walker - The Science Of Perfect Sleep
So there are lots of great ways to treat it. What about snoring? What about reducing snoring? Something that's presumably more common than sleep apnea?
Modern Wisdom
#883 - Dr Matthew Walker - The Science Of Perfect Sleep
yeah so there i would probably go to a mandibular device speak to your dentist if they don't know about it go find a dentist who does they can make up these devices and most of them are covered by insurance you can buy them on amazon make sure that you just look at the star ratings and make sure it's rated by at least a couple of 500 600 people and then believe the rating and
Modern Wisdom
#883 - Dr Matthew Walker - The Science Of Perfect Sleep
you've got to get a bit used to it. And, you know, I've, I actually about three or four years ago, because I would track ruthlessly every night, my snore lab, I could start to see a little bit of snoring coming on. Now that's just my age. As we age, you know, just like the rest of your body, it becomes a bit saggy. My muscle tone isn't what it used to be.
Modern Wisdom
#883 - Dr Matthew Walker - The Science Of Perfect Sleep
And so I started to see signs of very mild sleep apnea. I wasn't in anywhere close to the region of needing to be treated, but because I know so much about sleep, I don't want to live a shorter life, nor do I want to live a life with disease. So I just bought myself one of these devices.
Modern Wisdom
#883 - Dr Matthew Walker - The Science Of Perfect Sleep
I ended up then having a great dentist friend who specializes, and we actually got the proper device, so the custom device. But you can buy them on Amazon. You put them in hot water. Like a gum guard. You buy down, gum guard. And they're actually not too bad if you can tolerate them. For smaller people who don't have jaws like my jaw and certainly your jaw, it's going to be a bit...
Modern Wisdom
#883 - Dr Matthew Walker - The Science Of Perfect Sleep
tougher you know my wife very slim refined woman you know she's probably not going to be able to tolerate it because the jaw mass is just not sufficient so you've got to be i'm not trying to say it's a one-size-fits-all for everyone but for those who can if you have some mild snoring it will clean it right up it's very impressive
Modern Wisdom
#883 - Dr Matthew Walker - The Science Of Perfect Sleep
We have people come to my sleep center all the time and they say, I am just so tired. I'm so tired, but I'm just so wired that I can't fall asleep or stay asleep. So at that point, when we've built up all of that pressure, forced you to be efficient and you haven't been efficient, we exclude you medically, that you're healthy, no sleep disorders.
Modern Wisdom
#883 - Dr Matthew Walker - The Science Of Perfect Sleep
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Modern Wisdom
#883 - Dr Matthew Walker - The Science Of Perfect Sleep
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Modern Wisdom
#883 - Dr Matthew Walker - The Science Of Perfect Sleep
Right now, you can sign up for a $1 per month trial period by going to the link in the description below or heading to shopify.com slash modernwisdom, all lowercase. That's shopify.com slash modernwisdom to upgrade your selling today. Let's talk about sleep and relationships. I think two people trying to sleep together...
Modern Wisdom
#883 - Dr Matthew Walker - The Science Of Perfect Sleep
wonderful pairing they're so in love everything's great and yet one of the best predictors for their lifespan their health span their mood their emotional regulation the way they feel the next day their achievement of their goals their memory the fact that they're not going to fall asleep at the wheel and die uh That's my next book right there, Chris Williamson.
Modern Wisdom
#883 - Dr Matthew Walker - The Science Of Perfect Sleep
Wonderful partners in waking, terrible partners in sleeping. Talk to me about the relationship between sleep and relationships.
Modern Wisdom
#883 - Dr Matthew Walker - The Science Of Perfect Sleep
Yeah, there's some really great research on this. Pioneer in this field is Wendy Troxell, wrote a great book. And what we find is that if you survey people and you ask, do you sleep in the same bed together? One out of four people will say that they do not sleep in the same bed.
Modern Wisdom
#883 - Dr Matthew Walker - The Science Of Perfect Sleep
And if you then survey them anonymously, because there's such a stigma associated with not sleeping together, about one in three couples will say, I wake up in a different location. than this bed that I went to sleep in with my partner. So in other words, they got up during the night and they just went and they got on the couch. I'm sick.
Modern Wisdom
#883 - Dr Matthew Walker - The Science Of Perfect Sleep
And I'm not suggesting again here that it is a one size fits all. It's absolutely not. Some couples can sleep together and they sleep really well and they have a preference for that. What's interesting though, is that if you measure them objectively,
Modern Wisdom
#883 - Dr Matthew Walker - The Science Of Perfect Sleep
How do you come to think about what good sleep is? How do we conceptualize good sleep?
Modern Wisdom
#883 - Dr Matthew Walker - The Science Of Perfect Sleep
you always see that when couples sleep together versus when couples sleep separately, their sleep is always objectively, as we measure it with sleep trackers or polysomnography in the laboratory, it's always worse when they're sleeping together on average than when they're sleeping separately. However, If you ask them subjectively, what do you think of your sleep?
Modern Wisdom
#883 - Dr Matthew Walker - The Science Of Perfect Sleep
They'll say, well, about half of them will say, I actually feel my sleep is much better quality when I'm sleeping with my partner versus when I'm not. Some of that has to do with perhaps the societal bias that they think they have to cleave to. Others, it's about safety. That they just feel safer. Others, it's just more intimate.
Modern Wisdom
#883 - Dr Matthew Walker - The Science Of Perfect Sleep
But what we have definitely found is that if you start to undersleep a male, if you short sleep them, and if you look at the average data, they could be in bed, let's say, seven hours. With a partner, they could be down to around five and a half hours because of the sleep disruption.
Modern Wisdom
#883 - Dr Matthew Walker - The Science Of Perfect Sleep
Then we've got to figure out what's going on in your life.
Modern Wisdom
#883 - Dr Matthew Walker - The Science Of Perfect Sleep
If you put a male, healthy male in their 20s on five hours of sleep for five nights, they have a level of testosterone of someone who's 10 years older than them. So, and you see equivalent impairments in female reproductive health, follicular stimulating hormone, luteinizing hormone, progesterone,
Modern Wisdom
#883 - Dr Matthew Walker - The Science Of Perfect Sleep
These are all critical sex hormones that promote superior libido drive, and it also promotes superior sensation and sexual pleasure during the act of intimacy. So firstly, when you're underslept, and again, this is not a one size fits all, but for those that it's not working for, the stigma in society is that if you're not sleeping together, you're not sleeping together. Mm-hmm.
Modern Wisdom
#883 - Dr Matthew Walker - The Science Of Perfect Sleep
Let's dig into that wired but tired stress thing. what is going on in the body from a sleep perspective, in the body and the brain, when you're in a high-stress lifestyle?
Modern Wisdom
#883 - Dr Matthew Walker - The Science Of Perfect Sleep
But in fact, the opposite seems true because you replete your sex hormones. We also know that for every one hour of sleep that a woman gets, an extra hour of sleep that a woman gets, her desire to be intimate with her partner increases by 14%. Now, if you think about the latest libido drugs for women, things like Vilesi, those will improve dramatically.
Modern Wisdom
#883 - Dr Matthew Walker - The Science Of Perfect Sleep
libido by about 23 to 24 percent that's a pharmacological brute forcing agent but here 90 minutes of sleep one hour of sleep and you're you know you're getting there so all of a sudden you know all the guys now are probably saying calling their girlfriends or their wives honey we need to go to bed an hour yeah should we get into bed an hour and let's sleep in come on let's have a um so so there's certainly a superior benefit when you are sleeping well as a couple you're
Modern Wisdom
#883 - Dr Matthew Walker - The Science Of Perfect Sleep
your physical component of intimacy is improved. We also know that when couples are sleeping well, from a female perspective at least, you get, by way of those sex hormones, you get greater vaginal lubrication, which leads to higher pleasure during sex, and you get greater sensitivity of the genitalia for both man and woman in terms of the intimacy.
Modern Wisdom
#883 - Dr Matthew Walker - The Science Of Perfect Sleep
The other component though is the psychological component. When couples are not sleeping well, for example, when they are sleeping together, firstly, their empathetic sensitivity is blunted. Secondly, as a consequence, they end up butting heads more in the relationship
Modern Wisdom
#883 - Dr Matthew Walker - The Science Of Perfect Sleep
Yeah, there's probably at least two things going on in the body and at least one thing going up in the brain. The first in the body is the balance between the two branches of your nervous system. One is the fight or flight branch called the sympathetic nervous system. It's very poorly named. It's anything but sympathetic. It's very agitating and activating. And then there's the parasympathetic.
Modern Wisdom
#883 - Dr Matthew Walker - The Science Of Perfect Sleep
And furthermore, because their prefrontal cortex, which is the kind of higher order reasoning logical area of the brain, that's the one that goes first in terms of sleep deprivation. It's the same one that is there designed to do conflict resolution.
Modern Wisdom
#883 - Dr Matthew Walker - The Science Of Perfect Sleep
So you are enfeebled as an organism to have a co-opted relationship that's emotionally mature and designed to be part of a team versus adversarial and combative. And so shorter nights, greater fights. That's what data starts to demonstrate. then you can ask, well, okay, if I decide to sleep in separate rooms, how can I firstly approach that with my partner and how can I design it?
Modern Wisdom
#883 - Dr Matthew Walker - The Science Of Perfect Sleep
The first thing I would say is approach your partner with curiosity and a non-binding agreement. Go to your partner and say, look, Have you ever thought about us maybe trying to sleep in separate locations so we sleep better, so we're better together as a consequence? Would you be open to just saying, look, for the next two weeks, we try sleeping apart.
Modern Wisdom
#883 - Dr Matthew Walker - The Science Of Perfect Sleep
And if we agree that it doesn't work, we just go back to sleeping together. would you be open to that idea? So you make it non-threatening, you approach from a level of curiosity and you don't make it binding that from this point forward, this is what we're doing. Then how do you design it?
Modern Wisdom
#883 - Dr Matthew Walker - The Science Of Perfect Sleep
What we, most of us miss by sleeping together is the bookends of sleep because in between we're largely non-conscious. So you can say, look, if you, before we go to sleep, I'm just going to come into your room and we're just going to have a kiss and a cuddle. And we're going to do what we're going to do, the front end of sleep.
Modern Wisdom
#883 - Dr Matthew Walker - The Science Of Perfect Sleep
And then whoever wakes up first, you can go through to the kitchen, make the coffee. And the person who is waking up second, just text your partner. And now this is, you know, utopian world where no one's rushing out the door to go to work. But if you have the chance, then just text your partner and say, Hey, I'm awake. Come in, give me a cuddle, give me a kiss. And
Modern Wisdom
#883 - Dr Matthew Walker - The Science Of Perfect Sleep
And that way you get what you wish for, which is the bookends of sleep of intimacy, cuddling, and all of those good things. But you still get to sleep apart.
Modern Wisdom
#883 - Dr Matthew Walker - The Science Of Perfect Sleep
What is it that's happening when people sleep together that's causing the disruption for the most part? It's usually two things.
Modern Wisdom
#883 - Dr Matthew Walker - The Science Of Perfect Sleep
It's the... It's the territorial non-conscious fight for the top surface called the cover, the kind of tug of war. And the second is the distribution of disturbance along the base of the bed, which is I'm tossing and turning. And you therefore may not even remember that I woke you up. But my movement still train going past outside and it correct.
Modern Wisdom
#883 - Dr Matthew Walker - The Science Of Perfect Sleep
And yeah, and you roll over, you're back into shallow sleep. And then the other person has rolled over. And now that was just at the time. And they're adjusting themselves just at the time that you fell back asleep after you were the one who caused it. And now you're awake again. So firstly, there's the non-conscious physicality of top and bottom sort of surfaces being moved around.
Modern Wisdom
#883 - Dr Matthew Walker - The Science Of Perfect Sleep
And then the other is snoring. If you ask a lot of usually women, because women get sleep apnea and men get sleep apnea. It's just that it's probably at a rate of about three to one ratio, men getting sleep apnea. It's about the opposite for insomnia. Far more women have insomnia than men. It's not to say that men don't have insomnia. The high neuroticism? Yeah.
Modern Wisdom
#883 - Dr Matthew Walker - The Science Of Perfect Sleep
It's usually because anxiety disorders are about twice as common in women than in men. And anxiety, just as we spoke about, is one of the principal underlying mechanisms through which we understand this thing called insomnia.
Modern Wisdom
#883 - Dr Matthew Walker - The Science Of Perfect Sleep
Okay. Did you see on Reddit quite a while ago that famous couple sleep study they did where they ended up with the two-way solution? Yeah. What do you make of that? Because I've had a number of friends. I have one friend who I'm not going to name. I have two friends. One friend who a year ago... Actually, it was done on the show. It was George.
Modern Wisdom
#883 - Dr Matthew Walker - The Science Of Perfect Sleep
That's the kind of quiescent branch of your nervous system. If you're a good healthy sleeper and you don't have too much stress in your life, you naturally switch over to that restful quiescent branch of the nervous system. And that is the royal kind of pathway to good sleep.
Modern Wisdom
#883 - Dr Matthew Walker - The Science Of Perfect Sleep
So George fully committed to this, having read that study on Reddit. And he had the classic... Partner's great, but fuck, the sleep is lower quality than it should be. And he was very much prioritizing it, a la Dr. Walker. And he pivoted to a two-way solution. Do you want to explain the two-way solution just for folks who... Two duvets. Two duvet covers on the top of the bed.
Modern Wisdom
#883 - Dr Matthew Walker - The Science Of Perfect Sleep
This couple who had... maybe using an aura ring or something similar, attract their sleep. The single best determinant of the wife's good night's sleep was the husband being in the bed. The single best determinant of a bad night's sleep for the husband was the wife being in the bed. For clarity, I think it was the same, it was more of a decrease in,
Modern Wisdom
#883 - Dr Matthew Walker - The Science Of Perfect Sleep
in sleep quality for the man as being on the period was for the woman. So that was the sort of rate. Extent of, yeah. Yeah, exactly. The rate of impact. And they tried everything, lots of different solutions. They didn't want to go to a two bed solution. So they went to a two duvet solution, which presumably is, as you said, fixing the top surface.
Modern Wisdom
#883 - Dr Matthew Walker - The Science Of Perfect Sleep
It's no longer a tug of war because it's two separate surfaces to play on. So I guess,
Modern Wisdom
#883 - Dr Matthew Walker - The Science Of Perfect Sleep
Is there not, first off, there must be companies, I think, look at all of the eight sleeps and the, you know, the, the Helix mattress and stuff like that, uh, an extra, extra wide bed that's got maybe some sort of segmented, um, you know, the honeycomb thing that kind of portions off in the middle with a two-way solution.
Modern Wisdom
#883 - Dr Matthew Walker - The Science Of Perfect Sleep
I mean, how big does a bed have to be before it's one bed that is essentially two? Do you know what I mean? Yeah. Have you looked at solutions? Imagine the real estate territory we're talking about here at some point. It's just an entire bedroom that's one mattress. Yeah, exactly. It's a soft play area for parents. Keep your bedroom chit-chat to yourself, Chris.
Modern Wisdom
#883 - Dr Matthew Walker - The Science Of Perfect Sleep
What do you think about the two-way solution? Have you looked at that? Has it ever been replicated? And then what about solutions? Maybe the people don't have sufficient bedrooms in the house to be able to move to two. What can people do to make sleeping together better solutions?
Modern Wisdom
#883 - Dr Matthew Walker - The Science Of Perfect Sleep
Yeah, I actually think the two-way solution is a great one. In fact, if you look, there's Equinox Hotels, the chain, principally in New York right now. If you go in, they're highly optimizing sleep, and I'm just starting to have conversations with them to see if I can help them with that. They already do this, where the king bed, it's dressed in essentially two separate beds.
Modern Wisdom
#883 - Dr Matthew Walker - The Science Of Perfect Sleep
suites of, you know, your sheets. They've got an eight sleep on them all as well, right? They've got a cool mattress. I don't know if they have eight sleep yet, but certainly they, yeah, they probably, I'm sure they do, but they will, they've already figured this out and it can have a genius move. But there's a more extreme version of that, and it's called the Swedish method.
Modern Wisdom
#883 - Dr Matthew Walker - The Science Of Perfect Sleep
Yeah, it's an interesting question because I think everyone, most mornings, let's say you've got a significant other, you come down the stairs and you say, you know, how do you sleep? And they'll say, I slept well, or I didn't sleep well. So everyone themselves has a subjective estimate of what this thing called good versus bad sleep is. Science is a little different though.
Modern Wisdom
#883 - Dr Matthew Walker - The Science Of Perfect Sleep
And the alacrity of sleep, the speed with which sleep arrives to you when you disengage from the fight or flight branch is really speedy and rather beautiful. If you are so wired though, however, the sympathetic, the fight or flight branch is activated. Your heart rate is jacked. Your blood pressure is too high.
Modern Wisdom
#883 - Dr Matthew Walker - The Science Of Perfect Sleep
And it sounds highly salacious. It just turns out that this was a method pioneered in Sweden, which is simply that you get two twin beds, you put them together side by side. So you're still sleeping essentially next to each other. But there is complete separation between church and state, as it were.
Modern Wisdom
#883 - Dr Matthew Walker - The Science Of Perfect Sleep
And therefore, the bottom and the top is segregated rather than the tuve, where the bottom is common, duvet is split. And this way, with the Swedish method, you do top and bottom.
Modern Wisdom
#883 - Dr Matthew Walker - The Science Of Perfect Sleep
Wow. Which sounds very... A little bit. It does sound very Swedish. Anything else... I'm so glad you're not cutting that part. Anything else to say on sleep and relationships?
Modern Wisdom
#883 - Dr Matthew Walker - The Science Of Perfect Sleep
I would say that certainly... Sleep affects sex, meaning that when you are getting sufficient sleep, it can promote a greater degree of physical intimacy and pleasure. Sex also impacts sleep though. And what we found, we in the Royal Way of the Sleep Field, is that sex that is associated with orgasm ends up producing about a 70% improvement in subjectively reported sleep quality.
Modern Wisdom
#883 - Dr Matthew Walker - The Science Of Perfect Sleep
Regardless of time of day? Regardless of time of day, it's higher in men than in women. So women, it's about a 64% improvement. In men, it's about a 72% improvement. But it's still, you know... demonstrable. Now, for some people listening, maybe you don't have a partner, but all is not lost because it turns out that masturbation associated with orgasm results in about a 50% improvement.
Modern Wisdom
#883 - Dr Matthew Walker - The Science Of Perfect Sleep
Part of it is probably because of certain other social bonding hormones like pro... Well, probably... If you look at some of the data, there is probably vasopressin for men. And then if you look at that sort of the classic hormone of bonding, which you, have you spoken about? Oxytocin. Oxytocin before. Yeah. So oxytocin, that's more so in females than in males.
Modern Wisdom
#883 - Dr Matthew Walker - The Science Of Perfect Sleep
Vasopressin for men is so fascinating.
Modern Wisdom
#883 - Dr Matthew Walker - The Science Of Perfect Sleep
And it's, oh, don't get me started. Yeah. And I've started to speak to Peter Tia, you know, because he used to use it for all sorts of sleep related reasons. But vasopressin, Those hormones typically are released by way of pro-social activity. Now, when you're by yourself, you don't get that added benefit.
Modern Wisdom
#883 - Dr Matthew Walker - The Science Of Perfect Sleep
So there is something about, and I think what's happening with orgasm is that you're very sympathetic, you're very fight or flight, you're getting very activated, your heart is racing. But then afterwards, it's that kind of cigarette moment in the movies where all of a sudden you're just spent and you go all the way over into the parasympathetic, quiescent state and you're kind of done.
Modern Wisdom
#883 - Dr Matthew Walker - The Science Of Perfect Sleep
And that's the state that you need to be in. So firstly, I think from a hormonal and a nervous system perspective, that's why sex by way of orgasm is beneficial. The benefit of couples or at least more than one person producing that added benefit from 50 to 70 is probably because of the pro-social hormones. But nevertheless, you can still get 50% of the way there.
Modern Wisdom
#883 - Dr Matthew Walker - The Science Of Perfect Sleep
So in terms of adding sleep credit,
Modern Wisdom
#883 - Dr Matthew Walker - The Science Of Perfect Sleep
You're making money hand over fist, but maybe I wouldn't say that. Let's not talk about fist. So you mentioned there about nicotine, about the cigarette after sex. Caffeine, one of the most common stimulants that I think 80%, 90% of people use on a daily basis.
Modern Wisdom
#883 - Dr Matthew Walker - The Science Of Perfect Sleep
Your temperature, because of that activated state, your core body temperature is also too high. If you are too hot, your heart is racing and your blood pressure is high. It's very difficult for you to fall asleep.
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#883 - Dr Matthew Walker - The Science Of Perfect Sleep
Yeah, it's the second most traded commodity on the surface of the planet after oil, so it tells you everything. It's the largest drug experiment that's repeated on the planet every single day. Wow.
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#883 - Dr Matthew Walker - The Science Of Perfect Sleep
What is there to know about sleep and caffeine?
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#883 - Dr Matthew Walker - The Science Of Perfect Sleep
Probably, I think most people now, through idiots like me, understand some of its temporal dynamics. What I mean by that is its half-life. Caffeine has a half-life of about five to six hours, which means after about five to six hours, 50% of that is still in your brain. which means it has a quarter life of 10 to 12 hours for the average person.
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#883 - Dr Matthew Walker - The Science Of Perfect Sleep
So drink a cup of coffee at midday, perhaps a quarter of that caffeine is still in your brain at midnight. It's highly dependent, however, on your sensitivity, which is determined by a specific enzyme. That enzyme is what we call a cytochrome P450. It's a liver enzyme, and it's a variant on a gene that's called the CYP1A2 gene, which is just, you know,
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#883 - Dr Matthew Walker - The Science Of Perfect Sleep
word spaghetti at this point, word salad, but simply variations in that gene means that you are either quick at clearing the caffeine or slow. And everyone knows what type that they are. And I'm pretty slow too. I am a caffeine sensitive individual, but nevertheless, just keep that in mind that in terms of caffeine, having that temporal dynamic and
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#883 - Dr Matthew Walker - The Science Of Perfect Sleep
I would say the dose and the timing make the poison. Try to cut yourself off after about probably four cups of coffee maximum. Three is probably really where I would draw the line. But again, it depends on your sensitivity.
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#883 - Dr Matthew Walker - The Science Of Perfect Sleep
That's not where it stops though, because even if you're one of those individuals that says, look, I can have two espressos after dinner and I fall asleep fine and I stay asleep. That may be true, but the caffeine will actually keep you out of the deeper stages of sleep. And we did some studies where we gave you 200 milligrams of caffeine, which is a hefty drip.
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#883 - Dr Matthew Walker - The Science Of Perfect Sleep
Sort of, yeah, cup of coffee after dinner. And that robbed you of about 15 to 22% of your deep sleep. And to do that, I would have to add about 12 years to your life. So I could age you by a decade in terms of your deep sleep quality by just having two espressos after dinner. The other thing about caffeine is that it will fragment your sleep. So it will litter your sleep with these awakenings.
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#883 - Dr Matthew Walker - The Science Of Perfect Sleep
At the top of that, a second system in the body, which is what we call the HPA axis, or it's essentially the stress axis, which descends down from a brain stem area, the hypothalamus, down to the pituitary, releases adrenaline. All of a sudden, you are cortisol flooded.
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#883 - Dr Matthew Walker - The Science Of Perfect Sleep
And just like alcohol, which does the same, but by way of a different mechanism, caffeine is going to reduce the quality of your sleep non-consciously because those awakenings are so brief, you never commit them to memory. So you wake up the next day, you feel lousy, but you don't remember waking up, so you don't put two and two together. That said, though, I've actually changed my tune on coffee.
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#883 - Dr Matthew Walker - The Science Of Perfect Sleep
I would absolutely say for anyone for whom they like coffee, absolutely drink coffee. And the reason is because if you look at coffee, the health benefits associated with coffee are astronomically numerous and remarkably robust statistically.
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#883 - Dr Matthew Walker - The Science Of Perfect Sleep
Furthermore, perplexingly for someone like me, if you list all of the benefits that is de-risking in terms of diseases and you stack up what sleep will do in terms of de-risking all of your disease states, it's almost a one-to-one match. So people are coming along to me and saying, well, can you square that circle for me? I don't understand how that can be true.
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#883 - Dr Matthew Walker - The Science Of Perfect Sleep
The answer is that the coffee bean contains a whopping dose of antioxidants and And because we're so deficient in our antioxidant consumption, because we're deficient in our whole food dietary intake in this modern world, the coffee bean has been asked to carry the Herculean weight of all of our antioxidant needs. So no wonder it looks like drinking coffee is associated with health benefits.
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#883 - Dr Matthew Walker - The Science Of Perfect Sleep
It's not the caffeine. It's the antioxidants. Case in point, if you look at the benefits that decaffeinated coffee produces, it's the same. So it's not the caffeine, it's the coffee bean.
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#883 - Dr Matthew Walker - The Science Of Perfect Sleep
I looked at the Whoop urine review last year. It's actually just come out recently and I haven't been through it. And they talk about your behaviors and what's been related between your behaviors and your sleep and your recovery and your strain and so on and so forth. But they also have aggregated, anonymized and aggregated the data from all of the other Whoop users.
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#883 - Dr Matthew Walker - The Science Of Perfect Sleep
The number one predictive behavior for a good night's sleep was caffeine. The number one predictive behavior for a good night's sleep was caffeine. So is there a...
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#883 - Dr Matthew Walker - The Science Of Perfect Sleep
uh method or would you ever encourage somebody to use caffeine in terms of its timing to help bring you into land from an adenosine perspective uh so that you sleep more easily so that your latency is reduced or whatever from all of the data there's nothing to say that you should advocate for it as a sleep aid i think there's some data to say it may be equivocal that at least moderate doses of caffeine have any effect on your sleep
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#883 - Dr Matthew Walker - The Science Of Perfect Sleep
The problem with some of that data is that it's associational. So it could be that people who are drinking coffee are people who also are very thoughtful because they can afford. So yeah, healthy user bias. They're the same people who are probably drinking two cups. Then they're going to the gym. They're exercising. Sleep is fantastic. That's right. Exercise is fantastic for sleep.
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#883 - Dr Matthew Walker - The Science Of Perfect Sleep
But that's the interesting thing about the WHOOP data, though, because that is a relatively, I would guess, homogenous group of people, all of whom have got a wearable. They're tracking lots of things. And even within, because these are behaviors done by the same individual on different days.
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#883 - Dr Matthew Walker - The Science Of Perfect Sleep
Within subject design is what we call it. Sort of longitudinal within subject. And so the other possibility is that it's still on days when you're drinking caffeine or days when you are more fatigued.
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#883 - Dr Matthew Walker - The Science Of Perfect Sleep
And I think everyone has had that sense where, whether it's, let's say you've been on stage, you've been on tour, you come off stage and you are wired. Now, this is not you're anxious, but you're still wired. Cortisol is streaming. Your heart rate is jacked. And you can say, I was up at seven this morning. And it's now two o'clock because all is said and done. I am still unable to fall asleep.
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#883 - Dr Matthew Walker - The Science Of Perfect Sleep
See, this is why we need a scientist to help me pick this apart. Okay, so that's sleeping caffeine. What about sleeping alcohol?
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#883 - Dr Matthew Walker - The Science Of Perfect Sleep
Yeah, drink lots of it. It's fantastic for your sleep. Said like a true brain. It's right there on our passports. Alcohol is probably the most misunderstood sleep aid that there is out there. Alcohol is in a class of drugs that we call the sedatives. And sedation is not sleep. But when you have a couple of nightcaps in the evening, you mistake the former for the latter.
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#883 - Dr Matthew Walker - The Science Of Perfect Sleep
And if I were to show you the electrical signature of your sleep with alcohol versus without, you would see how different it is. It's not the same. That that alcohol will actually, it pushes you into what looks like deep, slow wave sleep. but it's kind of the faster slow brainwave activity. So it's sort of the more less nutritious of those deep slow brainwaves, but it's simply sedation.
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#883 - Dr Matthew Walker - The Science Of Perfect Sleep
The second problem with alcohol is that like caffeine, but through a different mechanism by way of acting on the sympathetic fight or flight branch of the nervous system, it will make you wake up more times throughout the night. And once again, they're so brief that you don't usually commit it to memory.
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#883 - Dr Matthew Walker - The Science Of Perfect Sleep
The other thing is that because of that sleep fragmentation, that principally is happening in the first half of the night. This is why on your sleep tracker, when, you know, if I look at my O-ring data, I mean, I don't typically drink, but even if I have, you know, glasses, I get hit not just with this. Another thing I'm going to tell you about REM sleep, I lose a good amount of my deep sleep.
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#883 - Dr Matthew Walker - The Science Of Perfect Sleep
And it turns out that it's really the fragmentation of your sleep early on in the night when the alcohol concentration is highest, when your liver and your kidneys have not had the chance to metabolically clear it. And when you get fragmentation in the first half of the night, you're not getting your deep sleep. And as a result, there's a great study that demonstrated that
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#883 - Dr Matthew Walker - The Science Of Perfect Sleep
Alcohol after dinner, one glass, decreased the amount of deep sleep, and as a result, produced a 50% drop in growth hormone release. 50%, I mean, I don't know what you'd have to age an individual by to get them to have a 50% drop in growth hormone. So there are, it's consequential. It's not epiphenomenal. Just because you don't get deep sleep, you may say, well, so yes and so what?
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#883 - Dr Matthew Walker - The Science Of Perfect Sleep
What's the consequence of that lack? Well, one is that you don't get your growth hormone release for reparation and repair. But then the other thing about alcohol, people love me, don't they? Someone once told me when we listen to you, your personality is like the greatest prophylactic known to man ever. Oh, you're the fun police. Thanks for, yeah, exactly. Yeah.
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#883 - Dr Matthew Walker - The Science Of Perfect Sleep
God, if, and that goes together already with my bloody acerbic personality. Anyway, nevertheless, alcohol also is very good at blocking your REM sleep. And it turns out it's not the alcohol, it's the metabolic byproducts of it, particularly the aldehydes. And it's the aldehydes that will essentially act like a sort of jamming up of the cogs of the gears of the generation of REM sleep.
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#883 - Dr Matthew Walker - The Science Of Perfect Sleep
So you become REM sleep deficient. This is the reason that people will sometimes say, you know, we had two or three bottles of wine last night when friends came over at the weekend. And then I slept in late because we went to bed late and I was having these crazy dreams, just wild crazy dreams. What's happened there is that firstly, REM sleep comes mostly in the second half of the night.
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#883 - Dr Matthew Walker - The Science Of Perfect Sleep
You get most of your deep sleep in the first half of the night. If you're sleeping later into the morning, that's the REM sleep rich phase part of your sleep cycle. So your brain has a different taste preference for what it wants to eat from the finger buffet of the sleep menu at night. Early in the night, all it wants to do is feast on deep sleep, very little REM.
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#883 - Dr Matthew Walker - The Science Of Perfect Sleep
I'm so tired, but I am way too cortisol, you know, sort of concentrated. Yeah, exactly. So those two things in the body are what we will... presumably, I think most people will cleave to as the ingredients to the type-wide phenomena. I also think upstairs, and they are interrelated, upstairs in the brain, you start to get this Rolodex of anxiety.
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#883 - Dr Matthew Walker - The Science Of Perfect Sleep
As you go through into the second half of the night, it likes to switch its taste preference to REM. The further you sleep later into the morning, the more REM sleep you get. If you want to increase the amount of REM sleep, one of the things you can do is just sleep half an hour later into that morning and you'll start to get more REM sleep.
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#883 - Dr Matthew Walker - The Science Of Perfect Sleep
But what alcohol will do is it will start to block the amount of REM sleep that you've been having for most of the night. Your brain is so clever though. Sleep is so strongly conserved across biology, across phylogeny, that sleep emerged, as I said, with living organisms and has stayed there. It's one of the most preserved behaviors that we see in any living organism.
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#883 - Dr Matthew Walker - The Science Of Perfect Sleep
And it's preserved at the level of the stages too. So your brain, what I mean by that is it's understanding how much REM sleep you, Chris, should have had across the night when you've had a few too many drinks. And it keeps a clock counter of how much REM sleep you should have had and you've not obtained.
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#883 - Dr Matthew Walker - The Science Of Perfect Sleep
And finally, by those late morning hours on the Saturday when you've slept late, your liver and your kidneys have finally excreted all of the alcohol. So in the last hour or two of sleep, your brain gets the REM sleep it will have normally obtained, plus it tries to get back that which it's lost. And it's called a REM sleep rebound effect.
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#883 - Dr Matthew Walker - The Science Of Perfect Sleep
And that's why you have really intense dreaming and you have these really crazy, bizarre experiences. Does your brain get back all of the REM sleep that it lost? No, it doesn't. It can only accumulate about 50% of the debt. So you will still be REM sleep deficient. REM sleep, it turns out, if you want to say... Give the head-to-head challenge, which is more important, non-REM versus REM?
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#883 - Dr Matthew Walker - The Science Of Perfect Sleep
Well, I'm going to firstly tell you that all stages of sleep are important. Different stages do different things at different times of night. But the ultimate test of what's more important is presumably death. How quickly do you die when you don't have one versus the other?
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#883 - Dr Matthew Walker - The Science Of Perfect Sleep
They did a series of studies back in the 1980s that will never be replicated again because I think they were just, you know, so barbaric. They started to sleep deprive rats to the point when they died. And what they found is firstly that rats will die as quickly of food deprivation as they will of sleep deprivation.
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#883 - Dr Matthew Walker - The Science Of Perfect Sleep
Sleep deprivation will kill you just as quickly as no food, about 11 days in the rats. Then they said, okay, let me now selectively just deprive the rats of deep sleep. So they still get REM sleep or they get deep sleep and we remove REM sleep. And when they looked at that, the rats died from REM sleep after about 20 days. So REM sleep was, you know, still lethal.
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#883 - Dr Matthew Walker - The Science Of Perfect Sleep
A lack of REM sleep was still lethal. Non REM sleep, they still died, but they died after about 60 days. So in other words, rats will die quicker from REM sleep deprivation than they will from deep non REM sleep deprivation. We all predicted the opposite in those studies. Why? Because I told you that non REM sleep was the original OG. in terms of the evolutionary course of sleep.
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#883 - Dr Matthew Walker - The Science Of Perfect Sleep
It was the first stage of sleep. So surely the first stage of sleep that emerged in the course of evolution would be the fundamental, elemental, most important. The opposite was true. Great study then back at Harvard. And what we find is that a lack of sleep, short sleep, as I said, shorter your sleep, shorter your life. And it's sort of a
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#883 - Dr Matthew Walker - The Science Of Perfect Sleep
It's a decaying curve, which is that, you know, the less sleep that you have, the higher and higher your death risk. But let's come back to that seven to nine hours of sweet spot because something odd happens. When you get past about nine, your death risk does not keep going down. it goes back up as if more sleep after nine hours is deathly.
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#883 - Dr Matthew Walker - The Science Of Perfect Sleep
And people have said, well, that's proof that sleep can actually kill you. If you look at the data, at least one of two things is happening in those studies. When you get sick, what is the first thing that you typically want to do? Sleep. Exactly.
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#883 - Dr Matthew Walker - The Science Of Perfect Sleep
And I think we've all had that where we're stressed, you... In the modern world, we're constantly on reception. Very rarely do we do reflection. And now the only time based on modernity and how it inflects us that we do reflection is when our head hits the pillow at night. That's the worst time to do reflection.
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#883 - Dr Matthew Walker - The Science Of Perfect Sleep
And it turns out that the reason is that your immune system has a very adaptive network that when you get sick, it brute forces a set of chemicals to induce you into more sleep because it knows that the Swiss army knife of health, the best thing that it has to combat disease and sickness is this thing called sleep. So it drives you to sleep more.
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#883 - Dr Matthew Walker - The Science Of Perfect Sleep
And so what was happening in those studies is that whatever the disease was, the sickest people were sleeping more.
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#883 - Dr Matthew Walker - The Science Of Perfect Sleep
It's like an unhealthy user bias.
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#883 - Dr Matthew Walker - The Science Of Perfect Sleep
And it looks like artificially more sleep is killing you.
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#883 - Dr Matthew Walker - The Science Of Perfect Sleep
It's just that the people that were sleeping nine hours or more per night, there was something underlying that was causing them to.
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#883 - Dr Matthew Walker - The Science Of Perfect Sleep
It was too powerful for sleep to overcome despite sleep trying. The other reason is because of sleep quality versus quantity. Typically, what we find is that people who have really bad sleep quality stay in bed for far longer. And sleep quality also predicts all-cause mortality. So as a consequence, it looks like people, when they say, what time did you get into bed? What time did you wake up?
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#883 - Dr Matthew Walker - The Science Of Perfect Sleep
That's how they measure the amount of sleep, as it were, poorly as it is. Those people who are in bed for 10 hours died sooner. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. But to come back to it, this Harvard study then looked at how much of different stages of sleep people were getting across the lifespan because they were able to do this with fancy sort of technology.
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#883 - Dr Matthew Walker - The Science Of Perfect Sleep
And what they found was that when they put non-REM sleep, again, in the same statistical model with REM sleep, REM sleep beat out deep non-REM sleep in humans to predict your all-cause mortality. And here, it wasn't this reverse J shape. like total sleep duration, which is once you get past nine hours, it starts to hook back up.
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#883 - Dr Matthew Walker - The Science Of Perfect Sleep
No, with REM sleep, the less and less that you had, the worse and worse your mortality risk. It was a linear relationship. And so across animals, across human beings, REM sleep seems to have been, if you want to do the math, which I wouldn't argue for anyone to do, if there is one stage of sleep that's mortality more important than the other.
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#883 - Dr Matthew Walker - The Science Of Perfect Sleep
it would be REM sleep, which is also the reason maybe to raise caution regarding alcohol and then maybe THC.
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#883 - Dr Matthew Walker - The Science Of Perfect Sleep
Talk to me about CBD, THC. It's been marketed for a while separately and together as solutions. What's the truth behind it?
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#883 - Dr Matthew Walker - The Science Of Perfect Sleep
So THC and CBD, I think they've gone through a real evolution. THC, for the most part, I think the data is fairly robust. It's just not going to be your friend when it comes to sleep. It is very clearly helping people fall asleep faster. And I think that's something that we can come back to in a second.
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#883 - Dr Matthew Walker - The Science Of Perfect Sleep
The problem with THC first is that you build up a tolerance and a dependence on it, a psychological dependence. And what happens is that when you stop using THC for sleep, Not only do you go back to the bad sleep that you are having because of the dependency, you typically have a withdrawal and your sleep is even worse as a consequence.
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#883 - Dr Matthew Walker - The Science Of Perfect Sleep
Because when you start to have that kind of wheel of anxiety whirring, you begin to ruminate. When you ruminate, you catastrophize. everything seems twice as bad in the dark of night versus the light of day. And at that point, you're dead in the water for the next two hours.
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#883 - Dr Matthew Walker - The Science Of Perfect Sleep
And if you look at the number one reason why people fail in their attempted abstinence from smoking weed, it's because they can't tolerate the insomnia. So they fall off the wagon and they go right back to using again because they've built up both a physiological and a psychological dependence. So that's the first issue is just the really bad insomnia.
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#883 - Dr Matthew Walker - The Science Of Perfect Sleep
In fact, it's part of the cannabis withdrawal syndrome set of features in what we call the DSM-5, which is the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders. It's basically the psychiatrist's handbook. If you look at cannabis withdrawal syndrome, right there at the top, is insomnia.
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#883 - Dr Matthew Walker - The Science Of Perfect Sleep
And you're just feeding yourself a future event in your history of insomnia when you try to withdraw and you typically will go back. The second problem with THC is that it's very potent at blocking your REM sleep again. And we've spoken about REM sleep both as a mortality feature. REM sleep is critical for creativity, learning, and memory. It's also essential for your emotional and mental health.
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#883 - Dr Matthew Walker - The Science Of Perfect Sleep
But we often think of dream sleep, you know, it's such an active state that we think of it as purely for the brain. REM sleep is for the body. Men and women both release their peak levels of testosterone when you're in REM sleep. And so REM sleep is essential, but you're depriving yourself of it with THC. And a really good case in point here is that when people...
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#883 - Dr Matthew Walker - The Science Of Perfect Sleep
stop using teaching when they've been smoking weed, firstly, they'll start to say, I just don't dream or I don't remember my dreams anymore. Then all of a sudden, when they stop using it, they will say once again, like that late morning, Saturday morning with the alcohol, they will say, I'm just having these crazy dreams now. I never used to dream at all.
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#883 - Dr Matthew Walker - The Science Of Perfect Sleep
The reason is because the brain has built up such a chronic debt of absent REM sleep that finally when you stop smoking weed, it comes back with a vengeance because you've been trying to sort of get it, but you can't. And the roadblock is finally out the way. And boy, do you start getting REM sleep again.
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#883 - Dr Matthew Walker - The Science Of Perfect Sleep
So THC, right now, I just don't think there's good evidence for, although I'll come back to it now in one of the two ways. If you look at some of those studies, though, and you've really got to kind of dig deep into them and look at all of the ancillary, the supplemental materials in the science paper. Something funny happened when I was reading the literature.
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#883 - Dr Matthew Walker - The Science Of Perfect Sleep
If you looked at, they always classify people's level of sleep apnea in these sleep studies. It's just one of the things that we always measure, just like we measure your brainwaves and we measure your sleep apnea. If you look across when people were dosed experimentally with THC, the sleep apnea started to decrease. And in some of those studies decreased statistically significantly.
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#883 - Dr Matthew Walker - The Science Of Perfect Sleep
which would argue that THC may potentially have something beneficial to say about being at least an adjunct to sleep apnea therapy. Now, I am not going to advocate based on the downsides that come with THC in terms of your sleep that it should be used. But nevertheless, you shouldn't throw the baby out with the sleep bath water here. What is it about THC?
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#883 - Dr Matthew Walker - The Science Of Perfect Sleep
And that will then only feed in to jacking up the fight or flight branch because you're kind of going through, what didn't I do today? What should I have done? What do I need to do tomorrow? I forgot to do that thing that's critical for next week. It's a mental sort of, you know,
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#883 - Dr Matthew Walker - The Science Of Perfect Sleep
that is beneficial to reducing the respiratory disturbance associated with sleep apnea. I think we need to figure that out because there are too many studies where that seems to be an anecdotal result in the data. Now, is it because it prevents the relaxation response of the airways so that they stay more taut and resistant against the collapse?
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#883 - Dr Matthew Walker - The Science Of Perfect Sleep
Is it about the release of certain neurochemicals that are there to stimulate the nerves to keep the air? I've got no idea, but I do think it's a really interesting kind of story that's yet to be told.
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#883 - Dr Matthew Walker - The Science Of Perfect Sleep
What about melatonin, other sleep supplements that people are probably quite heavily relying on? I mean, you'll know this being from the UK, but Americans may not, that melatonin, something that you can just buy in CVS here, is kind of hard to get a prescription for in the UK. Drugs like Zolpidem, Ambien, you do not. I mean, you need to be like fucking...
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#883 - Dr Matthew Walker - The Science Of Perfect Sleep
insomniac for weeks and weeks in order for your doctor to step in pharmacologically and help you with your sleep in the UK. It's very much not a thing that your GP would ever do. But some people from the UK can get a hold of melatonin in some way or another, especially a lot of people in America are using it and other supplements, the magnesiums of the world. What's the L-theanines?
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#883 - Dr Matthew Walker - The Science Of Perfect Sleep
What do you sort of come to think about here?
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#883 - Dr Matthew Walker - The Science Of Perfect Sleep
Yeah, I think the first thing to note is that if Any of these supplements or any supplement stacks that are out there that promise you the royal road to resplendent sleep, if they really were doing what they claim, the drug companies would have been all over them 20 years ago and would find analogs and would have been making billions of dollars from them.
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#883 - Dr Matthew Walker - The Science Of Perfect Sleep
The fact that they've left them to the wayside tells you a lot about really what their efficacy is. And the drug companies are ruthless, but it took George Lucas, I think something like 30 or 40 years to amass about 4 billion in profit from the Star Wars franchise. It took Ambien 21 months to do that.
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#883 - Dr Matthew Walker - The Science Of Perfect Sleep
So they know that these drugs, if they are out there and any molecules like these supplements, if they are good sleep aids, they will be very strategic. Melatonin, I think, certainly over here, it's so easily purchased. You go down, you know, any grocery store and in the health food section, there's this big purple subsection and that's the melatonin section.
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#883 - Dr Matthew Walker - The Science Of Perfect Sleep
train wreck in terms of your sleep that then just further perpetuates those two downstream physiological mal sort of consequences and then they ramp up and that leads to more yeah talk to me about interventions for those three So the principle one is that you've got to process that. And this is the hard part of the equation. Mental health work is tough work.
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#883 - Dr Matthew Walker - The Science Of Perfect Sleep
And you've got 10 milligrams, 20 milligrams, I've seen 50 milligrams. Firstly, 5 milligrams, 10, 20 milligrams, these are what we call supraphysiological doses, meaning that they are levels of melatonin that your body would never naturally release far higher than your body's natural tendency. So the fear here, although there are some studies that people have argued that
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#883 - Dr Matthew Walker - The Science Of Perfect Sleep
This is not the case, but the fear is, just like testosterone replacement, at some point your testes, if you're exogenously injecting, will just stop producing innate testosterone, and once they stop, they don't restart.
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#883 - Dr Matthew Walker - The Science Of Perfect Sleep
The worry is the same with your pineal gland, which is going to release melatonin, that if you keep exogenously giving your brain vast amounts, it says, well, you're giving it to me, so I don't need to produce it anymore. And once it stops, does it ever restart? There are some data where they looked at an individual who was blind.
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#883 - Dr Matthew Walker - The Science Of Perfect Sleep
And the reason that they were looking at this individual is because when you're blind and depending on the level of blindness, if it's at, let's say, the level of the retina or the optic nerve, you don't receive light signals. So you don't get the light to reset your circadian rhythm. So you're bouncing with your sleep all over the place. It's very difficult for these patients.
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#883 - Dr Matthew Walker - The Science Of Perfect Sleep
So what we typically do is we give them exogenous melatonin to at least feed them the signal of melatonin darkness at night to try to regulate their sleep. And they did a study where they were tracking the melatonin of this individual and they were giving exogenous melatonin. And then they stopped and then looked to see, did that individual stop producing their own natural melatonin?
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#883 - Dr Matthew Walker - The Science Of Perfect Sleep
And the answer was no. So people say, well, that's a good thing. And it was about a 30-day experiment. Other people, I think, have looked across about six weeks of dosing. And when they stop, the people keep producing it. And some people have argued that's the evidence then that we don't have to worry about that. The problem is most people don't use melatonin like that.
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#883 - Dr Matthew Walker - The Science Of Perfect Sleep
They've been using it for three or four years. So we don't know. And it could be perfectly harmless. The second concern about melatonin is that it's a hormone that regulates the timing signal for when you should sleep. It doesn't participate in the generation of sleep itself. So melatonin is like the starting official at the 100-meter race.
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#883 - Dr Matthew Walker - The Science Of Perfect Sleep
It brings all of the sleep races to the line and begins the great sleep race, but it doesn't participate in the sleep race itself. That's a different set of chemicals and compounds.
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#883 - Dr Matthew Walker - The Science Of Perfect Sleep
So that's why when people have done what we call meta-analyses, where you get all of the individual studies looking at melatonin in sleep, and you put them all together in the same big statistical bucket, and you ask, what's the overall effect? Melatonin only improved the speed with which you fell asleep by about 3.9 minutes, which is not that much more relative to placebo.
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#883 - Dr Matthew Walker - The Science Of Perfect Sleep
And it only improved your sleep efficiency by about 2.2%. So again, largely trivial. Now, I think, however, despite touting those statistics, I think there is a subset of people for whom melatonin is sleep generating. And therefore, melatonin is not just the starting official. It's also one of the racers. And we don't yet understand why.
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#883 - Dr Matthew Walker - The Science Of Perfect Sleep
I think one of the ways that melatonin could be a sleep generating agent... and this will bring me back to CBD in a second, is that melatonin can make you cold. Melatonin has the ability to produce not hypothermia, don't worry about that, but it will drop your core body temperature a little bit.
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#883 - Dr Matthew Walker - The Science Of Perfect Sleep
And it turns out that we do need to drop our brain and core body temperature by about one degree Celsius to fall asleep and stay asleep. It's a reason that it's so hard on those summer nights when it's brutally hot and you've got no air conditioning. You can almost not fall asleep despite how tired you are in a warm room. But in a cold room, you typically can sleep.
Modern Wisdom
#883 - Dr Matthew Walker - The Science Of Perfect Sleep
And medicine teaches us that there are essentially what I would describe as the four macros of good sleep.
Modern Wisdom
#883 - Dr Matthew Walker - The Science Of Perfect Sleep
It's always because the cold room is at least taking you in the right temperature direction for good sleep as melatonin in some individuals may be mildly hypothermic and move you in that direction. So I think that's, I'm fascinated by that and I want to pick that apart. But for most people, firstly, it's not going to move the needle.
Modern Wisdom
#883 - Dr Matthew Walker - The Science Of Perfect Sleep
That's the reason that no one, no doctor has ever prescribed melatonin for people with insomnia. You have to have a circadian disruptive clinical syndrome causing the insomnia to receive melatonin. That's where it can be helpful. The other thing about, or two other things about melatonin, if you could go down that purple aisle, now a large part of it is dedicated to pediatric melatonin for kids.
Modern Wisdom
#883 - Dr Matthew Walker - The Science Of Perfect Sleep
You can take medications and that can be one path for people. You can take certain medications that can try to lower your heart rate, shift you back over into that quiescent state. But most people don't want to reach for a pill immediately necessarily. one thing you can do is just catharsis.
Modern Wisdom
#883 - Dr Matthew Walker - The Science Of Perfect Sleep
And what we know is that melatonin is a bioactive hormone. We did some work and we were looking at great scientist Craig Canepari at Yale, and we spoke with the FDA about this. Admissions to the hospital for melatonin poisonous overdose have increased by 503% in the past 10 years. which is a stunning statistic.
Modern Wisdom
#883 - Dr Matthew Walker - The Science Of Perfect Sleep
Now, granted melatonin for the most part is a largely inert compound in terms of its safety profile. But the worry with the pediatric component of melatonin nowadays from the sleep community is that studies done back in the 1980s, 70s demonstrated that in juvenile male rats, essentially male rats going through adolescence,
Modern Wisdom
#883 - Dr Matthew Walker - The Science Of Perfect Sleep
when they were given higher doses of melatonin, it stunted their testicular growth and it caused testicular atrophy. So imagine if I came along to a PTA meeting, a parent-teacher association meeting, and to the parents and the teachers, I got up there and said, tonight, I'd like you to start dosing your child with bioactive hormone.
Modern Wisdom
#883 - Dr Matthew Walker - The Science Of Perfect Sleep
And I'd like you to dose them with a magnitude that is far higher than their bodies would ever naturally release. And it's a hormone that will also disrupt their reproductive gonadal development. And I'd like you to do this every night for the next couple of years. Who's with me? And you get taken off stage rather rapidly.
Modern Wisdom
#883 - Dr Matthew Walker - The Science Of Perfect Sleep
And again, I don't mean that that's hyperbolic in terms of an example, but I do think we need to be a bit more thoughtful, certainly about melatonin in pediatric populations. The final thing about melatonin, it's now being replicated. They did a study originally where they looked at at least 20 different brands off the shelf of melatonin.
Modern Wisdom
#883 - Dr Matthew Walker - The Science Of Perfect Sleep
And then they test it based on what it said on the bottle versus what was inside the capsules. What it turned out was actually what you were swallowing was anywhere between 83% less than what it said was on the bottle to 464% more.
Modern Wisdom
#883 - Dr Matthew Walker - The Science Of Perfect Sleep
That 50 milligram capsule has become a monster. It's a wild west. You don't know what you think because it's not regulated by the FDA over here. Wow. And what was even worse is that within any one vendor... the amount of variability from one batch to the next, the next was just as large.
Modern Wisdom
#883 - Dr Matthew Walker - The Science Of Perfect Sleep
So this isn't even across companies. What about other technologies to artificially boost or improve sleep? Is there anything cool at the moment? Yeah, I think there is.
Modern Wisdom
#883 - Dr Matthew Walker - The Science Of Perfect Sleep
I mean, I think there are, you know, CBD, I think, is actually one of the potential contenders in this category of new emerging technologies pharmacologically. CBD, I think, is, we still don't have enough data I think the problem with CBD is that it is dose dependent.
Modern Wisdom
#883 - Dr Matthew Walker - The Science Of Perfect Sleep
If you look at the data, squint your eyes because there's not enough, and you make a non-scientific kind of guesstimation, anything less than about 25 milligrams seems to actually be wake promoting. Whereas anything that's about 50 milligrams or more may actually be sleep promoting. Even though it's the same drug. Compound. Same compound. So you get what's called a dose dependent response.
Modern Wisdom
#883 - Dr Matthew Walker - The Science Of Perfect Sleep
Two or three hours before bed, not right before bed, pad of paper and a pen, and just write down, I just want you to vomit out all of your stresses and anxieties. And it turns out that simply doing that will decrease the time it takes you to fall asleep by 50%. No way. Yeah, it's a great study, Michael Scullin, fantastic work.
Modern Wisdom
#883 - Dr Matthew Walker - The Science Of Perfect Sleep
And it's bimodal, meaning that it's the Goldilocks phenomenon, you know, not too little, not too much, just the right amount. And let's then entertain that you and I sit here in another five years time. There's been lots of work on this. And CBD now is a sleep aid. at the right dose. The question then is, how is it doing that?
Modern Wisdom
#883 - Dr Matthew Walker - The Science Of Perfect Sleep
Because for me as a scientist to entertain its causality, I at least want to understand mechanistically what it's doing to be a plausible parsimonious explanation. For CBD, I think it's actually at least two different routes. Like melatonin, CBD is really quite hypothermic. It will get rats cold when we dose them.
Modern Wisdom
#883 - Dr Matthew Walker - The Science Of Perfect Sleep
The colder their core body temperature, the faster sleep will arrive with them, the deeper the sleep that comes after. The second, however, I think is an indirect mechanism. I think now there is very good data, even human brain imaging data, that CBD is what we call anxiolytic, which it reduces down your anxiety. It takes you out of that fight or flight branch that we've been talking about.
Modern Wisdom
#883 - Dr Matthew Walker - The Science Of Perfect Sleep
It reduces cortisol levels. The emotional centers in the brain called the amygdala, they are turned down in terms of their volume of kind of cranked activation by way of CBD. So in other words, that kind of tired but wired phenomenon is potentially going to be medicated by CBD. CBD isn't necessarily generating sleep.
Modern Wisdom
#883 - Dr Matthew Walker - The Science Of Perfect Sleep
It's simply removing what is blocking your brain's natural ability to generate the sleep that it could do. If only it could try to reduce the anxiety that's getting in the way. And when I say anxiety here, I'm meaning the physiological, biological anxiety within the body. That's, I think, what CBD is potentially doing to get you into good sleep.
Modern Wisdom
#883 - Dr Matthew Walker - The Science Of Perfect Sleep
So new technologies, I think CBD is an interesting one. But then we come on to an area that I've been doing a fair amount of work in over the past eight years or so, which is the artificial enhancement of human sleep. Because what I started to realize is that, you know, I can come on lots of podcasts, I can give you the scientific data,
Modern Wisdom
#883 - Dr Matthew Walker - The Science Of Perfect Sleep
But in truth, there's only so much I can do to get people sleeping the same amount that I would wish them to sleep. So the next question would then be, well, could I create technologies that act like a zip file for sleep that I can compress sleep into six down from eight? Now, I think that that's, You've got to... I think that's a dangerous thing because I think it's hubristic.
Modern Wisdom
#883 - Dr Matthew Walker - The Science Of Perfect Sleep
Because it took Mother Nature 3.6 million years to put this thing called the seven to nine hour sleep necessity in place. Sleep is the most idiotic thing that you can conceive of. You're not finding a mate, you're not foraging for food, you're not reproducing, you're not caring for your young, and you are vulnerable to predation.
Modern Wisdom
#883 - Dr Matthew Walker - The Science Of Perfect Sleep
On any one of those grounds, sleep should have been strongly selected against in the course of evolution. If Mother Nature had found some magical zip file solution to compress eight hours of vulnerability nonsense down to six, guaranteed she would have done it. And the fact that it hasn't emerged.
Modern Wisdom
#883 - Dr Matthew Walker - The Science Of Perfect Sleep
And then I come along and I say to you, Chris, I'm going to be, you know, some, you know, scientific genius who comes along with the compression zip file for sleep. You know, good luck. Take care. We are starting to get there with some things, though. One of the things that we developed was an electrical brain stimulation device. So we've moved from pharmaceuticals to electroceuticals.
Modern Wisdom
#883 - Dr Matthew Walker - The Science Of Perfect Sleep
So the first thing is just get it all out of you so it's not inside of you. That said, you can still be burdened with this egregious kind of stress and anxiety nevertheless. So what do you do about that? At that moment in time, whether it's you falling asleep or you've woken up at 3am and it's happening and you need to get back to sleep. At that point, let's get your mind off itself.
Modern Wisdom
#883 - Dr Matthew Walker - The Science Of Perfect Sleep
Because if you want to change sleep, sleep is an electrical phenomenon. It's an electrophysiological state. It's brainwave activity. It's electrical activity. And if you want to speak in the currency of the brain, you should deal in the same currency, which is electricity.
Modern Wisdom
#883 - Dr Matthew Walker - The Science Of Perfect Sleep
So we developed something called a transcranial direct current stimulation tool, which is a fancy way of saying I put a headband on and I insert a small amount of voltage into your brain. It's so small you typically don't feel it, but it has a measurable benefit to your brainwave activity.
Modern Wisdom
#883 - Dr Matthew Walker - The Science Of Perfect Sleep
And people had been doing this approach where they measure your sleep in the laboratory and they're starting to look at these deep, slow brainwaves. And then using this electrical stimulation device, they're going to try to act like a choir to a flagging lead vocalist. And by way of measuring it, they can try to predict where the next stroke of midnight is coming on the top of that brainwave.
Modern Wisdom
#883 - Dr Matthew Walker - The Science Of Perfect Sleep
And they hit you with a pulse of electricity and they try to amplify the size of those brainwaves. And they can. And in doing it, they almost double the amount of memory benefit that you get from sleep. The problem is when we go to sleep, we take things off. We don't put things on. So you're expecting me to have a headband device with all of these wires and I'm going to sleep with it.
Modern Wisdom
#883 - Dr Matthew Walker - The Science Of Perfect Sleep
And then there's going to be some crazy computer in your study that's kind of, you know, measuring your brainwave and it's trying to temporally estimate when that's a disaster. It was never going to happen. So what we took the approach of is that when you stimulate the brain and and you stop stimulating like a drug in the system, it still has a blast radius of a benefit.
Modern Wisdom
#883 - Dr Matthew Walker - The Science Of Perfect Sleep
And when we do 10 minutes version of stimulation, it lasts in terms of its effect on the brain for about two hours. And it was that deep sleep that I said comes in the first half of the night and mostly in the first two hours. So I knew I had this window of opportunity to capture, to go after deep sleep.
Modern Wisdom
#883 - Dr Matthew Walker - The Science Of Perfect Sleep
So instead, what we did was we applied this headband and as you're brushing your teeth, when you're taking your makeup off, you're stimulating the head or you're lying in bed for 10 minutes. And then what happens is that you take the headband off and it's almost like, it's a good analogy would be a child on a swing. They're static and they're swinging their feet. Nothing is happening.
Modern Wisdom
#883 - Dr Matthew Walker - The Science Of Perfect Sleep
You as the parent, you've got to come along and you've got to start swinging them. But when you give them enough momentum, at some point you stop and they keep swinging. So I was trying to essentially get the brain swinging so that when it went into sleep, it
Modern Wisdom
#883 - Dr Matthew Walker - The Science Of Perfect Sleep
It would generate bigger, or a better analogy would be, I'm trying to electrically fertilize the soil of your prefrontal cortex so that when I take it off and you start sleeping, you germinate more powerful deep sleep brainwaves because I've electrically fertilized the soil. Have you tested this in the lab?
Modern Wisdom
#883 - Dr Matthew Walker - The Science Of Perfect Sleep
So we've tested it now multiple times and we were able to, we've published data on it already. We then ended up realizing, look, if I'm going to get this out to the public, despite me being a puritanical scientist, I've got to make it a company and move it out. We got venture backed capital. That was just when COVID hit.
Modern Wisdom
#883 - Dr Matthew Walker - The Science Of Perfect Sleep
And we were trying to do human testing where we were putting, you know, nasal thermistors up people's noses to measure their breathing. And COVID, you're So we had the kind of caboose put on a kibosh. Anyway, one of those. We slowed down, but we were able to get enough data that at least confirmed to me that it had efficacy. We've released a first-gen product now.
Modern Wisdom
#883 - Dr Matthew Walker - The Science Of Perfect Sleep
Again, I never want to be the George Foreman...
Modern Wisdom
#883 - Dr Matthew Walker - The Science Of Perfect Sleep
grill of sleep you know i never want to hawk this stuff so you you can kind of look around what's it called it's called somni so if you just go to the website stim science the company is stim science stimulation science um stim science.com you'll find it take what i say with a grain of salt it's gen one if it were up to me i would wait at least another 10 years get another 10 million hours of data before i as a scientist felt comfortable that's the reason i'm not the ceo
Modern Wisdom
#883 - Dr Matthew Walker - The Science Of Perfect Sleep
and so three macros of food fat carbohydrate and protein four of sleep and you can remember it by the acronym qqrt quantity quality regularity timing and there's all sorts of stuff on the internet about you know take this supplement do this particular thing and and it's the shangri-la of all good sleep and you'll have this utopian blissful night
Modern Wisdom
#883 - Dr Matthew Walker - The Science Of Perfect Sleep
That is the goal. How do you do that? Maybe at least four things. First, meditation. The data is really strong. Now, I was researching this for a book and I just thought, look, I'm a hard-nosed scientist. I'm here at UC Berkeley, San Francisco. It's all a bit woo-woo, this meditation thing. I'm sort of holding hands and people are strumming guitars at the end of the day. What is going on?
Modern Wisdom
#883 - Dr Matthew Walker - The Science Of Perfect Sleep
because people will have already done this long before me. So we've got a first-gen product out there. Second-gen is coming, I think, probably the end of Q1 2025. We've now done lots of systematic studies. We've looked at it on the basis of insomnia. It seems to be even more efficacious the more severe your insomnia symptoms are. I was worried it would be the opposite.
Modern Wisdom
#883 - Dr Matthew Walker - The Science Of Perfect Sleep
The harder the problem, the less
Modern Wisdom
#883 - Dr Matthew Walker - The Science Of Perfect Sleep
potent the solution it seems to be the opposite opposite um it does seem to benefit young and old but i would say that in the especially old individuals we're finding it harder to drive the brain into sleep with the stimulation device we now i think have some good new solutions in terms of how we stimulate the brain to overcome the age-related problem so it's not all good news um
Modern Wisdom
#883 - Dr Matthew Walker - The Science Of Perfect Sleep
And, but certainly the duration of sleep and the efficiency of sleep improve and the speed with which you fall asleep.
Modern Wisdom
#883 - Dr Matthew Walker - The Science Of Perfect Sleep
How long do you have to have it on for?
Modern Wisdom
#883 - Dr Matthew Walker - The Science Of Perfect Sleep
About 10 minutes. Wow. And it's an interactive thing because we'll also do bone conduction for sound. So you have a whole app experience. You do the app. And what's, Different in our method versus others who are trying to do this is what's called, it's a closed loop system because the stimulation I need to co-opt my brain into sleep is slightly different in terms of its frequency.
Modern Wisdom
#883 - Dr Matthew Walker - The Science Of Perfect Sleep
In other words, how I'm stimulating your brain in terms of the kind of the brainwave pattern. My stimulation frequency sweet spot is different to yours, not by much.
Modern Wisdom
#883 - Dr Matthew Walker - The Science Of Perfect Sleep
but just enough that if I tailor it to your unique frequency snowflake-like, as if versus standard stimulation tools out there are like going to your Bloomingdale's and you just grab a suit off the rack and it doesn't really fit you quite well. This version is the Savile Row suit. I tailor it unique to your physiology and that turns out to make night and day difference.
Modern Wisdom
#883 - Dr Matthew Walker - The Science Of Perfect Sleep
It makes a big difference statistically. In fact, we almost get no benefit at one size fits all stimulation. And we were doing that for about two years and getting no data. And I didn't want to release the product because, you know, I don't want to sell snake oil. If my mother is buying a device that promises a good sleep and it's $400.
Modern Wisdom
#883 - Dr Matthew Walker - The Science Of Perfect Sleep
that I'm not going to sleep well at night if it's total snake oil. So we just weren't going to release. And then we realized, no, we've got to find a unique stimulation pattern. So what the headband does is not just stimulate, it records. It's an input output device. And we start with a short session where I measure your resting brainwave activity.
Modern Wisdom
#883 - Dr Matthew Walker - The Science Of Perfect Sleep
And then we do a sort of an AI calculation where we rejig the stimulation for your frequency. In reverse. Yeah, we reverse engineer it. And now we know what to stimulate you at. And then if we see your brainwaves change, even across the 10 minute session, we're constantly adapting it to what we call a staircase method. Very cool. So that's electrical stimulation is one path.
Modern Wisdom
#883 - Dr Matthew Walker - The Science Of Perfect Sleep
I think I'm now interested in others. The next one is kinesthetic vibration. If you see a parent with a child who's not sleeping well, typically, you know, a grandmother will just pick the child up in their arms and they'll start to do what? Start to rock the child.
Modern Wisdom
#883 - Dr Matthew Walker - The Science Of Perfect Sleep
You know, if you think about, you know, a manger, rocking the manger, or parents with their child, they'll put them in the car and anything that's repetitive kinesthetic is enough to induce sleep. So they did this great study, Sophie Schwartz at the University of Geneva, It was wonderful borderline S&M. They got a mattress frame and they dangled it on the big chains from the ceiling.
Modern Wisdom
#883 - Dr Matthew Walker - The Science Of Perfect Sleep
I don't believe this. Studies were so powerful, though. So I thought, I best bloody try some of this myself. And that was six years ago. And I now meditate for 10 minutes every night before bed. So the first is meditation, but people just may not feel particularly compelled towards meditation. No problem. Next one is breath work.
Modern Wisdom
#883 - Dr Matthew Walker - The Science Of Perfect Sleep
So the bed frame was suspended on these chains. And all of a sudden it feels like, you know, candle wax on the nipples, tie me up, tie me down type stuff. And then what they did was they inserted an arm against the side of the bed frame that had this rotation. And it would rock at a very slow frequency. In fact, it would rock only once every four seconds. It was a really slow rock.
Modern Wisdom
#883 - Dr Matthew Walker - The Science Of Perfect Sleep
And the reason they were doing that is they were trying to mimic the super slow brainwave frequencies that go up and down maybe just once every second, maybe once every two seconds, ultra slow brain. They were trying to mimic that. And sure enough, by rocking you at this gentle frequency,
Modern Wisdom
#883 - Dr Matthew Walker - The Science Of Perfect Sleep
it increased the amount of those deep sleep brainwaves and these additional bursts of brainwaves that ride on top of them like surfers on a wave called sleep spindles. And the combination of those two we know are important to hit the save button on new memories for what we call memory consolidation. And sure enough, after the sleep on the rocking mattress...
Modern Wisdom
#883 - Dr Matthew Walker - The Science Of Perfect Sleep
it ended up boosting the amount of memory by about 20%. And some of their replication studies by about 10%. You think 10%. But if I were to say to one of my students, you know, okay, look, you got, you know, 65% on your exam. Do you want an extra 10%? Oh my goodness, that's a great point. You know, so it's not a trivial amount.
Modern Wisdom
#883 - Dr Matthew Walker - The Science Of Perfect Sleep
So I think this, and then they've done these really great studies in fruit flies. where they started to just vibrate the surface and these fruit flies just conked out. And there's something about the kinesthetic motion. And then what they did was really clever. You could say, well, is it something to do with the tactile sensation of feeling like you're moving
Modern Wisdom
#883 - Dr Matthew Walker - The Science Of Perfect Sleep
Or is it really what we call the vestibular system, the sensation of movement? So in these fruit flies, they were able to inactivate the vestibular mechanism in the fruit flies. So the fruit flies could no longer sense movement and they vibrated them
Modern Wisdom
#883 - Dr Matthew Walker - The Science Of Perfect Sleep
and they just stayed awake so it absolutely is something to do with the vestibular system that is assisting with sleep so i think that's a fascinating area that you know these new mattress companies You know, there are a couple of them. Bright, B-R-Y-T-E is doing this. Eight Sleep has, you know, the ability to now, you know, it will vibrate. You can tap on the side of the bed and it will vibrate.
Modern Wisdom
#883 - Dr Matthew Walker - The Science Of Perfect Sleep
You know, what if, and take, by the way, I think Eight Sleep is a fantastic product. I was using it for years beforehand. Now, together with myself, Andrew Huberman and Petra Thier, we joined the advisory board. So again, full disclaimer, take what I say with a grain of salt, just like I speak about Oura Ring because I'm an advisor there too. I would say though that,
Modern Wisdom
#883 - Dr Matthew Walker - The Science Of Perfect Sleep
these mattresses may now be able to create some kind of ripple approach. And so we're starting to play with this technology in the lab where we're trying to do just lateral ripples to see if we can actually manipulate you. I was at a conference at what's called the section of the advanced sort of science agency here, DARPA, which is part of the defense agency.
Modern Wisdom
#883 - Dr Matthew Walker - The Science Of Perfect Sleep
And they had this really interesting technology for special operatives to navigate them through, based on the trajectory, through a particular kind of scenario where they had to go and find a kill. And they couldn't use radio communication because that would give the game away.
Modern Wisdom
#883 - Dr Matthew Walker - The Science Of Perfect Sleep
And you can do, you can just Google different types of breath, you know, box breathing, sort of, you know, three, seven, four, there's all sorts of different patterns. But that breathing can also just try to bring the nervous system back down into that zone of sleep permission versus sleep prevention when it's too high. If that isn't your thing, you can do a body scan.
Modern Wisdom
#883 - Dr Matthew Walker - The Science Of Perfect Sleep
But they were able to insert this device into the ear that would stimulate the vestibular system and tell them left, right, forward, back. So then I was thinking, well, hang on a second. If I'm rippling the bed or I'm swinging it, you know, all of a sudden my girlfriend or my wife is probably thinking, you know, it's a bit too much too soon.
Modern Wisdom
#883 - Dr Matthew Walker - The Science Of Perfect Sleep
You know, we were fairly pedestrian in what was going on in the bedroom. Now you're swinging the mat. You know, go easy. I don't like that. But what if I could not even stimulate your mattress, which could disrupt someone else?
Modern Wisdom
#883 - Dr Matthew Walker - The Science Of Perfect Sleep
All I need to do is have this ear device and I'm going to fool artificially your brain into thinking that it's being rocked by way of stimulating the vestibular system and off you go into sleep. So that's another sort of method that I'm really interested in and there's good evidence for. Probably the next one is acoustic.
Modern Wisdom
#883 - Dr Matthew Walker - The Science Of Perfect Sleep
And there's now, I think, this emerging wave of acoustaceuticals, which is acoustic manipulation of the brain. Early studies from groups in Japan, like from Germany, Jan Born's group, they were just simply trying to do sounds that were these tones that would go at the frequency of the slow brainwaves. And they just started playing them as you were falling asleep and just kept playing them.
Modern Wisdom
#883 - Dr Matthew Walker - The Science Of Perfect Sleep
And they were ignorant of whether your brainwaves were going up or down. And it did seem to improve the amount of deep sleep, just passive tone playing at this frequency of about once every second or less. Then they got a bit clever.
Modern Wisdom
#883 - Dr Matthew Walker - The Science Of Perfect Sleep
Then they started to measure the brainwaves in the laboratory and they would try to hit the brain with a tone right at that strike of midnight, like we were doing with electricity. And sure enough, you boosted the brainwave. The problem was if you did it about three or four times in a row, the brain fought back and it resisted the tone.
Modern Wisdom
#883 - Dr Matthew Walker - The Science Of Perfect Sleep
And in fact, it started to decrease the amount of deep sleep brainwaves. So you've got to be a bit careful. Why would that happen? It's probably because the brain has a protective neural mechanism.
Modern Wisdom
#883 - Dr Matthew Walker - The Science Of Perfect Sleep
to prevent too much synchronous brainwave activity synchronous brainwave activity when it gets out of control is called epileptiform brainwave activity which causes a seizure so you've got to be you know you have to be thinking about these things so i think that but there is i think now devices out there that are doing vibratory stimulation
Modern Wisdom
#883 - Dr Matthew Walker - The Science Of Perfect Sleep
And part of the brain stimulation device that we have now is a bone conduction system too, where we can also vibrate you as well as electrical stimulate you. So you're doing both. So I'm doing both because when it comes to sleep for a commercial device, now as a scientific device, I want to pass them out separately and I want to understand them distinctly.
Modern Wisdom
#883 - Dr Matthew Walker - The Science Of Perfect Sleep
But when it comes to the boots in the ground and the trenches, I'm going to throw the kitchen sink at this too. So if I can do acoustics and electrical, I'll do it.
Modern Wisdom
#883 - Dr Matthew Walker - The Science Of Perfect Sleep
It's so cool. All of this technology is so sick. And I wonder what's going to happen. I wonder what's sort of coming next. And obviously, you know, such a reliance on pharmaceuticals. Yeah. Sort of leaning in and people manipulating all manner of different things internally. Yeah. You mentioned insomnia there. Have you looked at chronic fatigue syndrome? Is that part of your remit at all?
Modern Wisdom
#883 - Dr Matthew Walker - The Science Of Perfect Sleep
Fatigue sounds like tiredness, sounds like sleep. Is that something that you guys ever cross over with?
Modern Wisdom
#883 - Dr Matthew Walker - The Science Of Perfect Sleep
We've done a little work in it and it's different. And I think what's happening with chronic fatigue is that there is, here we're talking about a metabolic problem, which is it's about energy balance, that there's something going on with the metabolic regulation of the system that that causes this overall sense of malaise.
Modern Wisdom
#883 - Dr Matthew Walker - The Science Of Perfect Sleep
Now, how that plays out with sleep, all we simply know is that chronic fatigue syndrome results in fragmented sleep and poor quality of sleep, which in some ways is counterintuitive because all of us, if you've ever gone out on one of... You know, I cycle for a bit.
Modern Wisdom
#883 - Dr Matthew Walker - The Science Of Perfect Sleep
So just close your eyes, start at the top of your head and just start to relax back. Feel your neck, feel how tense it is. Start to relax it. Maybe even your forehead is that tense and just move through the rest of the body.
Modern Wisdom
#883 - Dr Matthew Walker - The Science Of Perfect Sleep
If I've gone on one of those, you know, century rides and, you know, back in California, I like to do in the summer because I love cycling in the heat. By the end of that day, I come home and it's like working in the fields for eight or nine hours. I just know that night I am going to have the most righteous sleep of my life because I'm just so fatigued. I can feel it in my body.
Modern Wisdom
#883 - Dr Matthew Walker - The Science Of Perfect Sleep
That's a very different physiological state, I believe, than chronic fatigue syndrome. Mine is acute fatigue syndrome. Chronic fatigue syndrome, I think, is probably a very different biological cascade. And that's probably pushing you into more, perhaps a higher kind of chronic cortisol state where you're all of a sudden fighting against sleep rather than promoting sleep. I think it's different.
Modern Wisdom
#883 - Dr Matthew Walker - The Science Of Perfect Sleep
Fascinating. You said earlier on as well about dreaming. I want to kind of get into dreaming. What is it? Why do we do it? How does it work? Explain to me.
Modern Wisdom
#883 - Dr Matthew Walker - The Science Of Perfect Sleep
Yeah. Dreaming is... when you think about it, absolutely bizarre because last night, everyone listening, yourself included, as long as you slept, you all became flagrantly psychotic. And before you reject my diagnosis of your nightly psychosis, I'll give you five good reasons. Firstly, when you slept and you started to dream, you started to see things which were not there.
Modern Wisdom
#883 - Dr Matthew Walker - The Science Of Perfect Sleep
So you were hallucinating. Second, you believe things that could not possibly be true. So you were delusional. Third, you became confused about time and place and person. And in psychiatry, that's what we call being disoriented. Fourth, you had wildly fluctuating emotions. And we describe that as becoming emotionally labile. You're pendulum-like. You're all over the place.
Modern Wisdom
#883 - Dr Matthew Walker - The Science Of Perfect Sleep
And then fifth, you woke up this morning and you forgot most, if not all of that dream experience. You're suffering from amnesia. If you were to experience any one of those five symptoms while you're awake, you'd probably be seeking psychiatric and psychological intervention. But for reasons that now we're starting to understand, it's a normal biological and psychological process.
Modern Wisdom
#883 - Dr Matthew Walker - The Science Of Perfect Sleep
So if it's prevalent and it's consistent, what is it functionally doing for us? Now, you've got to be very careful because dreaming, for the most part, is principally associated with REM sleep.
Modern Wisdom
#883 - Dr Matthew Walker - The Science Of Perfect Sleep
back and just you're not making any judgments you're just being aware of your body that's fantastic too the final thing if none of those appeal mental walk in hyper detail so think about let's say a walk that you do with your dog And what I want you to do is think about this at the level of, okay, I open the drawer. Which leash am I going to take? The blue or the red? I'll take the blue one.
Modern Wisdom
#883 - Dr Matthew Walker - The Science Of Perfect Sleep
So how do I put a scalpel scientifically between simply conflating any function of REM sleep, let's say hormone benefits for testosterone, and saying, no, separate from REM sleep, separate from the stage of sleep from which dreaming emerges, show me that dreaming above and beyond the state from which it comes from, which is REM, also has its own separate functional benefits.
Modern Wisdom
#883 - Dr Matthew Walker - The Science Of Perfect Sleep
And that was hard to do for a long time. And now we know that there are two benefits of dreaming independent of necessarily having REM sleep, although it is beneficially supported by the physiology of REM sleep. The first is that dreaming provides a form of overnight therapy.
Modern Wisdom
#883 - Dr Matthew Walker - The Science Of Perfect Sleep
Dreaming is emotional first aid because it's during dream sleep at night that dreaming acts like a nocturnal soothing balm that just takes the sharp edges off those difficult, painful experiences so that you come back the next day and you feel better about them. And what REM sleep dreaming is doing is essentially it's divorcing the emotion from the memory experience.
Modern Wisdom
#883 - Dr Matthew Walker - The Science Of Perfect Sleep
Because what makes a memory emotional is that at the time of the experience, you had this whole visceral emotional reaction and that wraps the memory with this emotional blanket. But what dreaming does is it goes in there and it divorces the emotion from the memory.
Modern Wisdom
#883 - Dr Matthew Walker - The Science Of Perfect Sleep
It strips the bitter rind from the informational orange so that you wake up the next day and you have a memory of an emotional event. But it's no longer emotional itself. You don't regurgitate the same intensity of visceral reaction that you did at the time of the experience. And so that's why we think... Dreaming provides a form of, it's emotional convalescence.
Modern Wisdom
#883 - Dr Matthew Walker - The Science Of Perfect Sleep
And the quintessential disorder that we've studied that this process seems to fail in is PTSD, post-traumatic stress disorder. Because when you speak to those patients, what they will tell you is, I can't quote unquote get over the event.
Modern Wisdom
#883 - Dr Matthew Walker - The Science Of Perfect Sleep
What they mean is that every time that they relive the memory, let's say it's the war veteran, they're walking through the supermarket car park, a car backfires, and instantly they have a flashback to the trauma memory of the detonation of the land mine. And what they're describing to you is they have not stripped the emotion from the memory. It's still bound to the experience.
Modern Wisdom
#883 - Dr Matthew Walker - The Science Of Perfect Sleep
it's not coincidental that one of the diagnostic features of PTSD is repetitive nightmares. And what we've done is put forward a theory that in PTSD, because they have two higher levels of a stress-related chemical called noradrenaline in the brain, They are not able to do the elegant trick of stripping the emotion from the memory. So what happens?
Modern Wisdom
#883 - Dr Matthew Walker - The Science Of Perfect Sleep
The next night, the brain comes back and says, look, sleep, please. I've got this highly charged emotional trauma memory. Please do your trick of divorcing the emotion from the memory. And it fails again because of this two high levels of a stress chemical called noradrenaline. And so it becomes this repetitive, almost like a broken record.
Modern Wisdom
#883 - Dr Matthew Walker - The Science Of Perfect Sleep
And it perfectly fits the feature of repetitive nightmares. You cannot receive a diagnosis of PTSD without having sleep disturbance or repetitive nightmares. So then you can ask, well, so then in normal REM sleep, why is it doing that? REM sleep is the only time during the 24-hour period where our brain shuts off this stress-related chemical called noradrenaline.
Modern Wisdom
#883 - Dr Matthew Walker - The Science Of Perfect Sleep
Clip the dog in with my right hand. I'm closing the drawer with my left. Open the front door with the left. I go down the stairs. I look across. There's that weird Berkeley house. It's kind of just a little bit hippie, but no problem. And then the cars always come too quickly around that bend. That's the level of hyper detail.
Modern Wisdom
#883 - Dr Matthew Walker - The Science Of Perfect Sleep
The sister chemical in the body everyone has heard about, it's called adrenaline. Upstairs in the brain, it's noradrenaline. And noradrenaline does lots of things, but one of the things it does is it gets released in rude amounts when you undergo one of these emotional experiences. It's the thing that plants the red flag on the memory and says to the brain, this is priority. This was emotional.
Modern Wisdom
#883 - Dr Matthew Walker - The Science Of Perfect Sleep
This is important. And so it's useful to prioritize what gets remembered in the brain. But it's only useful to tag the memory initially as important. It's not useful to hold on to the emotion. And Dream sleep provides that form of the emotional detox.
Modern Wisdom
#883 - Dr Matthew Walker - The Science Of Perfect Sleep
So I presented this data at a conference, this theory that dream sleep strips the emotion from the memory because dream sleep is the only time when the brain has this perfect therapeutic chemical cocktail of shutting off noradrenaline. And the brain actually has the emotional memory centers reactivated during dreaming.
Modern Wisdom
#883 - Dr Matthew Walker - The Science Of Perfect Sleep
So you can reactivate the emotional memories, but you process them in a quote unquote safe neurochemical environment. But in PTSD, they'd already measured levels of noradrenaline, the cerebrospinal fluid, and found that they were excessively high. No wonder they couldn't strip the memory, the emotion from the memory. And I was presenting this.
Modern Wisdom
#883 - Dr Matthew Walker - The Science Of Perfect Sleep
And then in the afternoon session, a psychiatrist came along from Puget Sound. He worked in the VA, the veterans system. And he was treating patients with PTSD. And they, most of them had high blood pressure. So he was treating them with a generic drug called Prazosin. And the drug, it turns out, because it's the VA, it's cheap, it's generic, it crosses the blood brain barrier.
Modern Wisdom
#883 - Dr Matthew Walker - The Science Of Perfect Sleep
So it goes up into the brain. And he was perplexed because his patients were coming back to him and their blood pressure was a little bit better. But they started saying to him, I'm not having the nightmares anymore and my symptoms are getting better. So I had a theory that was in search of clinical data. He had clinical data that was in search of a theory.
Modern Wisdom
#883 - Dr Matthew Walker - The Science Of Perfect Sleep
And it was one of those kind of hair on the back of your neck moments standing up. Race to him afterwards said, look, I've got to catch a flight back down to Berkeley. I'm going to fly you down next week. We need to go out for dinner. We need to speak about this. We started speaking about it. He did clinical trials. It then became the only... VA approved medication for PTSD.
Modern Wisdom
#883 - Dr Matthew Walker - The Science Of Perfect Sleep
There have been some failed replications with that medication. I'll tell you that right now, but nevertheless, it is usually one of the first line medication treatments now for PTSD veterans for nightmares. So that's the first benefit of dreaming. I would say that you can then argue, well, how do you disentangle that from just REM sleep that they're getting?
Modern Wisdom
#883 - Dr Matthew Walker - The Science Of Perfect Sleep
And what's interesting, if you look across all four of the things I've just described, the commonality is that they all get your mind off itself. Meditation, you're starting to focus on something other than your mind. If you're doing box breathing, you're all of a sudden body centric, not mind centric.
Modern Wisdom
#883 - Dr Matthew Walker - The Science Of Perfect Sleep
Rosalind Cartwright, who has now passed away, great sleep researcher back in the 1980s, was looking at her patients she was treating psychologically who were going through really tough experiences, bereavement, divorce, and they were very depressed. And around the time of those events, she was measuring their dreams, getting dream reports.
Modern Wisdom
#883 - Dr Matthew Walker - The Science Of Perfect Sleep
And then she did a follow-up study one year later, and about half of those patients had gained remission in terms of their depression. They'd got better. The other half had not. So she then went back a year previous and looked at the dream reports and split them on the basis of those who ended up getting remission and improving versus those who didn't. Both of those groups were getting REM sleep.
Modern Wisdom
#883 - Dr Matthew Walker - The Science Of Perfect Sleep
both of those groups were dreaming that was not the difference the difference was that those people who got remission at the time of the event were dreaming about the experiences themselves those people who had REM sleep who were dreaming but didn't dream of the events that they were experiencing did not gain remission in other words it's not just sufficient to have REM sleep.
Modern Wisdom
#883 - Dr Matthew Walker - The Science Of Perfect Sleep
It's not even sufficient to dream. You have to be dreaming about the difficult things that you're going through in order to get that overnight therapy benefit. So that to me was a demonstration that it's something about the act of dreaming above and beyond the stage of sleep. Does that make some contorted sense? The second benefit of dreaming is very different. It's creativity and ingenuity.
Modern Wisdom
#883 - Dr Matthew Walker - The Science Of Perfect Sleep
Because during deep sleep, deep non-realm sleep, that's when the brain takes the new memories that you've formed and it cements them. It sets them like amber, like a fly trapped in amber into your brain. It cements them into the architecture so that you don't forget. So deep sleep hits the save button on individual memories.
Modern Wisdom
#883 - Dr Matthew Walker - The Science Of Perfect Sleep
But memories that sit like isolate islands in your brain are largely useless because that's the old laptop. Your laptop was even better at storing individual pieces of information than your brain ever was. But you're far more intelligent. Why? Because you don't just simply have isolate pieces of information. Your brain richly interconnects them together.
Modern Wisdom
#883 - Dr Matthew Walker - The Science Of Perfect Sleep
That's the difference between knowledge, which is remembering the facts, versus wisdom, which is knowing what it all means when you put them together. That is the purview of REM sleep. REM sleep takes those new memories and it acts almost like group therapy for memories.
Modern Wisdom
#883 - Dr Matthew Walker - The Science Of Perfect Sleep
If you're starting to do some type of body scan, again, it's hard for you to think about your worries and your stresses if you're doing it. Mental walk, same thing. Because sleep at that time of night is a little bit like trying to remember someone's name. The harder you try, the further you push it away. Sleep is something that happens to us. It's not something that we make happen.
Modern Wisdom
#883 - Dr Matthew Walker - The Science Of Perfect Sleep
Everyone gets a name badge and it forces you to now speak to the people not at the front of the room that you think you've got the most obvious connection with. You've already done that when you're awake, seeking out the obvious connections. Dream sleep forces you to go and speak to the people at the back of the room that you think you've got no association with whatsoever.
Modern Wisdom
#883 - Dr Matthew Walker - The Science Of Perfect Sleep
It turns out that you do. It's a distant connection, but it's a powerful one nonetheless. Because when you start to fuse things together that shouldn't normally go together, but when they do, cause marked advance is in evolutionary fitness. It sounds like the biological basis of creativity. That's what dream sleep is doing.
Modern Wisdom
#883 - Dr Matthew Walker - The Science Of Perfect Sleep
It's almost as though you wake up with a revised mind wide web of associations. And it's during dream sleep and the act of dreaming itself that we, it's almost like memory pinball. You take what you've learned, bang, and you shoot it up into the cortex and you start bouncing it around and you test out what the connections are.
Modern Wisdom
#883 - Dr Matthew Walker - The Science Of Perfect Sleep
But the way the algorithm works during dreaming is different than wakefulness. Wakefulness is the Google search gone right. You type in, you know, modern wisdom into the Google search and the first page all about you. Fantastic. You go to page 20 and it's about a field hockey game in Utah. And you think, but if you read about it, all of a sudden you think, oh, that's clever.
Modern Wisdom
#883 - Dr Matthew Walker - The Science Of Perfect Sleep
I can see why that's associated.
Modern Wisdom
#883 - Dr Matthew Walker - The Science Of Perfect Sleep
Now, you can have a thousand of those every night that are completely useless, but all you need is one of those to make that advanced leap. That's the novel difference between 2001 and Space Odyssey, where they're banging bones around and then all of a sudden one of them realizes... Christ, this thing is actually a weapon.
Modern Wisdom
#883 - Dr Matthew Walker - The Science Of Perfect Sleep
It's not just a bone. What does it mean if we keep dreaming about the same situation or the same person, people that have sort of consistent dreams with consistent characters or scenarios in?
Modern Wisdom
#883 - Dr Matthew Walker - The Science Of Perfect Sleep
Yeah. Repetitive dreaming and repetitive nightmares. Some of it we think from the PTSD literature is about trying to reprocess emotion and emotional experiences and something maladaptive short circuits that. So you keep trying to reprocess. That's one theory. The other is that we We don't know if necessarily that's your brain simply trying to prioritize the memory circuit.
Modern Wisdom
#883 - Dr Matthew Walker - The Science Of Perfect Sleep
And it's saying that every night I want to etch and score that memory into the sort of the neural circuit glass of the brain ever more strongly because it's important. So one camp is it's maladaptive. And it's a process failed. The other is it's adaptive. And it's just simply telling your brain, pointing you to saying, this is the important stuff. We're going to memorize it more.
Modern Wisdom
#883 - Dr Matthew Walker - The Science Of Perfect Sleep
I would say that for people who are undergoing sort of repetitive nightmares, we used to have no real good memory. treatments for it. Now I spoke about processing as one way that we've done this with PTSD patients, but there's now actually a very effective psychological treatment for nightmares. And it's called, um, I image rehearsal therapy or I R T for short.
Modern Wisdom
#883 - Dr Matthew Walker - The Science Of Perfect Sleep
And it comes back to, we made a discovery back in, uh, 2003. What we found is that when you form a memory, uh, That memory is fragile. And when you sleep, the brain fixates it. So it's now stable and it's set and it's hard coded into the brain.
Modern Wisdom
#883 - Dr Matthew Walker - The Science Of Perfect Sleep
However, we then discovered that when you come back the next day, if you recollect, if you reactivate that memory again, it opens that memory back up to being fragile and susceptible to being molded and changed. And you think, well, why would you go through the act of cementing it only to basically kind of undo that cementing process? Think about a memory system. Think about a Word document.
Modern Wisdom
#883 - Dr Matthew Walker - The Science Of Perfect Sleep
I type in the Word document and then I hit the save button, which is sleep. I come back the next day, I double click on the Word document and I can't edit it. I want it to be flexible. And your brain has that ability. So the brain, every time you recollect a memory, you open it back up to change and then you modify it and then you sleep again and you re-consolidate the memory.
Modern Wisdom
#883 - Dr Matthew Walker - The Science Of Perfect Sleep
And when you get that mind focused, distracted away from itself, the next thing you typically remember is the alarm going off in the morning. Why? Because you got your mind off itself.
Modern Wisdom
#883 - Dr Matthew Walker - The Science Of Perfect Sleep
This therapy took advantage of that. So it had individuals who had repetitive painful nightmares. And with a therapist, they simply rehearsed the trauma dream. Now during the rehearsal, every time they brought back that memory to mind, by definition, it opened up that memory to being edited. And with the therapist, they would convert the ending. So let's say that I was in a horrific car accident.
Modern Wisdom
#883 - Dr Matthew Walker - The Science Of Perfect Sleep
And the brakes failed and I went straight through the junction and I got sideswiped and it was a horrific car accident. Well, now instead I'm coming up to the lights and I'm hitting the brake pedal. And in this new sort of rehearsal, they say, well, then you just reach down because it's a manual car and you just grab the handbrake and you pull it and gradually the car decelerates.
Modern Wisdom
#883 - Dr Matthew Walker - The Science Of Perfect Sleep
You move it to the side of the road and you avert the- Rewriting the memory. And you rewrite the memory and then you get them to sleep. And now it reconsolidates the updated version. And you have to do that though multiple times. So you set the new scenario, which is a neutral scenario. You have them rehearse it every day. You set a timer, they do this.
Modern Wisdom
#883 - Dr Matthew Walker - The Science Of Perfect Sleep
And then over time you morph the memory and you now rewrite your history And as you're doing that, night after night, what happens to the trauma dreams? The frequency of them decreases in proportion with the frequency of you repeating that every day. Absolutely brilliant memory dynamics.
Modern Wisdom
#883 - Dr Matthew Walker - The Science Of Perfect Sleep
It's so cool. So cool. Matt, I feel like I could speak to you all day. We need to bring this one into land, at least for the first one. You're so great. And like I said before, you genuinely made a huge change. Probably the single biggest lifestyle change that I made was after your first episode on Rogan. So however long I live is at least in part due to yourself.
Modern Wisdom
#883 - Dr Matthew Walker - The Science Of Perfect Sleep
Okay. So first one, quantity. Second one, quality, that being a component of that. Is there anything else to say on quality before we move on?
Modern Wisdom
#883 - Dr Matthew Walker - The Science Of Perfect Sleep
Well, I stand on the shoulders of all of my colleagues. I think I did a pretty bad job when I first came out at Communicating Science. I think I was untrained. I was dictatorial. I was absolutist. Not because I wanted to be that way. That's not my natural ilk. It was just because I saw so much...
Modern Wisdom
#883 - Dr Matthew Walker - The Science Of Perfect Sleep
suffering happening by way of a lack of sleep steaming in with authority sounds like a nice way to fix that right exactly and i was so passionate about it i came across as almost adversarial i probably caused as much insomnia by way of my ted talk you know it was called sleep is your superpower or something and people were saying it should have been called sleep or else dot dot dot you know and i feel bad about that but so i've
Modern Wisdom
#883 - Dr Matthew Walker - The Science Of Perfect Sleep
I would say now I'm a little less bad as a scientific communicator, but really all I'm doing is communicating the science of all of my colleagues. I'm just in the privileged position of being the idiot with the Bon Jovi hairstyle and the bad accent who's trying to communicate sleep science.
Modern Wisdom
#883 - Dr Matthew Walker - The Science Of Perfect Sleep
But if I've done any of that work, it's simply because I've communicated the science of others and for their efforts, I'm immensely grateful.
Modern Wisdom
#883 - Dr Matthew Walker - The Science Of Perfect Sleep
Thank you. Matt, I appreciate you. Until next time, mate. Next time.
Modern Wisdom
#883 - Dr Matthew Walker - The Science Of Perfect Sleep
Yeah, probably. The other way that we measure, and most people can't do this, but is in the sleep laboratory, we place electrodes on your head. You And the other way we measure quality is the depth of your deep non-REM sleep. So we have two main types of sleep, REM and non-REM. Non-REM, for most sleep trackers, you divide it into light non-REM and deep non-REM.
The Dr. Hyman Show
How Sleep Rewires Your Brain, Balances Your Hormones & Extends Your Life | Dr. Matthew Walker
It shouldn't surprise us because sleep is the most ridiculous, dumb thing you could ever have designed from an evolutionary perspective. You're not eating, you're not finding a mate, you're not reproducing, you're not caring for your young. And you're vulnerable to being eaten.
The Dr. Hyman Show
How Sleep Rewires Your Brain, Balances Your Hormones & Extends Your Life | Dr. Matthew Walker
Now on any one of those grounds, but especially as a collective, sleep should have been strongly selected against in the course of evolution.
The Dr. Hyman Show
How Sleep Rewires Your Brain, Balances Your Hormones & Extends Your Life | Dr. Matthew Walker
They have to keep coming up for air. Now you could have designed a system where they just didn't need sleep so that they would never have to worry about surfacing. Sleep was so incredibly necessary for those aquatic mammals. They had to figure out how to sleep with one half of their brain.
The Dr. Hyman Show
How Sleep Rewires Your Brain, Balances Your Hormones & Extends Your Life | Dr. Matthew Walker
Because they couldn't get around this non-negotiable thing called sleep. Yeah. And so I think for me, what that really tells us is that If sleep doesn't serve an absolutely vital set of functions, it was probably the biggest mistake the evolutionary process ever made. And now we realize it didn't make a spectacular blunder. It is- We need a cleanup. It's cleanup.
The Dr. Hyman Show
How Sleep Rewires Your Brain, Balances Your Hormones & Extends Your Life | Dr. Matthew Walker
Sleep is mother nature's best effort yet at immortality based on everything that I've seen.
The Dr. Hyman Show
How Sleep Rewires Your Brain, Balances Your Hormones & Extends Your Life | Dr. Matthew Walker
I mean, if you look at the data, there has been a pernicious erosion of sleep time over the past 100 years. Now, if you look at it over the past 10 years, that creep has maybe not been so demonstrable. But really, think about it. We evolved over millions and millions of years for our evolution.
The Dr. Hyman Show
How Sleep Rewires Your Brain, Balances Your Hormones & Extends Your Life | Dr. Matthew Walker
And it's taken mother nature millions of years to put this necessity of a seven to nine hour sleep need in place. And then within the space of a hundred years, we've gone from something that seems to be based on the data around about 8.4 hours of sleep a night that we used to be getting a hundred years ago.
The Dr. Hyman Show
How Sleep Rewires Your Brain, Balances Your Hormones & Extends Your Life | Dr. Matthew Walker
Now, if you look at the data on average, Americans are sleeping about six hours and 40 minutes. Now don't forget, That's the average. That means that there's a good proportion of people who sit to the left side of that distribution, who are getting even less than that. America is not the worst culprit, by the way, Japan, we're all at each other's throats and not thinking clearly.
The Dr. Hyman Show
How Sleep Rewires Your Brain, Balances Your Hormones & Extends Your Life | Dr. Matthew Walker
We think about that and we giggle about it. But I don't think it's a factor to be discounted in our emotional dysfunction. Your empathy, for example, we did a great study and we were looking at how empathetically sensitive a human being is. And boy, do you just simply start to ignore other people's pain and their needs. No, you feel like crap, so it's hard to care, right?
The Dr. Hyman Show
How Sleep Rewires Your Brain, Balances Your Hormones & Extends Your Life | Dr. Matthew Walker
You feel so bad yourself. Why? Because you've got to take care of... You know that your brain... Well, let me put it this way. Human beings are the only species that will deliberately deprive themselves of sleep for no apparent good reason. Like doctors, you mean? Like doctors, exactly. But what does that tell us? That tells us is that mother nature has never had to face
The Dr. Hyman Show
How Sleep Rewires Your Brain, Balances Your Hormones & Extends Your Life | Dr. Matthew Walker
this challenge of sleep deprivation. So no wonder there are no safety nets in place. So no wonder that we firstly go down very quickly biologically in terms of our health, but also don't forget that that is such a rare circumstance that when it happens, when the brain starts to sense I'm not sleeping enough, now it doesn't know why because we're watching Netflix.
The Dr. Hyman Show
How Sleep Rewires Your Brain, Balances Your Hormones & Extends Your Life | Dr. Matthew Walker
It just says, red alert, break glass in case of emergency. I'm not going to care about you, the people that I love. I've got to go into essentially low battery status and take care of myself. So you lose your empathetic sensitivity. We looked at doctors. And there's great study from a team in Israel too.
The Dr. Hyman Show
How Sleep Rewires Your Brain, Balances Your Hormones & Extends Your Life | Dr. Matthew Walker
And what they found was that they started to prescribe less, and it was necessary, less pain medication for their patients the more sleep deprived they were. Why? Because they lost their empathy. They did not care. And so patients are suffering. They are more sort of ensconced in nociceptive, you know, drench of pain because the doctors just don't see it.
The Dr. Hyman Show
How Sleep Rewires Your Brain, Balances Your Hormones & Extends Your Life | Dr. Matthew Walker
Yeah. It's almost like a hazing that we went through it and you're going to have to go through it. But it's horrible.
The Dr. Hyman Show
How Sleep Rewires Your Brain, Balances Your Hormones & Extends Your Life | Dr. Matthew Walker
And if you look at the curve, the decline in sleep over the past really 70 years, for which we have good data, and if you look, for example, at the rise in obesity over the same duration of time, those two things go in opposite directions. As sleeping is coming down, obesity is going up. And we know that a lack of sleep changes your appetite hormones.
The Dr. Hyman Show
How Sleep Rewires Your Brain, Balances Your Hormones & Extends Your Life | Dr. Matthew Walker
It changes your ability to dispose of food and specifically regulate your blood sugar. So you are more obesogenic in terms of your profile of weight gain.
The Dr. Hyman Show
How Sleep Rewires Your Brain, Balances Your Hormones & Extends Your Life | Dr. Matthew Walker
Yeah. That's all you want. And that's exactly, it's not just that you eat more, which you do. It's what you eat. That's the problem. You go after the heavy hitting stodgy carbohydrates, simple sugars, and you shy away from the, the sort of, you know, the leafy greens, the nuts and the good proteins, because you are just on a junk food binge. Well, you want to get energy and you want it quick. Yeah.
The Dr. Hyman Show
How Sleep Rewires Your Brain, Balances Your Hormones & Extends Your Life | Dr. Matthew Walker
Yeah.
The Dr. Hyman Show
How Sleep Rewires Your Brain, Balances Your Hormones & Extends Your Life | Dr. Matthew Walker
That's right, and you can see that same replication of failure across multiple organ systems. So for example, I take a young, healthy set of males, I limit them to let's say four or five hours of sleep for five nights, they will have a level of testosterone, which is that of someone 10 years their senior. So I can age a healthy young man by 10 years by short sleeping them for a week.
The Dr. Hyman Show
How Sleep Rewires Your Brain, Balances Your Hormones & Extends Your Life | Dr. Matthew Walker
You can take people who have perfectly regulated blood sugar, no problems with their blood glucose whatsoever, Put them on that same regimen of four or five nights of short sleep. And at the end of it, someone like you would look at their blood work and you would say, you are bordering on being pre-diabetic right now. Again, that's within the space of days. Days, yeah.
The Dr. Hyman Show
How Sleep Rewires Your Brain, Balances Your Hormones & Extends Your Life | Dr. Matthew Walker
So I think it's, again, a demonstration to us that sleep, we don't have any real wiggle room.
The Dr. Hyman Show
How Sleep Rewires Your Brain, Balances Your Hormones & Extends Your Life | Dr. Matthew Walker
Yeah.
The Dr. Hyman Show
How Sleep Rewires Your Brain, Balances Your Hormones & Extends Your Life | Dr. Matthew Walker
All of the above plus more. So there's not necessarily just one cause. Let's start at the hierarchical government level. There is no first world nation that I know of that has had a major public health campaign regarding sleep. Why not? We've had it for drunk driving. We've had it for safe sex. We've had it for all of these different things, but there's nothing there for sleep.
The Dr. Hyman Show
How Sleep Rewires Your Brain, Balances Your Hormones & Extends Your Life | Dr. Matthew Walker
And yes, you could argue from a cynical perspective, it's because we want you, from a capitalist society, we really want you to be doing two things. You're either producing things or you're buying things or you're consuming things. And if you're asleep, you're not doing either of those two. So you could argue conspiracy. I don't think it's that.
The Dr. Hyman Show
How Sleep Rewires Your Brain, Balances Your Hormones & Extends Your Life | Dr. Matthew Walker
And I've actually just recently started a public charity, a foundation specifically designed for global sleep education. Take it a step down. There is the World Health Organization that I spoke to recently. There is no educational module for children translated into 37 different languages across different age ranges that educates them on the importance of sleep.
The Dr. Hyman Show
How Sleep Rewires Your Brain, Balances Your Hormones & Extends Your Life | Dr. Matthew Walker
So no wonder there is a parent to child transmission of sleep neglect. We have to change that too. Some of it is about education. The second part is mental health. We have a rising tide of anxiety in society. People are so stressed and we get people coming into the center at UC Berkeley and they will say, I am so tired. I am just so tired, but I'm so wired that I can't fall asleep.
The Dr. Hyman Show
How Sleep Rewires Your Brain, Balances Your Hormones & Extends Your Life | Dr. Matthew Walker
It's this tired but wired phenomenon. So the anxiety epidemic is causing sleep problems. And that's adrenal too, right? That's the cortisol rise at night. It's cortisol rise at night. It's because of that, what we call the HPA axis, the sort of the cortisol descending chain.
The Dr. Hyman Show
How Sleep Rewires Your Brain, Balances Your Hormones & Extends Your Life | Dr. Matthew Walker
It's also because the nervous system almost is forced into a locked position of the fight or flight branch, what we call the sympathetic nervous system, which is anything but sympathetic. It's very agitating. Yeah. And we cannot sleep when we are wired into the fight or flight branch. We have to switch over to the quiescent branch, the parasympathetic.
The Dr. Hyman Show
How Sleep Rewires Your Brain, Balances Your Hormones & Extends Your Life | Dr. Matthew Walker
So I think those two factors, the adrenal sort of nation, as it were, together with this fight or flight stance of the nervous system, is a royal roadblock to good sleep at night. I think it's one of the biggest factors. We've then also got the combative forces of entertainment and social media, which are on the, of course, consuming.
The Dr. Hyman Show
How Sleep Rewires Your Brain, Balances Your Hormones & Extends Your Life | Dr. Matthew Walker
And it's the worst time because in this modern era, we're constantly on reception. Very rarely do we do reflection. And the only time we do reflection
The Dr. Hyman Show
How Sleep Rewires Your Brain, Balances Your Hormones & Extends Your Life | Dr. Matthew Walker
when our head hits the pillow and that is the worst of times to do reflection because when you do that you start you start to ruminate when you ruminate you catastrophize and when you catastrophize you're dead in the water for the next two years because you know everything seems twice as bad in the dark of night than it does in the light of day and if we're doing that right before bed
The Dr. Hyman Show
How Sleep Rewires Your Brain, Balances Your Hormones & Extends Your Life | Dr. Matthew Walker
So I think there are issues there. Sleep disorders are on the rise. Insomnia, which I think is a consequence of the anxiety and the stress. I often think that insomnia is the revenge of things that we've not processed during the day and got resolution to. We've got sleep apnea, snoring. I think that's heavy snoring or can be an indicator of that.
The Dr. Hyman Show
How Sleep Rewires Your Brain, Balances Your Hormones & Extends Your Life | Dr. Matthew Walker
That's certainly comorbid with diabetes and also obesity. Obesity. So I think you've got all of this collection of factors together with the stigma that we described earlier, which is, well, I'm not really that proud of sleeping more. Why should I be? Because society doesn't reward it. You know, it's the type A, the early bird catches the worm.
The Dr. Hyman Show
How Sleep Rewires Your Brain, Balances Your Hormones & Extends Your Life | Dr. Matthew Walker
Maybe that's true, but I would say based on the data, the second mouse gets the cheese. And what's strange is that we... Never heard that one. But I find it funny that we, we chastise people who wake up late as being lazy, but we never say, oh, you go to bed early. You're lazy.
The Dr. Hyman Show
How Sleep Rewires Your Brain, Balances Your Hormones & Extends Your Life | Dr. Matthew Walker
Well, that's night owl and that's morning lock. It's not your fault. So I think there are a whole collection of conspiring factors that together conflate to this enormous sleep challenge that we have in society right now.
The Dr. Hyman Show
How Sleep Rewires Your Brain, Balances Your Hormones & Extends Your Life | Dr. Matthew Walker
Yeah, restless leg syndrome.
The Dr. Hyman Show
How Sleep Rewires Your Brain, Balances Your Hormones & Extends Your Life | Dr. Matthew Walker
And what we found is that when people are sleep deprived, you become asocial. You withdraw from society. You just don't want to interact with other people. You just want to, you know, you just want to shut down. Yeah.
The Dr. Hyman Show
How Sleep Rewires Your Brain, Balances Your Hormones & Extends Your Life | Dr. Matthew Walker
Yeah, I think, you know, all of those factors that you just described will all feed into gut dysbiosis. And there is, I think, a bidirectional, and this is what we spoke about in the article, a bidirectional relationship between your gut health and your brain sleep health. Meaning that when your gut is in balance with that sort of collection of the flora and the fauna in your gut microbiome,
The Dr. Hyman Show
How Sleep Rewires Your Brain, Balances Your Hormones & Extends Your Life | Dr. Matthew Walker
It can send a health-related signal through the nervous system by way of a major highway that connects your gut to the brain called the vagus nerve. And that can help- That's not like Las Vegas.
The Dr. Hyman Show
How Sleep Rewires Your Brain, Balances Your Hormones & Extends Your Life | Dr. Matthew Walker
That's the relaxation nerve, but it's also a major informational highway, bi-directional communication path between your brain and your gut. That's how we think that the gut can influence the brain. And that's how we think that if you get the gut right, it may be a new approach to a sleep aid because then you can get the brain right.
The Dr. Hyman Show
How Sleep Rewires Your Brain, Balances Your Hormones & Extends Your Life | Dr. Matthew Walker
And it works in the opposite way, which is that when you are sleeping well, it can communicate a signal for improved gut health through the vagus down into the body.
The Dr. Hyman Show
How Sleep Rewires Your Brain, Balances Your Hormones & Extends Your Life | Dr. Matthew Walker
But when you are not sleeping well, and there's been some great studies, for example, in the extreme with jet lag, my goodness, do you see that when the brain becomes deficient in its sleep through this communication pathway, you will get significant gut dysbiosis. And many people will tell you one of the things that happens when I'm jet lagged is that my tummy is just off.
The Dr. Hyman Show
How Sleep Rewires Your Brain, Balances Your Hormones & Extends Your Life | Dr. Matthew Walker
Oh my goodness, things don't go well for me. And I don't quite understand why. I'm eating the same things, but it's probably because of this gut dysbiosis caused by a lack of sleep.
The Dr. Hyman Show
How Sleep Rewires Your Brain, Balances Your Hormones & Extends Your Life | Dr. Matthew Walker
So it's not being answered yet. I suspect that we have enough data to do the correlation study that you just described, which is, Are these two things related?
The Dr. Hyman Show
How Sleep Rewires Your Brain, Balances Your Hormones & Extends Your Life | Dr. Matthew Walker
For example, if you look across a longitudinal study, and if we, I mean, we haven't been assessing the gut microbiome for probably long enough to have good longitudinal data yet in the gut microbiome, but we've got plenty of longitudinal data in sleep, meaning we've started off assessing people in their 30s or their 40s, track them over 15, 20 years,
The Dr. Hyman Show
How Sleep Rewires Your Brain, Balances Your Hormones & Extends Your Life | Dr. Matthew Walker
and then asked, is the sleep that they've been having across their life predictive of their all-cause mortality, cardiovascular mortality, cancer mortality? And we've got that data. What we now need is to look at gut health and ask, as that sleep is declining across the lifespan longitudinally, what happens to the gut?
The Dr. Hyman Show
How Sleep Rewires Your Brain, Balances Your Hormones & Extends Your Life | Dr. Matthew Walker
Yeah, yeah.
The Dr. Hyman Show
How Sleep Rewires Your Brain, Balances Your Hormones & Extends Your Life | Dr. Matthew Walker
No, yeah. Of a certain type to really enjoy that type of stuff. Exactly.
The Dr. Hyman Show
How Sleep Rewires Your Brain, Balances Your Hormones & Extends Your Life | Dr. Matthew Walker
That's right. And to me, that's one of the exciting parts of it. Because it's treatable. Is that it's both treatable and it's a novel, you know, is it a novel sleep aid pathway? I don't know. I don't know if it's powerful enough to come close to that. It may not be.
The Dr. Hyman Show
How Sleep Rewires Your Brain, Balances Your Hormones & Extends Your Life | Dr. Matthew Walker
I mean, I love to see the data. Yeah, yeah, yeah. But it's interesting. I'm not trying to be too skeptical because as scientists and doctors, you and I both know absence of evidence is not evidence of absence. So don't judge too quick. But right now, I think the jury's out. Yeah, for sure.
The Dr. Hyman Show
How Sleep Rewires Your Brain, Balances Your Hormones & Extends Your Life | Dr. Matthew Walker
Yeah, when you have sleep disruption, yeah.
The Dr. Hyman Show
How Sleep Rewires Your Brain, Balances Your Hormones & Extends Your Life | Dr. Matthew Walker
And Alzheimer's disease, there's some really fascinating data regarding... inflammation and Alzheimer's disease as a causal relationship now. Quite striking. Quite striking.
The Dr. Hyman Show
How Sleep Rewires Your Brain, Balances Your Hormones & Extends Your Life | Dr. Matthew Walker
And so, and I think we don't yet know what's happening with tau, which is the other tau protein, which is the other sort of culprit there with inflammation. I suspect it may be the same story. It may be even more powerfully explanatory of cognition.
The Dr. Hyman Show
How Sleep Rewires Your Brain, Balances Your Hormones & Extends Your Life | Dr. Matthew Walker
But, you know, it's all of this just once again teaches us, I think you and I, maybe people listening that for so long in medicine and science, we took the a siloed organ or system-specific approach. I was a cardiologist. I was a neurologist. I was an immunologist. We are an embodied species, brain and body combined. I'm an everything-ologist. Yeah, exactly.
The Dr. Hyman Show
How Sleep Rewires Your Brain, Balances Your Hormones & Extends Your Life | Dr. Matthew Walker
And that's what, if your doctor says that,
The Dr. Hyman Show
How Sleep Rewires Your Brain, Balances Your Hormones & Extends Your Life | Dr. Matthew Walker
Fundamental. Yeah. I mean, and during sleep, we have a metabolic reduction. Part of the... One of perhaps the restorative functions of sleep is to have a metabolic downturn to a degree. But I think the other point is there is... You spoke about all of these different, I'm a multi-system doctor.
The Dr. Hyman Show
How Sleep Rewires Your Brain, Balances Your Hormones & Extends Your Life | Dr. Matthew Walker
And yes, what we find is that all of those different systems, each by themselves, can all independently affect sleep. If you're in inflammation, if you have high blood pressure, if you have abnormal hormonal profiles, if you have poor blood sugar, all of these will disrupt your sleep. So it's feed up to the brain, disrupt sleep, but it also is feed down.
The Dr. Hyman Show
How Sleep Rewires Your Brain, Balances Your Hormones & Extends Your Life | Dr. Matthew Walker
And I've often thought, and it works both ways for health and ill health with good sleep versus bad sleep. If you've gone into one of those fancy music studios and there's that mixing deck with all of those little dials on it.
The Dr. Hyman Show
How Sleep Rewires Your Brain, Balances Your Hormones & Extends Your Life | Dr. Matthew Walker
Yeah, and I look at it, oh my goodness. And you can move all of the different dials. They're all of the different systems, but you know that there's that one white dial all the way to the far left that if you move that up, all of the other dials go up with it. That to me is sleep. It is the Archimedes lever of health. So that's why when you move sleep up in the right direction,
The Dr. Hyman Show
How Sleep Rewires Your Brain, Balances Your Hormones & Extends Your Life | Dr. Matthew Walker
you cascade down this whole, it's the single tide that rises all other health boats in my mind. And I think it's not my mind, it's the data.
The Dr. Hyman Show
How Sleep Rewires Your Brain, Balances Your Hormones & Extends Your Life | Dr. Matthew Walker
Teens who are sleep deprived because of early school start times. Suicide. And the link between a lack of sleep and suicide now, I think that's been one of the things that has just exploded on the scene in the past five years. Certainly, I didn't have anything in the book about that because it was just nascent at the time. Now, that data is so compelling.
The Dr. Hyman Show
How Sleep Rewires Your Brain, Balances Your Hormones & Extends Your Life | Dr. Matthew Walker
Insufficient sleep in teens will predict suicide ideation, meaning thinking about suicide. It will predict suicide attempts, and tragically, it will predict suicide completion. And it's not just sleep. What we're finding is that a lack of sleep will have maybe a twofold increased risk for suicidality in teens, meaning you may be twice as likely based on a cutoff of insufficient sleep.
The Dr. Hyman Show
How Sleep Rewires Your Brain, Balances Your Hormones & Extends Your Life | Dr. Matthew Walker
Right. And it's not their fault because the biology, as they become adolescents forces them to have a, an appetite, a predilection for sleeping much later into the night. They're not trying to be rebellious. It's just their biology. But then early school start times have them waking up far too early.
The Dr. Hyman Show
How Sleep Rewires Your Brain, Balances Your Hormones & Extends Your Life | Dr. Matthew Walker
So the one thing that gets squeezed like vice grips in the middle of the night for these teens is a sufficient night of sleep. But what we've also found is that it's not just sleep. Dreams seem to be, and bad dreams in teens, seem to be even more predictive of suicide than insufficient sleep itself. We've got no idea why.
The Dr. Hyman Show
How Sleep Rewires Your Brain, Balances Your Hormones & Extends Your Life | Dr. Matthew Walker
It tells us something about dreaming above and beyond sleep that is predictive of our mental health.
The Dr. Hyman Show
How Sleep Rewires Your Brain, Balances Your Hormones & Extends Your Life | Dr. Matthew Walker
I think most people can probably tell you to a degree, am I getting the sleep that I need? And you can ask at least one or two questions to answer that. If your alarm didn't go off tomorrow morning, would you sleep past your alarm? If the answer is yes, you're not done with sleep yet. You're not satiated.
The Dr. Hyman Show
How Sleep Rewires Your Brain, Balances Your Hormones & Extends Your Life | Dr. Matthew Walker
Another good example would be how much are you sleeping during a working week and how much are you sleeping at a weekend? And this is not a perfect test for a number of different reasons, but if you're sleeping more at the weekend than you are during the week,
The Dr. Hyman Show
How Sleep Rewires Your Brain, Balances Your Hormones & Extends Your Life | Dr. Matthew Walker
then what I know is that you have the capacity to generate more sleep and you have a higher, you have a sleep need that is higher than that which you are giving yourself the opportunity to get during the week. So it's not as though you just are someone who actually needs six hours of sleep because at the weekend, you get more sleep than you would do during the week.
The Dr. Hyman Show
How Sleep Rewires Your Brain, Balances Your Hormones & Extends Your Life | Dr. Matthew Walker
So I think the first thing is ask yourself some honest questions. Am I getting enough sleep? The next question then is to say, even if the quantity of sleep I'm getting is sufficient, maybe I still do not feel restored or refreshed by my sleep the next day. And that comes on to quality over quantity. It's not just about how much sleep you're getting.
The Dr. Hyman Show
How Sleep Rewires Your Brain, Balances Your Hormones & Extends Your Life | Dr. Matthew Walker
It's about how well that sleep restores you the next day. In fact, that's one of our new metrics of insomnia. You can fall asleep fine. You can stay asleep. But if you don't feel restored or refreshed by your sleep the next day, you can still receive a diagnosis of unrestorative sleep leading to insomnia. Insomnia is much more a waking day disorder than it is a sleeping night disorder.
The Dr. Hyman Show
How Sleep Rewires Your Brain, Balances Your Hormones & Extends Your Life | Dr. Matthew Walker
What do you mean? Because you feel bad during the day? Because you feel bad during the day. And so we've now tried to upgrade or at least refine the complexity that is insomnia to represent the patient themselves and their true experience. So understanding that your quantity and quality are good or bad then leads to the next set of questions, which is, well, what do I do about it?
The Dr. Hyman Show
How Sleep Rewires Your Brain, Balances Your Hormones & Extends Your Life | Dr. Matthew Walker
Now, take what I say with a grain of salt. I'm wearing two Oura rings right now. I know, yeah, one is sort of a next gen, and the reason why is that I'm a scientific advisor to the company. So take anything I say with a grain of salt, absolutely. So complete, and they look very much similar. So complete disclosure, and that's important.
The Dr. Hyman Show
How Sleep Rewires Your Brain, Balances Your Hormones & Extends Your Life | Dr. Matthew Walker
We did it. It was great. Great to see you. You're looking great, by the way.
The Dr. Hyman Show
How Sleep Rewires Your Brain, Balances Your Hormones & Extends Your Life | Dr. Matthew Walker
I would say, though, that for most people, tracking your sleep can be a very worthwhile thing. And it's simply because sleep in part is a non-conscious process. I can ask you, you know, Mark, in the past week, have you been eating well or not eating well? And you can tell me, have you been exercising consistently or not? Yes, you can.
The Dr. Hyman Show
How Sleep Rewires Your Brain, Balances Your Hormones & Extends Your Life | Dr. Matthew Walker
But if I then said to you, how much deep sleep did you get last Tuesday night?
The Dr. Hyman Show
How Sleep Rewires Your Brain, Balances Your Hormones & Extends Your Life | Dr. Matthew Walker
I have no idea. No one has any idea unless you have the historical record of your sleep. So I think it can be very helpful. Are they accurate? You know, I only know about aura and I think it's, it's probably, I know the algorithm, um, and I've helped with that algorithm. You know, it's going to be about close to 80, maybe more percent accurate at determining wake from sleep.
The Dr. Hyman Show
How Sleep Rewires Your Brain, Balances Your Hormones & Extends Your Life | Dr. Matthew Walker
And then when you split it four ways, light non-REM, deep non-REM, REM sleep or wakefulness, which are really the four states that you can be in, which is a four class algorithm. then the accuracy is about maybe 75%. And that seems to be about best in class right now. Now you may say, well, hang on a second, that doesn't sound so impressive, 75%. Think about this though.
The Dr. Hyman Show
How Sleep Rewires Your Brain, Balances Your Hormones & Extends Your Life | Dr. Matthew Walker
Apparently not. Probably no one should trust someone who has hair this long. So everyone listening or watching, take anything I say with a grain of salt. Well, that's not true.
The Dr. Hyman Show
How Sleep Rewires Your Brain, Balances Your Hormones & Extends Your Life | Dr. Matthew Walker
I have about $50,000 worth of a spaghetti monster at my sleep center to get 100% accurate gold standard sleep recording. And then you can come along and within the space of some development cycles of technology, you can boil it down to a ring this size for several hundreds of dollars, and you can get 75% of the way there? That's bloody remarkable, you know?
The Dr. Hyman Show
How Sleep Rewires Your Brain, Balances Your Hormones & Extends Your Life | Dr. Matthew Walker
Different algorithm, and unfortunately, different site of location. So I think the reason that Oura, and I wasn't with the company when they first made the choice to go with a Ring, By the way, the other reason I like the company and the ring itself is because of the form factor. We don't put wristwatches on when we go to sleep or headbands or chest straps. We take things off.
The Dr. Hyman Show
How Sleep Rewires Your Brain, Balances Your Hormones & Extends Your Life | Dr. Matthew Walker
But rings, we're accustomed to that. So I like the form factor too, which is a low friction, no friction device. I would say though that for the Oura Ring in terms of its sensing capacity, when you get closer to the vasculature of the finger, it's more accurate than it would be necessarily on the wrist itself and the sensor.
The Dr. Hyman Show
How Sleep Rewires Your Brain, Balances Your Hormones & Extends Your Life | Dr. Matthew Walker
So that's why, firstly, because the, so you get a better sensing location, number one. And number two, I think the algorithms are different. So that's why you'll get probably quite wildly different numbers from those two devices. But again, I think overall, sleep trackers, largely good. Two more caveats. The first is that that absolute accuracy of 75% is its absolute accuracy.
The Dr. Hyman Show
How Sleep Rewires Your Brain, Balances Your Hormones & Extends Your Life | Dr. Matthew Walker
However, its relative accuracy is much higher.
The Dr. Hyman Show
How Sleep Rewires Your Brain, Balances Your Hormones & Extends Your Life | Dr. Matthew Walker
Correct. You've nailed it. So don't follow nightly headlines, absolute accuracy, follow weekly trend lines, which is to say that this thing is 75% accuracy at separating all of those different categories, but it's consistently inaccurate night after night after night. So it's power is when all of a sudden you see deviations in your trend because it can't be the ring that's deviating.
The Dr. Hyman Show
How Sleep Rewires Your Brain, Balances Your Hormones & Extends Your Life | Dr. Matthew Walker
It's consistent. It must be you. That's when you should pay attention.
The Dr. Hyman Show
How Sleep Rewires Your Brain, Balances Your Hormones & Extends Your Life | Dr. Matthew Walker
I don't know what mine is. Hashtag midlife crisis.
The Dr. Hyman Show
How Sleep Rewires Your Brain, Balances Your Hormones & Extends Your Life | Dr. Matthew Walker
Exactly, yeah. So whatever is changing it, it's not the ring.
The Dr. Hyman Show
How Sleep Rewires Your Brain, Balances Your Hormones & Extends Your Life | Dr. Matthew Walker
I think almost all people should be tracking except those who are obsessive about it and become it becomes a challenge. And sleep now has this term that's floating around called orthosomnia. So ortho. So you've heard of, yeah, ortho sort of straightening. So orthodontic, straightening teeth, orthopedic, straightening bones.
The Dr. Hyman Show
How Sleep Rewires Your Brain, Balances Your Hormones & Extends Your Life | Dr. Matthew Walker
You know, orthosomnia is getting my sleep so straight and I get so anxious about it that it crucifies my sleep. And at that point, I say one of two things. If it's really causing you distress, take it off, put it in a drawer, we'll come back to it, we'll fix your sleep, and we'll get back on track later. Or keep it on and only look at your data once a week. Yeah, yeah.
The Dr. Hyman Show
How Sleep Rewires Your Brain, Balances Your Hormones & Extends Your Life | Dr. Matthew Walker
Or have someone else look at your data once a week. And the discipline there is hard, I agree. But you may not need to throw the baby out with the bathwater.
The Dr. Hyman Show
How Sleep Rewires Your Brain, Balances Your Hormones & Extends Your Life | Dr. Matthew Walker
I think the first thing we have to do, and sleep is so idiosyncratic that different people will have different problems. First thing that we would want to do with an individual who comes in with complaining of sleep problems, do sleep test assessments. Do you have insomnia? Do you have sleep apnea? Do you have restless leg syndrome? Let's discount the sleep disorders.
The Dr. Hyman Show
How Sleep Rewires Your Brain, Balances Your Hormones & Extends Your Life | Dr. Matthew Walker
Let's say that you don't have any of those. Let's now take a step down. I would say in terms of recommendations, and it's going to be different, as I said, for different people, there are probably a collection of common things that you can do now. Don't worry so much about the sleep supplements. And we can come to those later.
The Dr. Hyman Show
How Sleep Rewires Your Brain, Balances Your Hormones & Extends Your Life | Dr. Matthew Walker
But if you're focusing on supplements as your first line approach to getting your sleep corrected, you are majoring in the minors. and you're minoring in the majors, you should be focused on firstly, regularity. You would be surprised at how everything just falls in place when you get, I am the most boring individual, I get it.
The Dr. Hyman Show
How Sleep Rewires Your Brain, Balances Your Hormones & Extends Your Life | Dr. Matthew Walker
But I am so metronome-like in my regularity just because I know how powerful that anchor to my circadian rhythm is to make sure that my sleep is high quality.
The Dr. Hyman Show
How Sleep Rewires Your Brain, Balances Your Hormones & Extends Your Life | Dr. Matthew Walker
No matter, weekday, weekends for the most part. Now, when I'm traveling or, you know, sometimes we'll go out with friends, we'll have a late night. Of course, you know, I don't want to be puritanical about this. Life is to be lived. Joie de vivre. No one wants to be the healthiest person in the graveyard. Live life, of course, for goodness sake.
The Dr. Hyman Show
How Sleep Rewires Your Brain, Balances Your Hormones & Extends Your Life | Dr. Matthew Walker
But overall, if, you know, 90% of the time you can be consistent, you would be surprised. I would say the next big challenge is have a wine.
The Dr. Hyman Show
How Sleep Rewires Your Brain, Balances Your Hormones & Extends Your Life | Dr. Matthew Walker
There is nothing special whatsoever about the stroke of midnight and sleep. It's not as though all of a sudden the two minutes of sleep that you get after midnight are so much less powerful and utility beneficial. than the two minutes that you got before. That's not true at all.
The Dr. Hyman Show
How Sleep Rewires Your Brain, Balances Your Hormones & Extends Your Life | Dr. Matthew Walker
No, it's not. Absolutely not. And it can be problematic in at least two ways. The first is that if you are having insomnia and you suffer from sleep onset insomnia, where you can't fall asleep, forcing yourself to go to bed earlier is the worst thing you can do.
The Dr. Hyman Show
How Sleep Rewires Your Brain, Balances Your Hormones & Extends Your Life | Dr. Matthew Walker
Because you're not tired enough. and therefore you remain in bed longer awake, and that only reinforces your anxiety around this place called my bed being the place where I am always awake. So don't do that if you're suffering from insomnia. The rule of thumb there is, and it's just a rule of thumb, only go to bed when you're tired. Don't worry about the clock.
The Dr. Hyman Show
How Sleep Rewires Your Brain, Balances Your Hormones & Extends Your Life | Dr. Matthew Walker
Insomnia patients, only go to bed when you're tired. The second reason that going to bed earlier and you sort of hear this edict coming down from maybe influencers or people saying, you know, just go to bed early, wake up early, get a jumpstart on the day. That's the most effective way to be productive and healthy and it changes your life forever. Nonsense.
The Dr. Hyman Show
How Sleep Rewires Your Brain, Balances Your Hormones & Extends Your Life | Dr. Matthew Walker
If you're an evening type, let's say you're a night owl who normally has a biological hardwired predilection to go to sleep at 1230 at night,
The Dr. Hyman Show
How Sleep Rewires Your Brain, Balances Your Hormones & Extends Your Life | Dr. Matthew Walker
you can get into bed at 10 p.m and you are going to think that you have insomnia because you're wide awake for the first two hours and you don't have insomnia you have a mismatch between your chronotype and your lifestyle and we see that quite often too so the advice of always going to bed early or trying to go to bed before midnight is completely dependent on your chronotype and people can do a chronotype test or your morning type evening type or somewhere in between
The Dr. Hyman Show
How Sleep Rewires Your Brain, Balances Your Hormones & Extends Your Life | Dr. Matthew Walker
Easy to do. You can just Google the MEQ test, which stands for Morningness Eveningness Questionnaire. Takes about three minutes. And it will tell you pretty close to your genetics, which truly determine it. And it turns out, by the way, that if you are an evening type and you want to be a morning type, It's not that simple. You don't get to decide. It's gifted to you at birth.
The Dr. Hyman Show
How Sleep Rewires Your Brain, Balances Your Hormones & Extends Your Life | Dr. Matthew Walker
There are at least 22 different genes that we know dictate your morningness and eveningness. But this questionnaire comes quite close in terms of its kind of proxy. So I would say that good sleep... What is good sleep? Good sleep for me is about four macros. I've sort of thought about this and come up with this principle that there are four macros of good sleep.
The Dr. Hyman Show
How Sleep Rewires Your Brain, Balances Your Hormones & Extends Your Life | Dr. Matthew Walker
And you can remember it by the acronym QQRT. Quantity, quality, regularity, timing. And we've really covered all of them. Quantity, seven to nine hours. Quality, are you sleeping consistently or is your sleep littered with all of these awakenings at night? So you're sort of waking up. That's poor quality. And the way that we measure that is efficiency. You can see it in your sleep trackers.
The Dr. Hyman Show
How Sleep Rewires Your Brain, Balances Your Hormones & Extends Your Life | Dr. Matthew Walker
Yeah, Why We Sleep.
The Dr. Hyman Show
How Sleep Rewires Your Brain, Balances Your Hormones & Extends Your Life | Dr. Matthew Walker
Of the time that you're in bed, what percent of that time is sleep? 85% or above. Once you drop below that, we'd like to correct it. So quantity, quality, regularity, going to bed at the same time, waking up at the same time, regularity carries as if not more predictive power over your all-cause mortality than quantity does. That's a recent finding.
The Dr. Hyman Show
How Sleep Rewires Your Brain, Balances Your Hormones & Extends Your Life | Dr. Matthew Walker
And literally a paper came out today that replicated that finding of about two years ago. The final one is timing. And you think, well, QQRT, quantity, quality, regularity. Timing sounds like regularity. Timing is your chronotype. So if you are an evening type, sleep as best you can with your lifestyle. And I know that I'm talking about the ideal world and no one lives in that.
The Dr. Hyman Show
How Sleep Rewires Your Brain, Balances Your Hormones & Extends Your Life | Dr. Matthew Walker
We all live in the real world. So as best you can, try to sleep closer to your natural chronotype. Because if you sleep against your chronotype, sleeping out of harmony with your biology, when you fight biology, you normally lose. The way you know you've lost is disease and sickness. And we see that in night owls who are forced to sleep like morning larks.
The Dr. Hyman Show
How Sleep Rewires Your Brain, Balances Your Hormones & Extends Your Life | Dr. Matthew Walker
So that's why to me, I think I would come on to say, firstly, give yourself the right opportunity to sleep. Get regular, understand your chronotype, realize it's not your fault and it's not your choice. Try to get good with your chronotype as best you can. And then finally, just make sure that the quality of your sleep, the consistency is good. If the quality is not good, you're waking up a lot.
The Dr. Hyman Show
How Sleep Rewires Your Brain, Balances Your Hormones & Extends Your Life | Dr. Matthew Walker
Let's drill down into that for recommendations. Think about your alcohol and caffeine. Those are probably the two lowest hanging fruit that will cause poor quality of sleep.
The Dr. Hyman Show
How Sleep Rewires Your Brain, Balances Your Hormones & Extends Your Life | Dr. Matthew Walker
Devastation, isn't it? Yeah, it's like, wow. There is a blast radius that is non-trivial. It's not. And it is so fun.
The Dr. Hyman Show
How Sleep Rewires Your Brain, Balances Your Hormones & Extends Your Life | Dr. Matthew Walker
And, you know, I wonder if they've changed alcohol sales. I don't know. Among their users, that would be an interesting study. But I would say that. The two of them.
The Dr. Hyman Show
How Sleep Rewires Your Brain, Balances Your Hormones & Extends Your Life | Dr. Matthew Walker
Now, you know, you can complain about devices or subscription fees or whatever about all of these different gadgets all you like. But if that's the only thing that they've done in society. I think that your liver is gonna be outside of your body next day. I'm thanking you to the high heavens for saying, thank you for not drinking as much. So let's- Alcohol, caffeine. Alcohol, caffeine.
The Dr. Hyman Show
How Sleep Rewires Your Brain, Balances Your Hormones & Extends Your Life | Dr. Matthew Walker
I would say, be mindful of light. We are a dark deprived society in this modern era and we get junk light at night. And light will stamp the brakes on melatonin, which is a natural hormone that times our sleep. And it will make you, it'll fool your brain into thinking, I'm not tired. Even though there's all of that tiredness built up inside of you, you're over light, overhead lighting, stimulated.
The Dr. Hyman Show
How Sleep Rewires Your Brain, Balances Your Hormones & Extends Your Life | Dr. Matthew Walker
And so your brain gets really confused. We don't have strong enough daylight during the day to ramp us up and make us awake, so we're sleepy during the day. And we don't have enough darkness at night to make us sleepy, so we're awake at night. I would say recommendation in the last hour before bed, switch off half the lights in your home. Just do me the experiment for the next 10 days. Try it.
The Dr. Hyman Show
How Sleep Rewires Your Brain, Balances Your Hormones & Extends Your Life | Dr. Matthew Walker
It has come on the scene now. I mean, back then, just before I published the book, Sleep, and it wasn't the book that did this, Sleep was almost the neglected stepsister in the health conversation of that time back in 2018. Yeah. And now I think people are starting to really embrace it. Maybe it's the wearable movement. Maybe it's just more people speaking about it. I don't quite know what it is.
The Dr. Hyman Show
How Sleep Rewires Your Brain, Balances Your Hormones & Extends Your Life | Dr. Matthew Walker
If it doesn't feel any different, great.
The Dr. Hyman Show
How Sleep Rewires Your Brain, Balances Your Hormones & Extends Your Life | Dr. Matthew Walker
You don't have to worry about that fancy stuff. Is it the dimmer matters? It's just dimness. Try to get below about... 10 looks, and you can just on your phone, go to the app store, download a Lux meter, L-U-X, and then just sit in your bed and look to say, you know, or walk around your house. I do this. This is how I do it.
The Dr. Hyman Show
How Sleep Rewires Your Brain, Balances Your Hormones & Extends Your Life | Dr. Matthew Walker
No, but imagine spending that to guarantee sleep for the next years. It's a small cost to pay. For sure. So I would say grab a lux meter if you want to be nerdy about it, but just get dim light. Don't have to be too nerdy. Just turn down half the lights in your house. Next thing for timing, by the way, I should go back to it.
The Dr. Hyman Show
How Sleep Rewires Your Brain, Balances Your Hormones & Extends Your Life | Dr. Matthew Walker
Yeah, the data there is quite strong on melatonin. However- In terms of the blue light from our devices being the catastrophic force on sleep decline that we used to think it was is probably not true. So if you're on your phone at night or if you're on your computer... Blue light is not the villain that we thought.
The Dr. Hyman Show
How Sleep Rewires Your Brain, Balances Your Hormones & Extends Your Life | Dr. Matthew Walker
There's been a great, there's been a guy in Australia, almost pioneered this, Michael Gradazar. He started to get skeptical of this whole blue light thing. And there's been a couple of powerful studies that, yes, it definitely blocks your melatonin. Yes, it can disrupt your sleep. But what he demonstrated is that it's not the blue light itself.
The Dr. Hyman Show
How Sleep Rewires Your Brain, Balances Your Hormones & Extends Your Life | Dr. Matthew Walker
It's that these devices that we use that emit blue light.
The Dr. Hyman Show
How Sleep Rewires Your Brain, Balances Your Hormones & Extends Your Life | Dr. Matthew Walker
They are attention capture devices. They are hugely activating. And their sole purpose now is to capture your attention economy. And they do it ruthlessly well.
The Dr. Hyman Show
How Sleep Rewires Your Brain, Balances Your Hormones & Extends Your Life | Dr. Matthew Walker
And they stimulate dopamine. They switch on your cortex. And that results in this thing that we call sleep procrastination, where you know that you're tired, but then you think, oh gosh, I'll just look at Facebook one last time. Oh, I'll just check X one more time. And oh, I should have ordered that thing from Amazon. Let me just go and do that. And you look up and it's 40 minutes later.
The Dr. Hyman Show
How Sleep Rewires Your Brain, Balances Your Hormones & Extends Your Life | Dr. Matthew Walker
And what he's really arguing, and I think the data is compelling now, is that you just need to try to do a digital detox, not for the blue light, but for the demonstrable capturing of your brain's cortical activation.
The Dr. Hyman Show
How Sleep Rewires Your Brain, Balances Your Hormones & Extends Your Life | Dr. Matthew Walker
I would suggest that for people, there are two rules of thumb. If you can, desaturate your phone to black and white. There are some apps that will do it. Big difference. The second is if you have to use your phone in the bedroom, and I know that genie is out the bottle, no matter what I say, it's not going back in any time soon.
The Dr. Hyman Show
How Sleep Rewires Your Brain, Balances Your Hormones & Extends Your Life | Dr. Matthew Walker
The rule of thumb from another friend of mine, Michael Gradner, said the following. If you have to take your phone into the bedroom, you can only use it standing up. And after about seven or eight minutes, you're standing there and you think, I'm just going to sit down. And at that point, sorry, phone goes away. You're done. That's it. I'll tell my wife that. She's not going to like that at all.
The Dr. Hyman Show
How Sleep Rewires Your Brain, Balances Your Hormones & Extends Your Life | Dr. Matthew Walker
I would say just coming on to some other points of suggestion. Yeah. wind down routine. We all fail to recognize that sleep is not like a light switch and it shouldn't be that way. Sleep is much more like landing a plane. It takes time to come down onto the terra firma of good sleep at night. And then, and so you can't be answering emails then. And then you don't X, why would you expect that?
The Dr. Hyman Show
How Sleep Rewires Your Brain, Balances Your Hormones & Extends Your Life | Dr. Matthew Walker
But now people, as you said, are not only saying it's the third pillar of good health alongside diet and exercise. In fact, if you look at the data, it's really not. It's the foundation on which those two other things sit. And so I think that's why it's had this really remarkable ascendancy in some ways. Nevertheless, I would still say though, that sleep has an image problem in society.
The Dr. Hyman Show
How Sleep Rewires Your Brain, Balances Your Hormones & Extends Your Life | Dr. Matthew Walker
It's like driving into your garage and your sort of your driveway. at still 60 miles an hour and then slamming the brakes on and think it's gonna be a good outcome. You go down the gears and then gradually you're braking and you come to a stop. That's sleep for you. So we obviously, if you have kids, you will know that you have a bedtime routine.
The Dr. Hyman Show
How Sleep Rewires Your Brain, Balances Your Hormones & Extends Your Life | Dr. Matthew Walker
You figure what it is out for your child, you figure out what it is for your child, and then you stick ruthlessly to it because if you don't, bad things happen. Why do we think that as adults? We don't also need a wind-down routine. And what does that look like? It can be hot baths or showers. Works very well for sleep, and we can speak about why from a thermal perspective. You can do meditation.
The Dr. Hyman Show
How Sleep Rewires Your Brain, Balances Your Hormones & Extends Your Life | Dr. Matthew Walker
Data on that, very strong indeed. You can do sleep stories. We read stories to our children. Turns out that sleep stories and the reason that they've saved meditation companies like Calm and made them a unicorn billion dollar company, which it did, the sleep stories, is because we also like to listen to stories ourselves. And I'll come back to why that is in a second.
The Dr. Hyman Show
How Sleep Rewires Your Brain, Balances Your Hormones & Extends Your Life | Dr. Matthew Walker
I'm like, well, I've had that for, I, I, I, I've so many people and I, I deeply despise my own voice. I loathe it. But so many people have said that listening to my voice, I have a podcast, the Matt Walker podcast, shameless plug. Um, but they actually use it as a sleep aid. And in some ways it's very devastating like you. But that's lovely for me in truth.
The Dr. Hyman Show
How Sleep Rewires Your Brain, Balances Your Hormones & Extends Your Life | Dr. Matthew Walker
And so I'm actually gonna start releasing an app that has sleep stories because people just kept slamming me. But do a sleep story. I don't care what it is, hot baths, whether it's meditation, whether it's journaling, whether it's listening to an audio book, whether it's yoga, whether it's light stretching, whether it's meditation, the goal is simple. Get your mind off itself.
The Dr. Hyman Show
How Sleep Rewires Your Brain, Balances Your Hormones & Extends Your Life | Dr. Matthew Walker
That is the principle reason why most people are not getting the sleep that they need. Shut down that crazy person in between your ears? Correct. And sleep is like trying to remember someone's name. The harder that you try, the more you force it away. And when you stop trying, it comes back to you.
The Dr. Hyman Show
How Sleep Rewires Your Brain, Balances Your Hormones & Extends Your Life | Dr. Matthew Walker
And I can't, I mean, another trick that I recommend people use, if you don't like meditation or any of that kind of stuff, it feels like a bit woo-woo, Just close your eyes and take yourself on a mental walk that you know with exquisite detail. So let's say I'm going to take the dog out for a walk. I clip him in. I open the door. I go down the steps.
The Dr. Hyman Show
How Sleep Rewires Your Brain, Balances Your Hormones & Extends Your Life | Dr. Matthew Walker
I take a left, go to the end of the driveway, and sort of go through a little gate there. And then we take a right, but I always look to the right because the traffic is coming far too quickly. It's in that level of granularity. What's the color of the leash that I'm using today for the dog? That's the level.
The Dr. Hyman Show
How Sleep Rewires Your Brain, Balances Your Hormones & Extends Your Life | Dr. Matthew Walker
And I'm distracting my mind. And then usually the next thing I remember is my alarm going off in the morning. Why? Because I got my mind off itself. So have a wind down routine, I would say is absolutely critical. It's one of the lowest hanging fruits that you can really grow.
The Dr. Hyman Show
How Sleep Rewires Your Brain, Balances Your Hormones & Extends Your Life | Dr. Matthew Walker
Data knots are strong for cold plunges, in truth. Warm bath and warm shower, it's so reliable that we have a statement called the warm bath effect in sleep science because it's been replicated so many times.
The Dr. Hyman Show
How Sleep Rewires Your Brain, Balances Your Hormones & Extends Your Life | Dr. Matthew Walker
Great.
The Dr. Hyman Show
How Sleep Rewires Your Brain, Balances Your Hormones & Extends Your Life | Dr. Matthew Walker
Meaning that we still apply this label of stigma and laziness. So many people will tell you, how clean they've been eating this past month, how many days they've got to the gym. I don't know anyone who's sidled up to me and sort of, you know. Hey, I slept nine hours last night. Yeah, I am consistently saying, because people's response is, really?
The Dr. Hyman Show
How Sleep Rewires Your Brain, Balances Your Hormones & Extends Your Life | Dr. Matthew Walker
Right. And also just the scent of it is calming. Yeah. And that's a calming signal to the brain, which puts you back out of the fight or flight into the restful state, the parasympathetic state. But you're right with the first explanation that when we have a hot bath or a shower, what we do is we encourage all of the blood to race to the surface of the skin.
The Dr. Hyman Show
How Sleep Rewires Your Brain, Balances Your Hormones & Extends Your Life | Dr. Matthew Walker
Someone like me, I'll have sort of rosy cheeks when I come out the bath. And essentially the bath has acted like a snake charmer, that it's charmed all of the trapped hot blood at the core of my body. And it's brought it to the surface so that when I get out, you think, or I think, that the reason I sleep so well after a bath at night is because I'm all warm and toasty. It's the opposite.
The Dr. Hyman Show
How Sleep Rewires Your Brain, Balances Your Hormones & Extends Your Life | Dr. Matthew Walker
When I get out the bath, all of the blood at the surface of the skin radiates the heat very quickly and my core body temperature absolutely plummets. And temperature and sleep is not quite as simple as we've been led to believe. It's a three-part equation. You have to warm up to cool down to fall asleep. You have to stay cool to stay asleep. You have to then warm up to wake up.
The Dr. Hyman Show
How Sleep Rewires Your Brain, Balances Your Hormones & Extends Your Life | Dr. Matthew Walker
And the first part seems oxymoronic. How can you warm up to cool down to fall asleep? Just as we've said, warm up the surface of the skin to radiate heat, to get cold at your core, and that promotes sleep onset. Then the cooler you get at night, and that's the reason that these smart mattresses now are working so well, As you get cold. Like they ate sleep. They ate sleep, yeah.
The Dr. Hyman Show
How Sleep Rewires Your Brain, Balances Your Hormones & Extends Your Life | Dr. Matthew Walker
I've recently, together with Andrew Huberman and my good friend, Pete Rottier, we joined the company because I've been using it for so long. And everyone I speak to, all of my sort of concierge clients, they all say it really radically changed life for them. So I thought, if I can help them, I'd love to help join them.
The Dr. Hyman Show
How Sleep Rewires Your Brain, Balances Your Hormones & Extends Your Life | Dr. Matthew Walker
But if you switch on the AI agent, it will gradually learn where your thermal sweet spot is. So as you get colder during the night, you get more deep sleep. But then you have to reverse engineer the trick. You have to warm up to wake up. And it's not light that wakes us up. Really, it's the warming of our core brain and body that is the true force that wakes us up.
The Dr. Hyman Show
How Sleep Rewires Your Brain, Balances Your Hormones & Extends Your Life | Dr. Matthew Walker
Case in point, when you, you know, let's say you come through in the morning and your significant other is there and they look at you and you say, I know I left the dishes in the sink. I'm so sorry, but just give me two minutes. I just need a couple of mouthfuls of my hot coffee and then I'll be right with you. And within five minutes, you feel like a much better version of yourself.
The Dr. Hyman Show
How Sleep Rewires Your Brain, Balances Your Hormones & Extends Your Life | Dr. Matthew Walker
It's got nothing to do with the caffeine. Why? Plasma peak concentration of caffeine isn't going to hit you until about 15 or 17 minutes later. What is it? It's the warmth. It's the warmth. And that much more rapidly rises your core temperature. And that's where you get a first hit after the warm beverage in the morning. And then the caffeine kicks in, so you get a second benefit.
The Dr. Hyman Show
How Sleep Rewires Your Brain, Balances Your Hormones & Extends Your Life | Dr. Matthew Walker
And embedded in that response and the tone is, well, are you not busy? Yeah. And if you're not busy, you must not be important. And therefore, we have this problem. But anyway, whoever the PR agent for sleep has been in the past 20 years, we should probably find them.
The Dr. Hyman Show
How Sleep Rewires Your Brain, Balances Your Hormones & Extends Your Life | Dr. Matthew Walker
Yeah.
The Dr. Hyman Show
How Sleep Rewires Your Brain, Balances Your Hormones & Extends Your Life | Dr. Matthew Walker
Stunning, isn't it? It was really quite amazing. And that's a combination of both the temperature, but also don't forget that you didn't have much electric light. polluting you.
The Dr. Hyman Show
How Sleep Rewires Your Brain, Balances Your Hormones & Extends Your Life | Dr. Matthew Walker
So you'd done all of the right things. Daylight during the day, physical activity, darkness at night, coldness at night. And you probably not had as much digital stimulation as you would otherwise, too. That is the perfect sort of prescription in a quote unquote manner for a good night's sleep. And that's exactly what you got.
The Dr. Hyman Show
How Sleep Rewires Your Brain, Balances Your Hormones & Extends Your Life | Dr. Matthew Walker
No, there's a study that showed that even if you were to sort of, you know, have low level overhead lighting still on during sleep, Even though you still sleep, the quality of your sleep is worse because it's still penetrating through your eyelid onto your retina and essentially light infecting your sleeping brain at night. So no light, sound? Blackout curtains, the data on noise machines.
The Dr. Hyman Show
How Sleep Rewires Your Brain, Balances Your Hormones & Extends Your Life | Dr. Matthew Walker
Earplugs? Equivocal. Earplugs, I will do eye mask, earplugs. I will have a sound machine if I'm in a noisy environment because if you look at the data, It's only where you get, you only get efficacy, meaning a benefit of these sort of white noise machines at least, in conditions of urban high noise. That's where they seem to be useful.
The Dr. Hyman Show
How Sleep Rewires Your Brain, Balances Your Hormones & Extends Your Life | Dr. Matthew Walker
If you're in a beautiful, you know, if you're camping in a yurt, a white noise machine isn't gonna do a thing because it's, you know, there's no noise whatsoever, maybe occasionally, but nothing. But I would say that absolutely the reason that you had that collection of benefits was because of this juicy menu set of options that you had finger buffeted your way through.
The Dr. Hyman Show
How Sleep Rewires Your Brain, Balances Your Hormones & Extends Your Life | Dr. Matthew Walker
But I like to keep the room at like 65 degrees at night. That's perfect. The problem is that it's different for men and women. And that's why I also like these smart mattresses. Yeah. Because you can find your own individual tailored.
The Dr. Hyman Show
How Sleep Rewires Your Brain, Balances Your Hormones & Extends Your Life | Dr. Matthew Walker
Oh my goodness. Right now, you are the envy of so many people right now.
The Dr. Hyman Show
How Sleep Rewires Your Brain, Balances Your Hormones & Extends Your Life | Dr. Matthew Walker
It was very funny. And you will always struggle with those problems. So I would absolutely say I think that type of thermal intervention is fairly well replicated.
The Dr. Hyman Show
How Sleep Rewires Your Brain, Balances Your Hormones & Extends Your Life | Dr. Matthew Walker
We have not seen much data right now to suggest that electromagnetic pollution in the environment is going to be a sleep disruptor. Yeah. I think there's probably some, you know, anecdata.
The Dr. Hyman Show
How Sleep Rewires Your Brain, Balances Your Hormones & Extends Your Life | Dr. Matthew Walker
But I think that that's got much more to do with absent light, absent technology. I know that when, so I live in Northern California, just outside of San Francisco and up in the Berkeley Hills, which is where I live behind my campus, trees will go down in the winter. They will take down the power lines and you lose electricity for maybe two or three days.
The Dr. Hyman Show
How Sleep Rewires Your Brain, Balances Your Hormones & Extends Your Life | Dr. Matthew Walker
At that point, I've just got, you know, maybe my phone left. I'm trying to save the battery, so I'm not on it much. I'm reading journals with candlelight. And I know for a fact that I think my natural bedtime, I'm a desperately vanilla person, I'm deeply boring, I'm vastly uninteresting, but I'm kind of like an 11, 11.30 to kind of 7.30 kind of guy in terms of my rhythm.
The Dr. Hyman Show
How Sleep Rewires Your Brain, Balances Your Hormones & Extends Your Life | Dr. Matthew Walker
I'm just slap bang in the middle, neutral. But I know that when those nights happen, all of a sudden I'm thinking, it's 10.25 and I'm actually sleeping. And what happens is that modernity comes in and it hits the mute button on my sleepiness. And I think I'm an 11 to 7.30 kind of guy. When actually I'm probably closer to a 10.15 kind of guy. And so you've got to be a bit mindful of that too.
The Dr. Hyman Show
How Sleep Rewires Your Brain, Balances Your Hormones & Extends Your Life | Dr. Matthew Walker
Magnesium is an interesting one. I mean, if you look on Amazon or alike, magnesium sleep formulations is rife across the board. and they're getting very good ratings. So you don't need a scientific study to suggest that something's going on there. But if you dig into the history of magnesium and sleep, you get an interesting kind of paper trail that goes all the way back.
The Dr. Hyman Show
How Sleep Rewires Your Brain, Balances Your Hormones & Extends Your Life | Dr. Matthew Walker
The story emerged from people who were magnesium deficient, and they had really quite profound sleep problems. And when you made them magnesium normative with supplementation, their sleep got better. That's very different than saying, okay, Matt, we've looked at your blood work. You are magnesium normative. And then taking vast doses of magnesium, I expect to get even better sleep.
The Dr. Hyman Show
How Sleep Rewires Your Brain, Balances Your Hormones & Extends Your Life | Dr. Matthew Walker
It's not going to happen. It's a little bit like saying you... I tell you, I've got this amazing new blood oxygen saturation machine. It's stunning. And you say, but my blood oxygen saturation is 98, 99%. Do you think that I'm going to push you away? No, you're at ceiling. So you've got to be a bit thoughtful. I think there is a cluster of individuals, the magnesium deficient individuals.
The Dr. Hyman Show
How Sleep Rewires Your Brain, Balances Your Hormones & Extends Your Life | Dr. Matthew Walker
Who will respond to magnesium for sleep. Yeah. Is... If you look at the data, magnesium citrate, not so much. Magnesium oxide certainly does seem to be the more, if there's going to be a form of magnesium that carries the vote so far in the data. Not three and eight, which is bad. Well, I'll come on to three and eight. But magnesium oxide is definitely the one that seems to promote it.
The Dr. Hyman Show
How Sleep Rewires Your Brain, Balances Your Hormones & Extends Your Life | Dr. Matthew Walker
It's just a little tougher on the tummy. And it's harder to absorb. Correct. And it's harder to absorb. Yeah. But I would say that the problem with those two as an explanation, standard forms of magnesium, not magnesium L3 and 8, is that none of those cross the blood-brain barrier. And so if you're thinking magnesium helps your brain to sleep, how could it? Because it doesn't get into the brain.
The Dr. Hyman Show
How Sleep Rewires Your Brain, Balances Your Hormones & Extends Your Life | Dr. Matthew Walker
And I think it does it indirectly through relaxation of the body, which sends a signal through the vagus nerve up to your brain to say, you're quiet, you're calm, your body is at peace. And your brain says, great, I'm checking out, it's sleep time. That's the indirect mechanism.
The Dr. Hyman Show
How Sleep Rewires Your Brain, Balances Your Hormones & Extends Your Life | Dr. Matthew Walker
However, there is a form of magnesium, magnesium L3 and eight that based on some animal data from MIT does seem to cross the blood brain barrier. Now there are no randomized control studies that I know of that have looked at magnesium L3 and eight and sleep improvement. So I think the jury is out. If you put a gun to my head and said, which form would you recommend for a patient?
The Dr. Hyman Show
How Sleep Rewires Your Brain, Balances Your Hormones & Extends Your Life | Dr. Matthew Walker
I would probably say magnesium three and eight because at least it's going to potentially get into the brain. So magnesium, I think under certain circumstances, it can be quite useful. I think the data on GABA is not particularly strong right now. So sort of the GABA supplements, I don't think are great. I think theanine has some supportive data to it right now.
The Dr. Hyman Show
How Sleep Rewires Your Brain, Balances Your Hormones & Extends Your Life | Dr. Matthew Walker
Again, it's just not that consistent. What about melatonin? Melatonin, for people who are not... in their 50s or older, and people who are in a stable time zone, magnesium, sorry, melatonin doesn't seem to move the needle.
The Dr. Hyman Show
How Sleep Rewires Your Brain, Balances Your Hormones & Extends Your Life | Dr. Matthew Walker
No, it does seem to potentially work for older people. Or better for older people, not for younger people. And under circumstances of jet lag. If you're younger and you're not in a state of jet lag, melatonin just doesn't seem to be that beneficial. I think there was a meta-analysis that said it only improved the speed with which you fell asleep by about 3.9 minutes. Not much.
The Dr. Hyman Show
How Sleep Rewires Your Brain, Balances Your Hormones & Extends Your Life | Dr. Matthew Walker
And it only improves your sleep efficiency by about 2.2%, not much more than placebo. Now, don't forget the placebo effect is the most reliable effect in all of pharmacology. So I'm shy of an effort, you know, adrenaline shot to the heart, but... So I would say melatonin, I probably wouldn't favor it right now. If you're going to do it, you're probably taking too much right now.
The Dr. Hyman Show
How Sleep Rewires Your Brain, Balances Your Hormones & Extends Your Life | Dr. Matthew Walker
You're taking maybe 10, 20 milligrams. Get below five, 10, 20. That's a super physiological dose. That's a dose that the body never would normally release itself. And we don't know what the consequences of that are. Could be fine, may not be fine. Yeah. Other things I would say for the tired but wired phenomenon, you can try it, although some people respond and some people don't, ashwagandha.
The Dr. Hyman Show
How Sleep Rewires Your Brain, Balances Your Hormones & Extends Your Life | Dr. Matthew Walker
The other one, phosphatidylserine. Not phosphatidylcholine, but phosphatidylserine. Both of those have got pretty good data, not with sleep, There are some data studies on sleep, and here we're talking about 300 to 400 north of those values, milligrams in each dose. But I would say that may certainly help. 400 milligrams of phosphatidylserine.
The Dr. Hyman Show
How Sleep Rewires Your Brain, Balances Your Hormones & Extends Your Life | Dr. Matthew Walker
Phosphatidylserine and also ashwagandha, sort of 400 to 600. You can add, if you would like, some... Glutamate seems to, sorry, glycine. Glycine at probably around two grams seems to potentially help regulate the circadian rhythm. That may be useful too. So you may want to try magnesium, ashwagandha, phosphatidylserine, and then maybe add glycine in the mix as well.
The Dr. Hyman Show
How Sleep Rewires Your Brain, Balances Your Hormones & Extends Your Life | Dr. Matthew Walker
But again, I would say for the supplements, you know, just be careful. Go back and listen to all of the things that we just said about the majors. Major in the majors, minor in the minors. Don't major in the minors. If you're looking straight away to supplements, you're majoring in the minors.
The Dr. Hyman Show
How Sleep Rewires Your Brain, Balances Your Hormones & Extends Your Life | Dr. Matthew Walker
Check out. I would say the podcast is probably the best place. The book may scare you if you're not sleeping well, which is fine. But the podcast, now there's over 70 different episodes on the Matt Walker podcast. And probably whatever question that you have will be answered there in a way. And it's a podcast, by the way. I'm nowhere near as elegant and erudite as you are to be an interviewer.
The Dr. Hyman Show
How Sleep Rewires Your Brain, Balances Your Hormones & Extends Your Life | Dr. Matthew Walker
My podcasts are usually, they're a short form podcast, somewhere between 20 to 40 minutes. They are short form monologues from yours truly. And they just are a little bite of sleep goodness to accompany your waking day. And most of what you're probably going to ask about is somewhere there on the episode list so far.
The Dr. Hyman Show
How Sleep Rewires Your Brain, Balances Your Hormones & Extends Your Life | Dr. Matthew Walker
Apparently, most people almost want to lose the will to live when they're listening to me. I think it's mostly because I'm so deeply uninteresting. No, I don't know about that. I think someone once said that my personality was the best prophylactic known to man. So anyway. That's not true.
The Dr. Hyman Show
How Sleep Rewires Your Brain, Balances Your Hormones & Extends Your Life | Dr. Matthew Walker
Yes, go to whywesleep.org. If you would like to support the public foundation, which is a global sleep education foundation, please visit us there. You can also take the global sleep assessment that you can get your global sleep score. It is just what we spoke about, the QQRT, quantity, quality, regularity assessment. Get your four macros of sleep score.
The Dr. Hyman Show
How Sleep Rewires Your Brain, Balances Your Hormones & Extends Your Life | Dr. Matthew Walker
And if you feel good about it, you can click on a button. It will tell you not just your score, but tips for what you can do to change your specific score. And then if you really want it, it will give you a four-week action plan as to how to try to change that. And all we ask for, we don't force it, but we simply ask...
The Dr. Hyman Show
How Sleep Rewires Your Brain, Balances Your Hormones & Extends Your Life | Dr. Matthew Walker
For that component, please just consider a wee little donation to the foundation.
The Dr. Hyman Show
How Sleep Rewires Your Brain, Balances Your Hormones & Extends Your Life | Dr. Matthew Walker
Actually, no. If you just go to whywesleep.org, and that's Y-W-H-Y rather than the letter Y, whywesleep.org. You can get all of that information there. And I would so appreciate any little gift that you could provide the foundation.
The Dr. Hyman Show
How Sleep Rewires Your Brain, Balances Your Hormones & Extends Your Life | Dr. Matthew Walker
Absolutely. When I'm there, my much better half in life is out there. So I will be there frequently. I would love to stop by. And if people have not had a vomiting reaction to this first podcast, have me back on. I would be delighted. And I would say, too, in return, thank you for what you do.
The Dr. Hyman Show
How Sleep Rewires Your Brain, Balances Your Hormones & Extends Your Life | Dr. Matthew Walker
What you've done in terms of a public service gift, in terms of medical education, should not be underestimated. Oh, thank you. It doesn't come without a toll. I understand what it takes to do these things. And when you put your head above the public parapet, you can also get some criticism, too. And it doesn't feel so nice sometimes. But you still do it. Yeah.
The Dr. Hyman Show
How Sleep Rewires Your Brain, Balances Your Hormones & Extends Your Life | Dr. Matthew Walker
for what you've done for society and what I hope you continue to do. Thank you, and thanks for having me on the show.
The Dr. Hyman Show
How Sleep Rewires Your Brain, Balances Your Hormones & Extends Your Life | Dr. Matthew Walker
We'll have you back soon.
The Dr. Hyman Show
How Sleep Rewires Your Brain, Balances Your Hormones & Extends Your Life | Dr. Matthew Walker
What I really wanted to try to do is capture, in a way, the full spectrum, the full panoply of sleep's influence in every single facet of us human beings as a species. And as you said, you can start right at the top. Some of our most recent work, which I think to me was the biggest surprise most recently,
The Dr. Hyman Show
How Sleep Rewires Your Brain, Balances Your Hormones & Extends Your Life | Dr. Matthew Walker
Sleep is essential for our pro-social behavior, meaning there is no major society that has sort of aspect of developed nations that has evolved without human cooperation, for example. That's pro-sociality. And what we found is that when people are sleep-deprived, you become asocial, you withdraw from society, you just don't want to interact with other people. You just want to shut down.
The Dr. Hyman Show
How Sleep Rewires Your Brain, Balances Your Hormones & Extends Your Life | Dr. Matthew Walker
Worse still, other people who do not know that you are sleep deprived When they are asked, would I like to go to coffee with this person when they've watched a video of them? Or would I like to make friends with them on Facebook?
The Dr. Hyman Show
How Sleep Rewires Your Brain, Balances Your Hormones & Extends Your Life | Dr. Matthew Walker
Even though they know nothing about whether that person is well slept or sleep deprived, they will find the person who is sleep deprived more socially repulsive and they will choose not to interact with them. Just by how they look? Just by how they look and how they talk.
The Dr. Hyman Show
How Sleep Rewires Your Brain, Balances Your Hormones & Extends Your Life | Dr. Matthew Walker
So in other words, and then worse still, when you interact with a sleep-deprived individual and we ask you, the sleep-rested individual, how are you feeling right now? Are you feeling engaged? Are you feeling lonely? They feel significantly more lonely as a consequence of interacting with the lonely sleep-deprived individual.
The Dr. Hyman Show
How Sleep Rewires Your Brain, Balances Your Hormones & Extends Your Life | Dr. Matthew Walker
They're checked out, but in some ways, it's viral transmission of becoming asocial. There is a social repulsion force from a sleep-deprived individual that not only makes you step away from them and not engage with them, but it makes you feel even more lonely having interacted with them.
The Dr. Hyman Show
How Sleep Rewires Your Brain, Balances Your Hormones & Extends Your Life | Dr. Matthew Walker
And you can see this in all manner, sleep deprived individual, people who are more sleep deprived are less likely to engage, for example, in voting during elections. So fundamental aspects of how our civilization operates are dependent on the interlaced factor of sleep at a high level. But then you can step down to the level, let's say, of brain function and hear it.
The Dr. Hyman Show
How Sleep Rewires Your Brain, Balances Your Hormones & Extends Your Life | Dr. Matthew Walker
The profile that you see is a high anxious, socially withdrawn, sort of depressogenic natured sort of patient or individual. And why would you? Now, there are circumstances where you would because they're your family member, they're your loved one. And so you will help them. But if it's just another individual, you'll shy away from them. So that stunned me in terms of that aspect.
The Dr. Hyman Show
How Sleep Rewires Your Brain, Balances Your Hormones & Extends Your Life | Dr. Matthew Walker
And then I can walk you through, I won't bore you, but we can go down to the level of the individual and look at their brain and their brain networks will start to disintegrate when you are sleep deprived. You
The Dr. Hyman Show
How Sleep Rewires Your Brain, Balances Your Hormones & Extends Your Life | Dr. Matthew Walker
lose what's called your prefrontal executive control, which is a very fancy way of saying you go from an evolved homo sapien to essentially regressing back to your impulsive emotional tendencies because you lose that regulatory break. from your high level executive frontal lobe. You're not making good choices. You're starting to become more reward sensitive.
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How Sleep Rewires Your Brain, Balances Your Hormones & Extends Your Life | Dr. Matthew Walker
You're more risk taking and sensation seeking. You are emotionally unstable. You have pendulum like swings because your brain has lost the emotional break to its accelerated gas pedal. And you're learning in memory. Take a nosedive like a dart into the ground. And performance. And then your performance in terms of your cognitive speed, your speed of processing, all of those things degrade.
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How Sleep Rewires Your Brain, Balances Your Hormones & Extends Your Life | Dr. Matthew Walker
And then you can also look at what happens for brain clearance. This has been a stunning, I think, finding. It's one that we've been doing a lot of work on, aging Alzheimer's disease. At night, when we sleep, if we are allowed to get enough of it or we give ourselves the chance to get it, your brain cleanses itself of the metabolic detritus that's been building up during the day.
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How Sleep Rewires Your Brain, Balances Your Hormones & Extends Your Life | Dr. Matthew Walker
And it's, it's hubris. I mean, it's, well, it's hype. I should say it's hyperbolic in the sense to say that wakefulness from a brain perspective is low level brain damage biochemically, but sleep is your sanitary salvation. And two of the pieces of toxic metabolic byproducts that are washed away by sleep at night, beta amyloid and tau protein, two protein culprits underlying Alzheimer's disease.
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How Sleep Rewires Your Brain, Balances Your Hormones & Extends Your Life | Dr. Matthew Walker
This is why we see that short sleep across the lifespan is predictive of high risk of Alzheimer's disease. So your brain is affected. Downstairs in the body, we can speak about every major organ system from your metabolic system, your reproductive system, your cardiovascular system, your thermoregulatory system, your immune system.
The Dr. Hyman Show
How Sleep Rewires Your Brain, Balances Your Hormones & Extends Your Life | Dr. Matthew Walker
Every one of those, we can experimentally just tweak your sleep and we can measure marked changes in those systems. But then the article went on to demonstrate that it's not just organ systems, it's individual cells. And even when you go inside of a cell, the specific componentry of a cell, even the nucleus itself is affected. There was a great study from the UK.
The Dr. Hyman Show
How Sleep Rewires Your Brain, Balances Your Hormones & Extends Your Life | Dr. Matthew Walker
They took people, healthy people, limited them to six hours of sleep a night for one week. Now, for most people, they're thinking six hours of sleep, that sounds almost luxurious. This was their version of sleep restriction.
The Dr. Hyman Show
How Sleep Rewires Your Brain, Balances Your Hormones & Extends Your Life | Dr. Matthew Walker
And then what they did was they measured the change in the gene activity profile within that individual. compared to that same individual when they'd been getting a full eight hours of sleep opportunity. So everyone acted as their own control. And there were two stunning results.
The Dr. Hyman Show
How Sleep Rewires Your Brain, Balances Your Hormones & Extends Your Life | Dr. Matthew Walker
First, what they found was that a sizable 711 genes were distorted in their activity caused by that short sleeping profile.
The Dr. Hyman Show
How Sleep Rewires Your Brain, Balances Your Hormones & Extends Your Life | Dr. Matthew Walker
Well, and that was the second result. About half of those genes were what we call upregulated. They were overexpressed. And those were genes that were associated with the promotion of tumors, genes that were associated with inflammation and long-term chronic inflammation, and genes that were associated with cellular stress and, as a consequence, cardiovascular disease. Mm-hmm.
The Dr. Hyman Show
How Sleep Rewires Your Brain, Balances Your Hormones & Extends Your Life | Dr. Matthew Walker
Whereas those genes that were actually down-regulated were genes that were promoting the support of your immune system. So even at a DNA genetic level, you could see your immune deficiency caused by one week of short sleep. So I can take you from a societal level and how we operate together as a human society-
The Dr. Hyman Show
How Sleep Rewires Your Brain, Balances Your Hormones & Extends Your Life | Dr. Matthew Walker
all the way down to say that there is no aspect of your physiology that can retreat at the sign of sleep deprivation and get away unscathed. It will even tamper with the very DNA nucleic alphabet that spells out your daily health narrative. It's incredible. And everything in between. It's incredible. So yeah, I think... But think about it from this perspective too.
The Dr. Hyman Show
The #1 Anti-Aging Tool You’re Ignoring (Hint: It’s Free and Happens at Night)
That's right. And to me, that's one of the exciting parts of it. Because it's treatable. Is that it's both treatable and it's a novel, you know, is it a novel sleep aid pathway? I don't know. I don't know if it's powerful enough to come close to that. It may not be.
The Dr. Hyman Show
The #1 Anti-Aging Tool You’re Ignoring (Hint: It’s Free and Happens at Night)
I mean, I love to see the data. But it's interesting. I'm not trying to be too skeptical, because as scientists and doctors, you and I both know absence of evidence is not evidence of absence. So don't judge too quick. But right now, I think the jury's out. Yeah, for sure.
The Dr. Hyman Show
The #1 Anti-Aging Tool You’re Ignoring (Hint: It’s Free and Happens at Night)
Yeah, when you have sleep disruption, yeah.
The Dr. Hyman Show
The #1 Anti-Aging Tool You’re Ignoring (Hint: It’s Free and Happens at Night)
So I'm- And Alzheimer's disease, there's some really fascinating data regarding- you know, inflammation and Alzheimer's disease as a causal relationship now. Quite striking.
The Dr. Hyman Show
The #1 Anti-Aging Tool You’re Ignoring (Hint: It’s Free and Happens at Night)
human beings are the only species that will deliberately deprive themselves of sleep for no apparent good reason. Like doctors, you mean? Like doctors, exactly. But what does that tell us? That tells us is that Mother Nature has never had to face this challenge of sleep deprivation. So no wonder there are no safety nets in place. Yeah.
The Dr. Hyman Show
The #1 Anti-Aging Tool You’re Ignoring (Hint: It’s Free and Happens at Night)
Right. And so, and I think we don't yet know what's happening with tau, which is the other tau protein, which is the other sort of culprit there with inflammation. I suspect it may be the same story. It may be even more powerfully explanatory of cognition.
The Dr. Hyman Show
The #1 Anti-Aging Tool You’re Ignoring (Hint: It’s Free and Happens at Night)
But, you know, all of this just once again teaches us, I think you and I, maybe people listening, that for so long in medicine and science, we took... a siloed organ or system specific approach. I was a cardiologist, I was a neurologist, I was an immunologist. We are an embodied species, brain and body. I'm an everything-ologist. Yeah, exactly. And that's what, if your doctor says that,
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The #1 Anti-Aging Tool You’re Ignoring (Hint: It’s Free and Happens at Night)
Fundamental, yeah. And during sleep, we have a metabolic reduction. Part of one of perhaps the restorative functions of sleep is to have a metabolic downturn to a degree. But I think the other point is there is... You spoke about all of these different, you know, I'm a multi-system doctor.
The Dr. Hyman Show
The #1 Anti-Aging Tool You’re Ignoring (Hint: It’s Free and Happens at Night)
And yes, what we find is that all of those different systems, each by themselves, can all independently affect sleep. If you're in inflammation, if you have high blood pressure, if you have abnormal hormonal profiles, if you have poor blood sugar, all of these will disrupt your sleep. So it's feed up to the brain, disrupt sleep, but it also is feed down.
The Dr. Hyman Show
The #1 Anti-Aging Tool You’re Ignoring (Hint: It’s Free and Happens at Night)
And I've often thought, and it works both ways for health and ill health with good sleep versus bad sleep. If you've gone into one of those fancy music studios and there's that mixing deck with all of those little dials on it.
The Dr. Hyman Show
The #1 Anti-Aging Tool You’re Ignoring (Hint: It’s Free and Happens at Night)
So no wonder that we firstly, you know, go down very quickly biologically in terms of our health, but also don't forget that that is such a rare circumstance that when it happens, when the brain starts to sense, I'm not sleeping enough. Now it doesn't know why, because we're watching Netflix. It just says red alert, break glass in case of emergency.
The Dr. Hyman Show
The #1 Anti-Aging Tool You’re Ignoring (Hint: It’s Free and Happens at Night)
Yeah, and I look at it, oh my goodness. And you can move all of the different dials. They're all of the different systems. But you know that there's that one white dial all the way to the far left that if you move that up, all of the other dials go up with it. That to me is sleep.
The Dr. Hyman Show
The #1 Anti-Aging Tool You’re Ignoring (Hint: It’s Free and Happens at Night)
I'm not going to care about you, the people that I love. I've got to go into essentially low battery status and take care of myself. So you lose your empathetic sensitivity. We looked at doctors and there's great study from a team in Israel too. And what they found was that they started to prescribe less, and it was necessary, less pain medication for their patients.
The Dr. Hyman Show
The #1 Anti-Aging Tool You’re Ignoring (Hint: It’s Free and Happens at Night)
the more sleep deprived they were. Why? Because they lost their empathy. They did not care. And so patients are suffering. They are more sort of ensconced in nociceptive drench of pain because the doctors just don't see it.
The Dr. Hyman Show
The #1 Anti-Aging Tool You’re Ignoring (Hint: It’s Free and Happens at Night)
Yeah, it's almost like a hazing that we went through it and you're going to have to go through it. But it's horrible.
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The #1 Anti-Aging Tool You’re Ignoring (Hint: It’s Free and Happens at Night)
20%.
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The #1 Anti-Aging Tool You’re Ignoring (Hint: It’s Free and Happens at Night)
Yeah.
The Dr. Hyman Show
The #1 Anti-Aging Tool You’re Ignoring (Hint: It’s Free and Happens at Night)
And if you look at the curve, the decline in sleep over the past really 70 years for which we have good data. And if you look, for example, at the rise in obesity over the same duration of time, those two things go in opposite directions. As sleeping is coming down, obesity is going up. And we know that a lack of sleep changes your appetite hormones.
The Dr. Hyman Show
The #1 Anti-Aging Tool You’re Ignoring (Hint: It’s Free and Happens at Night)
It changes your ability to dispose of food and specifically regulate your blood sugar. So you are more obesogenic in terms of your profile of weight gain. You crave more carbs and sugar.
The Dr. Hyman Show
The #1 Anti-Aging Tool You’re Ignoring (Hint: It’s Free and Happens at Night)
Yeah. That's all you want. And that's exactly, it's not just that you eat more, which you do. It's what you eat. That's the problem. You go after the heavy hitting stodgy carbohydrates, simple sugars, and you shy away from the, the sort of, you know, the leafy greens, the nuts and the good proteins, because you are just on a junk food binge.
The Dr. Hyman Show
The #1 Anti-Aging Tool You’re Ignoring (Hint: It’s Free and Happens at Night)
Yeah. Yeah.
The Dr. Hyman Show
The #1 Anti-Aging Tool You’re Ignoring (Hint: It’s Free and Happens at Night)
That's right. And you can see that same replication of failure across multiple organ systems. So for example, I take a young healthy set of males, I limit them to let's say four or five hours of sleep for five nights, they will have a level of testosterone, which is that of someone 10 years their senior. So I can age a healthy young man by 10 years by short sleeping them for a week.
The Dr. Hyman Show
The #1 Anti-Aging Tool You’re Ignoring (Hint: It’s Free and Happens at Night)
You can take people who have perfectly regulated blood sugar, no problems with their blood glucose whatsoever. Put them on that same regiment of four or five nights of short sleep. And at the end of it, someone like you would look at their blood work and you would say, you are bordering on being pre-diabetic right now. Again, that's within the space of days.
The Dr. Hyman Show
The #1 Anti-Aging Tool You’re Ignoring (Hint: It’s Free and Happens at Night)
So I think it's, again, a demonstration to us that sleep, we don't have any real wiggle room.
The Dr. Hyman Show
The #1 Anti-Aging Tool You’re Ignoring (Hint: It’s Free and Happens at Night)
All of the above plus more. So there's not necessarily just one cause. Let's start at the hierarchical government level. There is no First World nation that I know of that has had a major public health campaign regarding sleep. Why not? We've had it for... drunk driving, we've had safe sex, we've had it for, you know, all of these different things, but there's nothing there for sleep.
The Dr. Hyman Show
The #1 Anti-Aging Tool You’re Ignoring (Hint: It’s Free and Happens at Night)
And yes, you could argue from a cynical perspective, it's because we want you, you know, from a capitalist society, we really want you to be doing two things. You're either, you know, producing things, or you're buying things, or you're consuming things. And if you're asleep, you're not doing either of those two. So you could argue conspiracy. I don't think it's that.
The Dr. Hyman Show
The #1 Anti-Aging Tool You’re Ignoring (Hint: It’s Free and Happens at Night)
And I've actually just recently started a public charity, a foundation, specifically designed for global sleep education. Take it a step down. There is the World Health Organization that I spoke to recently. There is no educational module for children translated into 37 different languages across different age ranges that educates them on the importance of sleep.
The Dr. Hyman Show
The #1 Anti-Aging Tool You’re Ignoring (Hint: It’s Free and Happens at Night)
So no wonder there is a parent to child transmission of sleep neglect. We have to change that too. Some of it is about education. The second part is mental health. We have a rising tide of anxiety in society. People are so stressed and we get people coming into the center at UC Berkeley and they will say, I am so tired. I am just so tired, but I'm so wired that I can't fall asleep.
The Dr. Hyman Show
The #1 Anti-Aging Tool You’re Ignoring (Hint: It’s Free and Happens at Night)
It's this tired but wired phenomenon. So the anxiety epidemic is causing sleep problems. And that's adrenal too, right? That's the cortisol rise at night. It's cortisol rise at night. It's because of that, what we call the HPA axis, sort of the cortisol descending chain. It's also because the nervous system
The Dr. Hyman Show
The #1 Anti-Aging Tool You’re Ignoring (Hint: It’s Free and Happens at Night)
almost is forced into a locked position of the fight or flight branch, what we call the sympathetic nervous system, which is anything but sympathetic. It's very agitating. And we cannot sleep when we are wired into the fight or flight branch. We have to switch over to the quiescent branch, the parasympathetic.
The Dr. Hyman Show
The #1 Anti-Aging Tool You’re Ignoring (Hint: It’s Free and Happens at Night)
So I think those two factors, the adrenal sort of nation, as it were, together with this fight or flight stance of the nervous system, is a royal roadblock to good sleep at night. I think it's one of the biggest factors. We've then also got the combative forces of entertainment and social media, which are, of course, consuming the best amount of time.
The Dr. Hyman Show
The #1 Anti-Aging Tool You’re Ignoring (Hint: It’s Free and Happens at Night)
And it's the worst time because... In this modern era, we're constantly on reception. Very rarely do we do reflection. And the only time we do reflection is when our head hits the pillow. And that is the worst of times to do reflection. Because when you do that, you start to ruminate. When you ruminate, you catastrophize. And when you catastrophize, you're dead in the water for the next two years.
The Dr. Hyman Show
The #1 Anti-Aging Tool You’re Ignoring (Hint: It’s Free and Happens at Night)
Because, you know... Everything seems twice as bad in the dark of night than it does in the light of day. And if we're doing that right before bed. So I think there are issues there. Sleep disorders are on the rise. Insomnia, which I think is a consequence of the anxiety and the stress.
The Dr. Hyman Show
The #1 Anti-Aging Tool You’re Ignoring (Hint: It’s Free and Happens at Night)
I often think that insomnia is the revenge of things that we've not processed during the day and got resolution to. We've got sleep apnea, snoring. I think that's heavy snoring or can be an indicator of that. That's certainly comorbid with diabetes and also obesity.
The Dr. Hyman Show
The #1 Anti-Aging Tool You’re Ignoring (Hint: It’s Free and Happens at Night)
So I think you've got all of this collection of factors together with the stigma that we described earlier, which is, well, I'm not really that proud of sleeping more. Why should I be? Because society doesn't reward it. You know, it's the type A, the early bird catches the worm. Maybe that's true, but I would say based on the data, the second mouse gets the cheese. And what's strange is that we,
The Dr. Hyman Show
The #1 Anti-Aging Tool You’re Ignoring (Hint: It’s Free and Happens at Night)
Never heard that one. But I find it funny that we chastise people who wake up late as being lazy. But we never say, oh, you go to bed early, you're lazy.
The Dr. Hyman Show
The #1 Anti-Aging Tool You’re Ignoring (Hint: It’s Free and Happens at Night)
Well, that's night owl and that's morning lark and it's not your fault. So, I think there are a whole collection of conspiring factors that together conflate to this enormous sleep challenge that we have in society right now.
The Dr. Hyman Show
The #1 Anti-Aging Tool You’re Ignoring (Hint: It’s Free and Happens at Night)
Yeah, restless leg syndrome.
The Dr. Hyman Show
The #1 Anti-Aging Tool You’re Ignoring (Hint: It’s Free and Happens at Night)
Yeah, I think all of those factors that you just described will all feed into gut dysbiosis. And there is, I think, a bi-directional, and this is what we spoke about in the article, a bi-directional relationship between your gut health and your brain sleep health. Meaning that when your gut is in balance with that sort of collection of the flora and the fauna in your gut microbiome,
The Dr. Hyman Show
The #1 Anti-Aging Tool You’re Ignoring (Hint: It’s Free and Happens at Night)
it can send a health-related signal through the nervous system by way of a major highway that connects your gut to the brain called the vagus nerve. And that can help- That's not like Las Vegas.
The Dr. Hyman Show
The #1 Anti-Aging Tool You’re Ignoring (Hint: It’s Free and Happens at Night)
That's the relaxation nerve, but it's also a major informational highway, bi-directional communication path between your brain and your gut. That's how we think that the gut can influence the brain. And that's how we think that if you get the gut right, it may be a new approach to a sleep aid because then you can get the brain right.
The Dr. Hyman Show
The #1 Anti-Aging Tool You’re Ignoring (Hint: It’s Free and Happens at Night)
And it works in the opposite way, which is that when you are sleeping well, it can communicate a signal for improved gut health through the vagus down into the body.
The Dr. Hyman Show
The #1 Anti-Aging Tool You’re Ignoring (Hint: It’s Free and Happens at Night)
But when you are not sleeping well, and there's been some great studies, for example, in the extreme with jet lag, my goodness, do you see that when the brain becomes deficient in its sleep through this communication pathway, you will get significant gut dysbiosis. And many people will tell you one of the things that happens when I'm jet lagged is that my tummy is just off.
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The #1 Anti-Aging Tool You’re Ignoring (Hint: It’s Free and Happens at Night)
Oh, my goodness, things don't go well for me. And I don't quite understand why. I'm eating the same things, but it's probably because of this gut dysbiosis caused by a lack of sleep.
The Dr. Hyman Show
The #1 Anti-Aging Tool You’re Ignoring (Hint: It’s Free and Happens at Night)
So it's not been answered yet. I suspect that we have enough data to do the correlation study that you just described, which is, Are these two things related?
The Dr. Hyman Show
The #1 Anti-Aging Tool You’re Ignoring (Hint: It’s Free and Happens at Night)
For example, if you look across a longitudinal study, and if we, I mean, we haven't been assessing the gut microbiome for probably long enough to have good longitudinal data yet in the gut microbiome, but we've got plenty of longitudinal data in sleep, meaning we've started off assessing people in their 30s or their 40s, track them over 15, 20 years,
The Dr. Hyman Show
The #1 Anti-Aging Tool You’re Ignoring (Hint: It’s Free and Happens at Night)
and then asked, is the sleep that they've been having across their life predictive of their all-cause mortality, cardiovascular mortality, cancer mortality? And we've got that data. What we now need is to look at gut health and ask, as that sleep is declining across the lifespan longitudinally, what happens to the gut?
The Dr. Hyman Show
The #1 Anti-Aging Tool You’re Ignoring (Hint: It’s Free and Happens at Night)
Yeah, yeah, fantastic.
The Dr. Hyman Show
The #1 Anti-Aging Tool You’re Ignoring (Hint: It’s Free and Happens at Night)
No, yeah. Of a certain type to really enjoy that type of stuff. Exactly.
The Jordan Harbinger Show
1095: Ali Abdaal | The Hidden Economics of Creative Success Part One
Yeah.
The Jordan Harbinger Show
1095: Ali Abdaal | The Hidden Economics of Creative Success Part One
Sleep is not an optional lifestyle luxury. Sleep is a non-negotiable biological necessity. Sleep is a life support system. It is Mother Nature's best effort yet at immortality. And the decimation of sleep throughout industrialized nations is now having a catastrophic impact on our health, our wellness, as well as the safety and the education of our children.
The Jordan Harbinger Show
1095: Ali Abdaal | The Hidden Economics of Creative Success Part One
It is a silent sleep loss epidemic, and I would contend that it is fast becoming the greatest public health challenge that we now face in the 21st century. The evidence is very clear that when we delay school start times, academic grades increase, behavioral problems decrease, truancy rates decrease, psychological and psychiatric issues decrease.
The Jordan Harbinger Show
1095: Ali Abdaal | The Hidden Economics of Creative Success Part One
But what we also found, which we didn't expect in those studies, is the life expectancy of students increased. So if our goal as educators truly is to educate and not risk lives in the process, then we are failing our children in the most spectacular manner with this incessant model of early school start times. And by the way, 7.30 a.m. for a teenager is the equivalent for an adult waking up at 5.
The Jordan Harbinger Show
1095: Ali Abdaal | The Hidden Economics of Creative Success Part One
4 30 or 3 30 in the morning if you're trying to survive or regularly getting five hours of sleep or less you have a 65 risk of dying at any moment in time When you wake up the next day, you have a revised mind-wide web of associations, a new associative network, a rebooted iOS that is capable of defining remarkable insights into previously impenetrable problems.
The Jordan Harbinger Show
1095: Ali Abdaal | The Hidden Economics of Creative Success Part One
And it is the reason that you have never been told to stay awake on a problem. Instead, you're told to... Sleep on a problem.