Matthew Hussey
Appearances
On Purpose with Jay Shetty
Jay’s Must-Listens: 6 Love Experts Reveal How to Finally Attract the Right Relationship! Featuring Joe Dispenza & Lori Gottlieb
Sometimes we're wanting something else because there's, you know, the person that's in front of us isn't compelling enough. There really is something lacking in that relationship. But I do think we have to ask ourselves, what are the things I really must have for an amazing relationship? I'm not a... you know, there's the one out there kind of a person. I've never been that way.
On Purpose with Jay Shetty
Jay’s Must-Listens: 6 Love Experts Reveal How to Finally Attract the Right Relationship! Featuring Joe Dispenza & Lori Gottlieb
If anyone looks back through my videos, and you know this because we've spoken about it, back when I was single, you know, I've never been a person who believes in the idea of the one. So I think that it's finding someone that we've, you know, we look at what's really important to us
On Purpose with Jay Shetty
Jay’s Must-Listens: 6 Love Experts Reveal How to Finally Attract the Right Relationship! Featuring Joe Dispenza & Lori Gottlieb
Not what's important on an egoic level, because I think a lot of the things that make us question whether this person is right for us are ego-based. I don't think they're based on how we feel around this person. We worry, is this the kind of person my friends think that I should be with? Do they look the part? Are they my normal type?
On Purpose with Jay Shetty
Jay’s Must-Listens: 6 Love Experts Reveal How to Finally Attract the Right Relationship! Featuring Joe Dispenza & Lori Gottlieb
Yeah. Has this person come in the package that I had always told myself they would come in? And those things can be really, really limiting. And they can have us constantly trying to optimize for some... version of something that we think we're supposed to be with, which is a very dangerous way to go about finding love. You can't optimize for human beings.
On Purpose with Jay Shetty
Jay’s Must-Listens: 6 Love Experts Reveal How to Finally Attract the Right Relationship! Featuring Joe Dispenza & Lori Gottlieb
You can optimize for a lot in life, but you're dealing with people. By the way, even if you let go of this person, you're going to find someone else who's also imperfect and they might... Okay, this person scores a seven in this area and they score a nine, but guess what? They score a three in this other area that you didn't even know
On Purpose with Jay Shetty
Jay’s Must-Listens: 6 Love Experts Reveal How to Finally Attract the Right Relationship! Featuring Joe Dispenza & Lori Gottlieb
was great in this relationship because you took for granted how amazing that person was in that way. It's very dangerous to optimize in that way in our love life. And I've come to really believe in life that if you find a connection that has all the right raw materials, and you both have the same level of commitment, then you can build something extraordinary together.
On Purpose with Jay Shetty
Jay’s Must-Listens: 6 Love Experts Reveal How to Finally Attract the Right Relationship! Featuring Joe Dispenza & Lori Gottlieb
And actually the extraordinary is the thing you sculpt together. It's no different from a career. When we think of what's our like, what are we worried about in our love life? For so many of us, it's that we're going to settle.
On Purpose with Jay Shetty
Jay’s Must-Listens: 6 Love Experts Reveal How to Finally Attract the Right Relationship! Featuring Joe Dispenza & Lori Gottlieb
I'm going to settle for the wrong person. Well, I think we can actually start to reclaim the language of settling and make it into a very positive thing. What if it wasn't settling for, what if you decided to settle on settling? Because when you settle on someone, there's a power to that. It's like you resolve to say, I'm going to settle on this.
On Purpose with Jay Shetty
Jay’s Must-Listens: 6 Love Experts Reveal How to Finally Attract the Right Relationship! Featuring Joe Dispenza & Lori Gottlieb
I have to argue that the benefit I have gotten from the pain that I didn't choose has been no less valuable than the benefit I've gotten from the pain I did choose. In fact, actually, I think the most valuable pain I've ever had is the pain I didn't choose. And when you realize that, you can kind of almost, I think, look at some of the worst moments of your life as like a menu of pain.
On Purpose with Jay Shetty
Jay’s Must-Listens: 6 Love Experts Reveal How to Finally Attract the Right Relationship! Featuring Joe Dispenza & Lori Gottlieb
And beside the item on the menu is the very specific, unique benefits that can only come from this kind of pain. And you can kind of imagine yourself choosing, like retroactively choosing that pain.
On Purpose with Jay Shetty
Jay’s Must-Listens: 6 Love Experts Reveal How to Finally Attract the Right Relationship! Featuring Joe Dispenza & Lori Gottlieb
which is a very valuable thing to do because I was told by a psychologist about an experiment on rats where one rat was on a wheel and was just given the free rein to just run whenever it wanted to run. There was another rat, this was rat A, rat B was connected to that wheel. He was on another wheel that was connected to rat A's wheel. And any time rat A chose to run, rat B had to run, right?
On Purpose with Jay Shetty
Jay’s Must-Listens: 6 Love Experts Reveal How to Finally Attract the Right Relationship! Featuring Joe Dispenza & Lori Gottlieb
So both doing the same amount of exercising, but at the end of the experiment, rat A shows all the positive markers of exercise and rat B shows all the negative markers of stress.
On Purpose with Jay Shetty
Jay’s Must-Listens: 6 Love Experts Reveal How to Finally Attract the Right Relationship! Featuring Joe Dispenza & Lori Gottlieb
Same amount of exercise, what's the difference? Well, rat A chose to run, rat B didn't. Anyone who doesn't choose you cannot be for you. If they don't see you, like what is a relationship? It's someone sees you, they accept you and they want that. That's the most beautiful part of a relationship.
On Purpose with Jay Shetty
Jay’s Must-Listens: 6 Love Experts Reveal How to Finally Attract the Right Relationship! Featuring Joe Dispenza & Lori Gottlieb
So if someone doesn't see you and accept you and want what they see, then this relationship is missing the most beautiful part of any relationship. It shouldn't be desirable at that stage because it's not...
On Purpose with Jay Shetty
Jay’s Must-Listens: 6 Love Experts Reveal How to Finally Attract the Right Relationship! Featuring Joe Dispenza & Lori Gottlieb
it has failed the fundamental test of what makes a relationship worth having we're not talking about a person who you know in in at least the case i feel we're talking about the person who was taken from us by life we're talking about a person who's just walking around somewhere still existing on the planet but choosing not to be with us that should lose its romance to us
On Purpose with Jay Shetty
Jay’s Must-Listens: 6 Love Experts Reveal How to Finally Attract the Right Relationship! Featuring Joe Dispenza & Lori Gottlieb
You know, and, and to say, well, if that's the other game we play is if it was a different time in life, if they were a bit older, they would have been ready to commit. If they had been in different phase where they weren't so busy with their work, they might've had the space to really give to this relationship, but they said their work isn't allowing them to.
On Purpose with Jay Shetty
Jay’s Must-Listens: 6 Love Experts Reveal How to Finally Attract the Right Relationship! Featuring Joe Dispenza & Lori Gottlieb
If it's like we go through all these scenarios where it, it forces us into this sad love song of right person, wrong time. And that's a really pernicious story. That's a very dangerous story because it takes what belongs in the realm of science fiction and brings it into our reality.
On Purpose with Jay Shetty
The Easiest Way to Start Investing Today— No Experience Needed (You Just Need $1!) with Robinhood CEO
It's a show dedicated to helping you figure out the trickiest parts of adulting.
On Purpose with Jay Shetty
The Easiest Way to Start Investing Today— No Experience Needed (You Just Need $1!) with Robinhood CEO
Let's learn about all of it and then some. Listen to Grown Up Stuff How to Adult on America's number one podcast network, iHeart. Open your free iHeart app and search Grown Up Stuff.
On Purpose with Jay Shetty
Jay's Must- Listens: Before You Text Your Ex… Listen to This! 5 Love Experts Share the SECRET to Let Go and Move On (Ft. Esther Perel, Mel Robbins, & Matthew Hussey)
which is a very valuable thing to do because I was told by a psychologist about an experiment on rats where one rat was on a wheel and was just given the free rein to just run whenever it wanted to run. There was another rat, this was rat A, rat B was connected to that wheel. He was on another wheel that was connected to rat A's wheel. And any time rat A chose to run, rat B had to run, right?
On Purpose with Jay Shetty
Jay's Must- Listens: Before You Text Your Ex… Listen to This! 5 Love Experts Share the SECRET to Let Go and Move On (Ft. Esther Perel, Mel Robbins, & Matthew Hussey)
So both doing the same amount of exercising, but at the end of the experiment, rat A shows all the positive markers of exercise and rat B shows all the negative markers of stress.
On Purpose with Jay Shetty
Jay's Must- Listens: Before You Text Your Ex… Listen to This! 5 Love Experts Share the SECRET to Let Go and Move On (Ft. Esther Perel, Mel Robbins, & Matthew Hussey)
Same amount of exercise, what's the difference? Well, rat A chose to run, rat B didn't. And there's something profound about that to me, because if we can take a situation that we didn't choose, who would choose to be heartbroken, right? It's the worst. It's a terrible pain.
On Purpose with Jay Shetty
Jay's Must- Listens: Before You Text Your Ex… Listen to This! 5 Love Experts Share the SECRET to Let Go and Move On (Ft. Esther Perel, Mel Robbins, & Matthew Hussey)
But what if in that pain you did realize, like, there is something here that I'm going to gain from this experience that I couldn't have any other way? that if I look on that menu of pain, this one has some really good benefits. Like this one has some really amazing stuff.
On Purpose with Jay Shetty
Jay's Must- Listens: Before You Text Your Ex… Listen to This! 5 Love Experts Share the SECRET to Let Go and Move On (Ft. Esther Perel, Mel Robbins, & Matthew Hussey)
Who I'm going to have to become to get through this, what I'm going to have to learn, the way I'm going to have to get comfort, even just to get through a weekend right now on my own is going to be this unbelievable feat. and to get comfortable in my own company and to sit in this pain. And there are such profound benefits from that.
On Purpose with Jay Shetty
Jay's Must- Listens: Before You Text Your Ex… Listen to This! 5 Love Experts Share the SECRET to Let Go and Move On (Ft. Esther Perel, Mel Robbins, & Matthew Hussey)
What if I did actually look at those benefits and say, they're so powerful, that I'm gonna choose this pain so that I can experience those benefits. And so you turn yourself from rat B to rat A, and all of a sudden you're not a victim of that pain anymore. You're the beneficiary of these exquisite gifts that you could only get this way. And that...
On Purpose with Jay Shetty
Jay's Must- Listens: Before You Text Your Ex… Listen to This! 5 Love Experts Share the SECRET to Let Go and Move On (Ft. Esther Perel, Mel Robbins, & Matthew Hussey)
that's only there's one tool i've used to get through some of the worst worst pain of my life and then on a practice and on a psychological level with heartbreak what i always remind people is that if anyone who doesn't choose you cannot be for you they if they don't see you like what is a relationship it's someone sees you they accept you and they want that
On Purpose with Jay Shetty
Jay's Must- Listens: Before You Text Your Ex… Listen to This! 5 Love Experts Share the SECRET to Let Go and Move On (Ft. Esther Perel, Mel Robbins, & Matthew Hussey)
That's the most beautiful part of a relationship. So if someone doesn't see you and accept you and want what they see, then this relationship is missing the most beautiful part of any relationship. It shouldn't be desirable at that stage because it's not... It has failed the fundamental test of what makes a relationship worth having.
On Purpose with Jay Shetty
Jay's Must- Listens: Before You Text Your Ex… Listen to This! 5 Love Experts Share the SECRET to Let Go and Move On (Ft. Esther Perel, Mel Robbins, & Matthew Hussey)
We're not talking about a person who, you know, in at least the case I feel we're talking about, the person who was taken from us by life. We're talking about a person who's just walking around somewhere, still existing on the planet, but choosing not to be with us. that should lose its romance to us.
On Purpose with Jay Shetty
Jay's Must- Listens: Before You Text Your Ex… Listen to This! 5 Love Experts Share the SECRET to Let Go and Move On (Ft. Esther Perel, Mel Robbins, & Matthew Hussey)
You know, and to say, well, if that's the other game we play is if it was a different time in life, if they were a bit older, they would have been ready to commit. If they had been in different phase where they weren't so busy with their work, they might've had the space to really give to this relationship, but they said their work isn't allowing them to.
On Purpose with Jay Shetty
Jay's Must- Listens: Before You Text Your Ex… Listen to This! 5 Love Experts Share the SECRET to Let Go and Move On (Ft. Esther Perel, Mel Robbins, & Matthew Hussey)
If it's like we go through all these scenarios where it, it, forces us into this sad love song of right person, wrong time. And that's a really like pernicious story. That's a very dangerous story because it takes what belongs in the realm of science fiction and brings it into our reality. When we're thinking about an ex from like five years ago, And we're like, I miss them, I don't know why.
On Purpose with Jay Shetty
Jay's Must- Listens: Before You Text Your Ex… Listen to This! 5 Love Experts Share the SECRET to Let Go and Move On (Ft. Esther Perel, Mel Robbins, & Matthew Hussey)
You don't even know who they are anymore. That was five years ago. They're a different person now in many ways. You're a different person now in any way. If you got together now, you'd be getting together as different people. You miss a ghost. Person doesn't exist anymore in the way that you think they do. And when you're saying, oh, if only we met five years from now, it would have worked.
On Purpose with Jay Shetty
Jay's Must- Listens: Before You Text Your Ex… Listen to This! 5 Love Experts Share the SECRET to Let Go and Move On (Ft. Esther Perel, Mel Robbins, & Matthew Hussey)
In what parallel universe? This is science fiction. It didn't happen in this universe. So it's It's like, it is wishing for a parallel universe where everything, all the dominoes unfolded in a different way. It's not this universe. So we just, we have to get out of this mindset because it gets us bought into a science fiction story that doesn't really exist.
On Purpose with Jay Shetty
Jay's Must- Listens: Before You Text Your Ex… Listen to This! 5 Love Experts Share the SECRET to Let Go and Move On (Ft. Esther Perel, Mel Robbins, & Matthew Hussey)
I don't believe in the right person at the wrong time. It's the right person is right in their personality. They're ready. And their life is compatible with yours. If you're missing one of those three things, then it's not the right person. The right person has to be more than someone who you have a great time with and you like who they are and have great conversation and great intimacy.
On Purpose with Jay Shetty
Jay's Must- Listens: Before You Text Your Ex… Listen to This! 5 Love Experts Share the SECRET to Let Go and Move On (Ft. Esther Perel, Mel Robbins, & Matthew Hussey)
That's not the only criteria for someone who's right. So we have to stop telling ourself the story. That someone who, you know, broke up with us or it was bad timing or whatever is the right person for us. That is just a story. It is not reality. The right person is the person it happens with.
On Purpose with Jay Shetty
Jay's Must- Listens: Before You Text Your Ex… Listen to This! 5 Love Experts Share the SECRET to Let Go and Move On (Ft. Esther Perel, Mel Robbins, & Matthew Hussey)
100%.
On Purpose with Jay Shetty
Jay's Must- Listens: Before You Text Your Ex… Listen to This! 5 Love Experts Share the SECRET to Let Go and Move On (Ft. Esther Perel, Mel Robbins, & Matthew Hussey)
Well, when you're in the depths of it, because there's different phases, right? Like there's a, certainly a phase of any heartbreak when it's genuine, deep heartbreak, where you are just questioning your existence, where you are like, I, this, you know, I remember having my own heartbroken and sitting on this door, the doorstep of my house with a friend of mine.
On Purpose with Jay Shetty
Jay's Must- Listens: Before You Text Your Ex… Listen to This! 5 Love Experts Share the SECRET to Let Go and Move On (Ft. Esther Perel, Mel Robbins, & Matthew Hussey)
And just with tears in my eyes saying to him, I just feel like I'm not good enough. That was my deep sense was that I am not good enough. And if I was good enough, I would have been able to make this work. And that's a horrible place to be. And we have to have compassion for ourselves in those times because it's brutally difficult.
On Purpose with Jay Shetty
Jay's Must- Listens: Before You Text Your Ex… Listen to This! 5 Love Experts Share the SECRET to Let Go and Move On (Ft. Esther Perel, Mel Robbins, & Matthew Hussey)
It's a time where we just need love and we need to celebrate the fact that we got through another day and that we managed to get out of bed today. And it was a heroic act for me to just get out of bed. I always think that all of these moments give us gears that we wouldn't have had otherwise. And the worst pain of my life has given me access to gears that I didn't know I had.
On Purpose with Jay Shetty
Jay's Must- Listens: Before You Text Your Ex… Listen to This! 5 Love Experts Share the SECRET to Let Go and Move On (Ft. Esther Perel, Mel Robbins, & Matthew Hussey)
And as much as no one wants to hear it when they're in it, those gears turn out to be really valuable. They really do. I mean, we all choose suffering in our lives. Like we choose to go to the gym, that's choosing suffering. We choose like to write a book, that's choosing a form of suffering. We choose to make a podcast or we choose to climb a literal mountain or like we choose pain.
On Purpose with Jay Shetty
Jay's Must- Listens: Before You Text Your Ex… Listen to This! 5 Love Experts Share the SECRET to Let Go and Move On (Ft. Esther Perel, Mel Robbins, & Matthew Hussey)
in our lives regularly because we know that it gives us, there are benefits to be had. I have to argue that the benefit I have gotten from the pain that I didn't choose has been no less valuable than the benefit I've gotten from the pain I did choose. In fact, actually, I think the most valuable pain I've ever had is the pain I didn't choose.
On Purpose with Jay Shetty
Jay's Must- Listens: Before You Text Your Ex… Listen to This! 5 Love Experts Share the SECRET to Let Go and Move On (Ft. Esther Perel, Mel Robbins, & Matthew Hussey)
And when you realize that, you can kind of almost, I think, look at some of the worst moments of your life as like a menu of pain. And beside the item on the menu is the very specific, unique benefits that can only come from this kind of pain. And you can kind of imagine yourself choosing, like retroactively choosing that pain.
On Purpose with Jay Shetty
Dr. Rangan Chatterjee: #1 Way to Break a Bad Habit & Why 50% of What Doctors Learn in Medical School Turns Out Wrong
45 years ago, a Virginia soul band called the Edge of Daybreak recorded their debut album, Behind Bars. Record collectors consider it a masterpiece. The band's surviving members are long out of prison, but they say they have some unfinished business.
On Purpose with Jay Shetty
Dr. Rangan Chatterjee: #1 Way to Break a Bad Habit & Why 50% of What Doctors Learn in Medical School Turns Out Wrong
Listen to Soul Incarcerated on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
On Purpose with Jay Shetty
Dr. Rangan Chatterjee: #1 Way to Break a Bad Habit & Why 50% of What Doctors Learn in Medical School Turns Out Wrong
45 years ago, a Virginia soul band called the Edge of Daybreak recorded their debut album, Behind Bars. Record collectors consider it a masterpiece. The band's surviving members are long out of prison, but they say they have some unfinished business. Listen to Soul Incarcerated on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
On Purpose with Jay Shetty
Jillian Turecki: 3 Biggest Dating Mistakes You’re Making (Stop Chasing Love That’s Not For You)
People should be compassionate to themselves, but extend that compassion to your future self because truly extending your compassion to your future self is doing something that gives him or her a shot at a happy and a peaceful life.
On Purpose with Jay Shetty
Dan Harris: The Hidden Stressors That Are Ruining Your Inner Health & 10 Changes to Make to Reduce Stress
It's a show dedicated to helping you figure out the trickiest parts of adulting.
On Purpose with Jay Shetty
Dan Harris: The Hidden Stressors That Are Ruining Your Inner Health & 10 Changes to Make to Reduce Stress
Let's learn about all of it and then some. Listen to Grown Up Stuff How to Adult on America's number one podcast network, iHeart. Open your free iHeart app and search Grown Up Stuff.
On Purpose with Jay Shetty
Alexis Ohanian: Why Discipline Creates Freedom & How to Incorporate Routines in Your Schedule in Order to Succeed
It's a show dedicated to helping you figure out the trickiest parts of adulting.
On Purpose with Jay Shetty
Alexis Ohanian: Why Discipline Creates Freedom & How to Incorporate Routines in Your Schedule in Order to Succeed
Let's learn about all of it and then some. Listen to Grown Up Stuff How to Adult on America's number one podcast network, iHeart. Open your free iHeart app and search Grown Up Stuff.
On Purpose with Jay Shetty
Alicia Keys: 5 Ways to Overcome Self Doubt & Build Confidence Within
Are your money skills total trash? Well, you are not alone. Personal finance ignorance is as American as apple pie. But don't fret. The How to Money podcast is here to help you improve. Think, Matt, if your emergency fund was invested, especially given the volatility we're experiencing right now. Ouchies. Investing.
On Purpose with Jay Shetty
Alicia Keys: 5 Ways to Overcome Self Doubt & Build Confidence Within
It is ultimately a necessity, but you've got to keep that emergency fund accessible. It needs to be cash parked in your savings. It's time to increase your money knowledge. And the How to Money podcast is here to bring the wisdom. Open your free iHeartRadio app, search How to Money, and start listening today.
On Purpose with Jay Shetty
Alicia Keys: 5 Ways to Overcome Self Doubt & Build Confidence Within
We love learning about this extraordinary universe.
On Purpose with Jay Shetty
Alicia Keys: 5 Ways to Overcome Self Doubt & Build Confidence Within
And on our podcast, Daniel and Kelly's Extraordinary Universe, that's what we're going to do.
On Purpose with Jay Shetty
Alicia Keys: 5 Ways to Overcome Self Doubt & Build Confidence Within
I'm Kelly Wienersmith. I study parasites, and there's just endless things about this universe that I find fascinating.
On Purpose with Jay Shetty
LOVE EXPERT Stephan Speaks: 7 Ways You are Blocking Yourself From Meeting Your Soulmate (Change Your Patterns to Find the ONE)
People should be compassionate to themselves, but extend that compassion to your future self because truly extending your compassion to your future self is doing something that gives him or her a shot at a happy and a peaceful life.
On Purpose with Jay Shetty
Mel Robbins: How to Use the ‘Let Them Theory’ (A Life Changing Mindset Hack That 15 Million People Can’t Stop Talking About)
45 years ago, a Virginia soul band called the Edge of Daybreak recorded their debut album, Behind Bars. Record collectors consider it a masterpiece. The band's surviving members are long out of prison, but they say they have some unfinished business. The Edge of Daybreak, Eyes of Love, was supposed to have been followed up by another app.
On Purpose with Jay Shetty
Mel Robbins: How to Use the ‘Let Them Theory’ (A Life Changing Mindset Hack That 15 Million People Can’t Stop Talking About)
Listen to Soul Incarcerated on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
On Purpose with Jay Shetty
Mel Robbins: How to Use the ‘Let Them Theory’ (A Life Changing Mindset Hack That 15 Million People Can’t Stop Talking About)
45 years ago, a Virginia soul band called the Edge of Daybreak recorded their debut album, Behind Bars. Record collectors consider it a masterpiece. The band's surviving members are long out of prison, but they say they have some unfinished business. Listen to Soul Incarcerated on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
On Purpose with Jay Shetty
Sleep Expert Matthew Walker: Do THIS to Sleep Through The Night And Never Wake Up Tired Again
And at that point, we're dead in the water for the next two hours. So the final thing I would say is, let's speak about your mental state. So does that give you a sense of the pinwheel diagnostics that we would go through?
On Purpose with Jay Shetty
Sleep Expert Matthew Walker: Do THIS to Sleep Through The Night And Never Wake Up Tired Again
Yeah, two great questions. So right now we estimate that approximately 80% of people who have sleep apnea are undiagnosed.
On Purpose with Jay Shetty
Sleep Expert Matthew Walker: Do THIS to Sleep Through The Night And Never Wake Up Tired Again
Which if you look at the numbers is going to be a non-trivial proportion of the population. And the reason it's so dangerous is because when you have sleep apnea, essentially what's happening is that your airway is either partially becoming obstructed or like a straw, it's collapsing flat entirely.
On Purpose with Jay Shetty
Sleep Expert Matthew Walker: Do THIS to Sleep Through The Night And Never Wake Up Tired Again
Now, if it starts to become obstructed, so let's say you're sleeping on your back and the airway flaps in that airway are starting to give way to gravity, then you'll start to get a partial blocking, a partial what we call occlusion of the airway. And that's what you hear when you hear the... That's the sort of the flapping of the partial occlusion.
On Purpose with Jay Shetty
Sleep Expert Matthew Walker: Do THIS to Sleep Through The Night And Never Wake Up Tired Again
And then when you stop breathing entirely, at that point, the airway has completely collapsed. The straw has gone flat. And after about 15 or 20 seconds, your brainstem registers the alarming buildup of carbon dioxide in your blood, because at that point you are slowly asphyxiating and it sends a wake-up trigger up to your cortex. And then all of a sudden you hear... And you gasp and you're awake.
On Purpose with Jay Shetty
Sleep Expert Matthew Walker: Do THIS to Sleep Through The Night And Never Wake Up Tired Again
So imagine now we have a way that we measure these sort of occlusions and these partial collapses. And it's called the AHI score. Don't worry about it. It stands for the apnea hypopnea index. Suffice it to say that we look to see how many events like this are you having per hour of sleep. And if you were to have very mild sleep apnea, you may be having five, 10, 15 of these events.
On Purpose with Jay Shetty
Sleep Expert Matthew Walker: Do THIS to Sleep Through The Night And Never Wake Up Tired Again
That's considered mild. Some people could have 80 of them, perhaps. Let's just say you have mild sleep apnea, 10 of these events an hour, and you're in bed for eight hours. So imagine the following scenario with undiagnosed mild sleep apnea.
On Purpose with Jay Shetty
Sleep Expert Matthew Walker: Do THIS to Sleep Through The Night And Never Wake Up Tired Again
What if I were to say, tonight, I'm going to come into your bedroom, Jay, and every hour, I'm going to throttle you, strangle you to the point where you actually stop breathing. And I'm going to do that 10 times every hour for every one of the eight hours. So I'm going to do that 80 times throughout the night. That's so scary.
On Purpose with Jay Shetty
Sleep Expert Matthew Walker: Do THIS to Sleep Through The Night And Never Wake Up Tired Again
do you think you're going to feel restored and refreshed by your sleep the next morning? And the answer is no, but that's what, now that's hyperbolic of course, but in some ways that's what we're facing even with the mildest version of undiagnosed sleep apnea.
On Purpose with Jay Shetty
Sleep Expert Matthew Walker: Do THIS to Sleep Through The Night And Never Wake Up Tired Again
That's why sleep apnea untreated is associated with a very significant increase in all cause mortality, as well as increases in mortality related to diabetes, to cardiovascular disease, as well as certain forms of cancer. So, I think for me, it's the case of, it's not only going to erode the quantity of your life, meaning your lifespan, it will certainly shorten your health span.
On Purpose with Jay Shetty
Sleep Expert Matthew Walker: Do THIS to Sleep Through The Night And Never Wake Up Tired Again
That's what most of us are worried about. Not really our lifespan, it's our health span. None of us want to live with disease or sickness. I certainly don't want to. And I remember there was a patient that we work with, with sleep apnea. And after they were treated, they were saying, well, before that, I just thought this was me at 57 years old. I just thought I would deteriorate it with age.
On Purpose with Jay Shetty
Sleep Expert Matthew Walker: Do THIS to Sleep Through The Night And Never Wake Up Tired Again
And I realized there was someone in there that wasn't the way I felt. And when you treated me with sleep apnea, it was almost as though someone cognitively had wiped a fogged glass clear and finally I could see again. And so that's why I think so many people can benefit by way of just simply taking this app, seeing whether you snore. Also, you can do something called the stop button.
On Purpose with Jay Shetty
Sleep Expert Matthew Walker: Do THIS to Sleep Through The Night And Never Wake Up Tired Again
bang, questionnaire. So S-T-O-P, all in caps, dash B-A-N-G. And you can do it also online. And it's a very quick questionnaire, probably about two minutes, and it will evaluate your risk likelihood of having sleep apnea. One of those two, if you fear that you have sleep apnea, or if you know that your partner has sleep apnea, please go and get it seen to. It's a They sound like a chainsaw.
On Purpose with Jay Shetty
Sleep Expert Matthew Walker: Do THIS to Sleep Through The Night And Never Wake Up Tired Again
They wake the neighbors up. It's almost this thing of sort of humor. Trust me, when it comes to your health and your wellness, it is anything but a funny story when it comes to undiagnosed sleep apnea.
On Purpose with Jay Shetty
Sleep Expert Matthew Walker: Do THIS to Sleep Through The Night And Never Wake Up Tired Again
And so many downstream consequences happen when they get treated that they are typically overweight. They usually have high levels of blood sugar, of blood glucose. They typically have hypertension, high blood pressure. And what's nice is that when you were to say, okay, we've got to have you reducing your food intake. We need to stop you from eating sugar. We need to get you to the gym.
On Purpose with Jay Shetty
Sleep Expert Matthew Walker: Do THIS to Sleep Through The Night And Never Wake Up Tired Again
Right now we estimate that approximately 80% of people who have sleep apnea are undiagnosed.
On Purpose with Jay Shetty
Sleep Expert Matthew Walker: Do THIS to Sleep Through The Night And Never Wake Up Tired Again
All of those things have Herculean in their challenge. And people often in that state of being overweight, hypertensive, high glycemic, they just find it so hard to change. But if you treat them with sleep apnea, when sleep is abundant in good quantity and quality, which it will be when you treat them, all of a sudden your appetite hormones are rebalanced.
On Purpose with Jay Shetty
Sleep Expert Matthew Walker: Do THIS to Sleep Through The Night And Never Wake Up Tired Again
So you naturally stop eating as much as you wanted to. The weight starts to come off you and you're simply sleeping the weight off yourself. It's a largely painless equation. You don't crave those sugary sort of high sugar sort of immediate hit foods. So your blood sugar comes back into control and you're more motivated to be physically active, meaning that your cardiovascular health.
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Sleep Expert Matthew Walker: Do THIS to Sleep Through The Night And Never Wake Up Tired Again
So I sometimes think of sleep, you know, if you've seen one of those fancy music studios where they've got all of the dials on the mixing deck and And you can move any one of them. But sleep to me is that one dial all the way at the far left that if you move it, all of those other dials just kind of move up. It's the tide that floats all of our other health boats.
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Sleep Expert Matthew Walker: Do THIS to Sleep Through The Night And Never Wake Up Tired Again
And so if you get that one straight, so many things as a manifold, like an Archimedes lever, will consequently change downstream for the better. You don't even have to do anything. You just have to start sleeping better.
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Sleep Expert Matthew Walker: Do THIS to Sleep Through The Night And Never Wake Up Tired Again
What is good sleep? And should we just use the metric of quantity? The range is somewhere between seven to nine hours. Once you start to get less, the shorter your sleep, the shorter your life. When sleep is abundant, all of a sudden your appetite hormones are rebalanced. So you naturally stop eating as much as you wanted to. The weight starts to come off you.
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Sleep Expert Matthew Walker: Do THIS to Sleep Through The Night And Never Wake Up Tired Again
Yeah.
On Purpose with Jay Shetty
Sleep Expert Matthew Walker: Do THIS to Sleep Through The Night And Never Wake Up Tired Again
and you're simply sleeping the weight off yourself.
On Purpose with Jay Shetty
Sleep Expert Matthew Walker: Do THIS to Sleep Through The Night And Never Wake Up Tired Again
And in some ways, what's great now is the science is compelling in terms of the mechanism such that firstly, there are two appetite regulating hormones. They're called leptin and ghrelin. Now, leptin is an appetite hormone that when it's released, it says, okay, you're satisfied with your food. You don't want to eat more. You're satiated.
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Sleep Expert Matthew Walker: Do THIS to Sleep Through The Night And Never Wake Up Tired Again
ghrelin is the opposite it says you're not satisfied you're still hungry you need to eat more and what we find is that when we start to sort of thin slice people's sleep and it doesn't take very much you can sort of get maybe six hours of sleep for five nights or five hours of sleep for four nights all of a sudden the hormone leptin which says you're satisfied you're good you don't need to eat anymore that starts to decrease and
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Sleep Expert Matthew Walker: Do THIS to Sleep Through The Night And Never Wake Up Tired Again
Well, it usually takes about four nights of somewhere between four to five hours of sleep reduction to already see those changes and see appetite behavior changes as a consequence. So it doesn't take very much. And then if that wasn't bad enough, ghrelin, the hormone that says, oh, no, no, no, you're still hungry. Please, please eat more. That goes up.
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Sleep Expert Matthew Walker: Do THIS to Sleep Through The Night And Never Wake Up Tired Again
So in some ways, it's double jeopardy that you're getting punished twice for the same crime of insufficient sleep. Once by switching off the signal of I'm full, I don't need to eat. And once again, by I'm hungry and I need to eat more. Then what we have also found is that we have inside of us what we call endocannabinoids.
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Sleep Expert Matthew Walker: Do THIS to Sleep Through The Night And Never Wake Up Tired Again
If you are not sleeping in harmony with your natural biological sort of rhythm, then your sleep quantity and quality is worse. Regularity may be as, if not more important than quantity. And I would say to anyone listening, if you're going to do anything with this podcast, just do this one thing.
On Purpose with Jay Shetty
Sleep Expert Matthew Walker: Do THIS to Sleep Through The Night And Never Wake Up Tired Again
So people have heard of cannabis the way that most people have heard about it is an exogenous intake of cannabis. But we have naturally occurring cannabinoids in our system called endocannabinoids. Now, many people will, let's say, know someone, of course, I'm not going to judge anyone, will know someone who've said, when I smoke weed, I get the munchies, I get hungry.
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Sleep Expert Matthew Walker: Do THIS to Sleep Through The Night And Never Wake Up Tired Again
That seems to be one of the consequences of these cannabinoids. Now, endocannabinoids inside of us also do the same thing. They can make us more hungry. When you are underslept, you're naturally occurring cannabinoids, these endocannabinoids, they also increase. And that drives you to eat even more in addition to the changes in leptin and ghrelin.
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Sleep Expert Matthew Walker: Do THIS to Sleep Through The Night And Never Wake Up Tired Again
And then finally, we did a study with brain imaging where we scanned people's brains with and without good sleep, looking at different food items from highly desirable to highly healthy. When you are under slept, the rational control regions of your brain in the frontal cortex, they get shut down.
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Sleep Expert Matthew Walker: Do THIS to Sleep Through The Night And Never Wake Up Tired Again
And these more hedonic, deep emotional brain centers that respond to rewarding, pleasurable foods, they started to become much more reactive. And it set you on this path of almost obesogenic eating where you crave those sort of, you know, the sugars, the chocolates, the stodgy carbohydrates, and you don't go towards the leafy greens and the healthy nuts.
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Sleep Expert Matthew Walker: Do THIS to Sleep Through The Night And Never Wake Up Tired Again
You go after the pizza and sort of the salty snacks. So all of which is to say, you get this sort of conspiring both within the body and also at the level of the brain that explains exactly what you were just describing as a sort of a phenomenon.
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Sleep Expert Matthew Walker: Do THIS to Sleep Through The Night And Never Wake Up Tired Again
And that's why I think this, you've always got to be careful with epidemiological studies where you say, okay, shorter sleep equals higher body mass index, higher chances of obesity. There could be many things, but when you experimentally manipulate sleep and you can unpack the mechanism, then we can entertain causality.
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Sleep Expert Matthew Walker: Do THIS to Sleep Through The Night And Never Wake Up Tired Again
Yeah, it's a really good question. And so there, the sort of the three hours, what we were trying to do is take those night owls and try to drag them back in time. But if you're not a night owl trying to sort of manipulate your sort of sleep timing, we can then just ask for anyone who's just, you know, in their standard sleep regimen, when should you cut yourself off?
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Sleep Expert Matthew Walker: Do THIS to Sleep Through The Night And Never Wake Up Tired Again
And it's actually a bit of a myth because there's this strong sentiment out there on social media that you need to stop eating maybe three or four hours before bed. If you look at the data, and I did this sort of analysis of all the literature, if you eat as close as 60 minutes before bed, it doesn't seem to hurt your sleep.
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Sleep Expert Matthew Walker: Do THIS to Sleep Through The Night And Never Wake Up Tired Again
Now, if you sort of go 45 minutes or 30 minutes, then yes, it does seem to have an impact blast radius on your sleep. Nevertheless, that's a very different question than saying, what would be beneficial to my sleep? I'm phrasing the question as, at what point does it become harmful for your sleep? And the answer is, you can eat up to an hour before bed and show no harm on your sleep.
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Sleep Expert Matthew Walker: Do THIS to Sleep Through The Night And Never Wake Up Tired Again
But that's very different than saying, but what if you'd stopped eating two hours or two and a half hours? Would that have actually improved your sleep? I think what we're seeing in the data is that it's very idiosyncratic, that you need to test drive it and you will know which kind of quote unquote type you are.
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Sleep Expert Matthew Walker: Do THIS to Sleep Through The Night And Never Wake Up Tired Again
Some people, mostly night owls, have a preference to eat late in the day or early in the evening and very little in the morning. Whereas morning types like to eat sort of breakfast like a king, lunch like a prince and dinner like a pauper. You know, they scale down. I think it's dependent on your chronotype.
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Sleep Expert Matthew Walker: Do THIS to Sleep Through The Night And Never Wake Up Tired Again
That said though, the two ways that food can disrupt us, first, if we're eating high sugar content foods at night, it has a disruptive impact. And we know this in part because it could be not just the activating level of sort of alertness in the brain that happens with a sugar hit. It
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Sleep Expert Matthew Walker: Do THIS to Sleep Through The Night And Never Wake Up Tired Again
It's also that simple sugars are what we call thermogenic, meaning that when we take on board sugar, it can just very gently increase our core body temperature quite quickly. And it turns out temperature is key for sleep. We need to drop our brain and our body temperature by about one degree Celsius or about two to three degrees Fahrenheit to fall asleep and stay asleep.
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Sleep Expert Matthew Walker: Do THIS to Sleep Through The Night And Never Wake Up Tired Again
And it's the reason you will always find it easier to fall asleep in a room that's too cold than too hot. The room that's too cold, it's taking you in the right direction for good sleep at night. So when you onboard simple sugars at night, it starts to just moderately, just gently increase your core body temperature, which can disrupt your sleep.
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Sleep Expert Matthew Walker: Do THIS to Sleep Through The Night And Never Wake Up Tired Again
So I would say content, try to aim for, if you're going to go after sort of carbohydrate, make sure that they're complex carbohydrates that release that energy in a much slower fashion. Also try to aim for a protein based, you know, yogurt is fantastic at that point. Make sure it's not, you know, highly sweetened yogurt because then you're taking on board sugar, unfortunately.
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Sleep Expert Matthew Walker: Do THIS to Sleep Through The Night And Never Wake Up Tired Again
So yogurt together with some kind of slow release carbohydrate is probably a fantastic approach to food. The second way, though, that you can disrupt yourself above and beyond the macros of food is that when you eat too late, particularly spicy food, it can cause acid reflux. And that reflux is one of the other reasons that eating too close to bed will disrupt the quality of your sleep.
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Sleep Expert Matthew Walker: Do THIS to Sleep Through The Night And Never Wake Up Tired Again
So try to go after more of a slow-release sort of protein, maybe a casein-based protein, and then aim for, if you're going to go after carbohydrate, just make it a smaller portion and make it a complex carbohydrate. That's probably the best recommendation.
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Sleep Expert Matthew Walker: Do THIS to Sleep Through The Night And Never Wake Up Tired Again
That's right, yeah.
On Purpose with Jay Shetty
Sleep Expert Matthew Walker: Do THIS to Sleep Through The Night And Never Wake Up Tired Again
No, there actually is a correlation. It's a very astute observation, actually, which is you can have one type of biological chronotype predilection, but you can almost violate that biology and override some of it by creating certain conditions under which it will distort your natural rhythm. One way that this rhythm is played out is the release of something called melatonin.
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Sleep Expert Matthew Walker: Do THIS to Sleep Through The Night And Never Wake Up Tired Again
And melatonin is a naturally occurring hormone, and it simply tells your brain and your body when it is darkness, when it is night, which is to say melatonin helps with the timing of our sleep. And there are ways that you can artificially delay your natural melatonin release.
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Sleep Expert Matthew Walker: Do THIS to Sleep Through The Night And Never Wake Up Tired Again
A good one would be being exposed to too much light in the evening, too much artificial light, what I would think of as junk light. There was this concept a while back of junk DNA. Well, I think there is something called junk light and we get too much of it at night because we are a dark deprived society in this modern era. But there's other ways that you can delay your natural biology.
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Sleep Expert Matthew Walker: Do THIS to Sleep Through The Night And Never Wake Up Tired Again
And if let's say that all food was taken away, all electric light was gone, all internet service was down and the lights were out, you would naturally say to me, well, I'm someone who would probably not get sleepy until midnight. And then all of a sudden, as I said, no food, electromagnetic pulse takes out all electricity. Everything is gone. All of a sudden you probably say, gosh, it's 10, 15 PM.
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Sleep Expert Matthew Walker: Do THIS to Sleep Through The Night And Never Wake Up Tired Again
I actually feel quite sleepy. And it's because modernity through all of its changes, light, social media, you know, sort of entertainment that we're constantly exposed to. It's dislocated us from our natural sensation of being, Biology telling us it's time to sleep. Most of us think that, well, I'm probably, you know, a midnight to 8 a.m. type person.
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Sleep Expert Matthew Walker: Do THIS to Sleep Through The Night And Never Wake Up Tired Again
When if I took you camping in the Sierras for two weeks and we had all of our sort of fancy technology measuring your sleep-wake rhythms, we would actually find, you know, you're much closer to a 10.20 to 6.30 a.m. kind of person. But modern sort of industrial life has come in the way of that, and it has modified our perception.
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Sleep Expert Matthew Walker: Do THIS to Sleep Through The Night And Never Wake Up Tired Again
So to come back to your elegant insight, there are ways that we can almost contort our natural biology, one of which is things like social media, electric light. But another one is that you can just manipulate things like food timing. And that food timing will create an activating alertness sensation in the brain and the body and force you perhaps to go to bed or feel tired.
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Sleep Expert Matthew Walker: Do THIS to Sleep Through The Night And Never Wake Up Tired Again
And two hours later than you naturally would otherwise. So the way that we usually measure someone's natural sort of tendencies is we bring them into the laboratory and we say goodbye to your friends and your family for the next week. We take all daylight away, no windows, no nothing. And we just measure your natural biology when we separate you from everything that is in the outside world.
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Sleep Expert Matthew Walker: Do THIS to Sleep Through The Night And Never Wake Up Tired Again
And that way we can bring you back to your innate tendencies. And usually there is quite the mismatch between when we interview you and say, what is your natural rhythm? Versus when we measure you, what is your biological rhythm? Those two things are often quite different.
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Sleep Expert Matthew Walker: Do THIS to Sleep Through The Night And Never Wake Up Tired Again
Yeah, it's very interesting. And obviously just being a scientist rather than a medical doctor, what I could offer you is sort of scientifically descriptive advice rather than necessarily medically prescriptive advice. But melatonin has had this meteoric rise in the sleep supplement world.
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Sleep Expert Matthew Walker: Do THIS to Sleep Through The Night And Never Wake Up Tired Again
And now here, at least in America, where it's not regulated by the FDA, you can go into a supermarket or a grocery store and down the sort of the health food section, there is this big sort of purple sector. And that is the melatonin sector. Melatonin, it can be useful to help regulate your circadian rhythm. And so I will use it strategically if I'm traveling.
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Sleep Expert Matthew Walker: Do THIS to Sleep Through The Night And Never Wake Up Tired Again
If let's say I go back home to the United Kingdom and I live just outside of San Francisco, it's eight hours ahead. So I can use it to try to trick my brain into thinking, oh, it's nighttime on the first night I arrive in the UK, when in fact my melatonin peak is not going to arrive for at least another eight hours because I'm still back on California time.
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Sleep Expert Matthew Walker: Do THIS to Sleep Through The Night And Never Wake Up Tired Again
So, but for the most part, the way people use melatonin is night after night after night. And if you look at the studies, melatonin will only increase the speed with which you fall asleep by about 2.2 minutes. And it will only increase the efficiency of your sleep by about 3.7%, which isn't that much more above and beyond placebo.
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Sleep Expert Matthew Walker: Do THIS to Sleep Through The Night And Never Wake Up Tired Again
And the reason is because melatonin doesn't participate in the generation of sleep. Melatonin is a little bit like the starting official at the 100-meter race. It brings all of the great sleep races to the line and begins the great sleep race, but it doesn't participate in that sleep race. That's a whole different set of brain chemicals, which we'll come onto with sleeping pills.
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Sleep Expert Matthew Walker: Do THIS to Sleep Through The Night And Never Wake Up Tired Again
So that's the reason that melatonin isn't a particularly effective sleep aid. It's the reason that you will never see people being prescribed melatonin for insomnia for the most part, unless they have some kind of circadian rhythm disorder.
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Sleep Expert Matthew Walker: Do THIS to Sleep Through The Night And Never Wake Up Tired Again
So I would say if you're using melatonin for the purposes of improving the speed with which you fall asleep or the generation of sleep, it may be a placebo effect. And by the way, the placebo effect is the most reliable effect in all pharmacology. So maybe no harm, no foul.
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Sleep Expert Matthew Walker: Do THIS to Sleep Through The Night And Never Wake Up Tired Again
Ah, Jay, an absolute pleasure to be here. Thank you so much for having me and giving me the opportunity to speak the voice of sleep.
On Purpose with Jay Shetty
Sleep Expert Matthew Walker: Do THIS to Sleep Through The Night And Never Wake Up Tired Again
The only other caveats I would offer with melatonin, first, because it's not regulated here by the FDA, you don't know the purity. And there was a great study that's been replicated and they looked at, I think it was about 20 different vendors of melatonin and they sampled what was inside of the pill.
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Sleep Expert Matthew Walker: Do THIS to Sleep Through The Night And Never Wake Up Tired Again
based on what they said on the bottle versus what was actually in the pill, it ranged from about 80% less than what it said to 460% more than what it stated on the label. So it's a bit of a wild west. You don't quite know what you're getting when you take these. Yeah, it's misleading. Yeah, so you've got to, I would say, be a little bit careful.
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Sleep Expert Matthew Walker: Do THIS to Sleep Through The Night And Never Wake Up Tired Again
For the most part, melatonin is largely in a compound anyway, so we don't need to get sort of too phosphorylated about it.
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Sleep Expert Matthew Walker: Do THIS to Sleep Through The Night And Never Wake Up Tired Again
Yeah, that's another critical question. And that's one of the fears that we have. I think the data we don't have right now to say one way or the other, but if you think about, let's say, a male who's undergoing hormone replacement therapy with exogenous testosterone,
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Sleep Expert Matthew Walker: Do THIS to Sleep Through The Night And Never Wake Up Tired Again
What we know is with certain forms of testosterone replacement therapy, after some period of time, the testes will stop producing their own testosterone. And even if you were to stop your exogenous injection of testosterone, your production of testosterone innately never returns. And the worry is, is that the case with melatonin?
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Sleep Expert Matthew Walker: Do THIS to Sleep Through The Night And Never Wake Up Tired Again
Now, there have been a number of case studies that have looked at melatonin use, let's say for up to four or even six weeks of constant use. And when they stop, melatonin production returns. So it looks as though we don't have to worry. My worry though, with those data, when someone has sort of offered them to me is to say, but most people in society, they're not using melatonin like that.
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Sleep Expert Matthew Walker: Do THIS to Sleep Through The Night And Never Wake Up Tired Again
They've been using it for years, not six weeks. So I think I'm still a little bit sort of concerned. The other thing, or two other things, one is that the dose that people typically take is what we call a supraphysiological dose, meaning it's far higher than anything your body would naturally release. So people are taking five milligrams, 10 milligrams, maybe sometimes even 20 milligrams.
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Sleep Expert Matthew Walker: Do THIS to Sleep Through The Night And Never Wake Up Tired Again
Whereas what we would recommend in sleep medicine is somewhere around about one, maybe maximum of three milligrams. So log orders of magnitude higher. The other thing too, to keep in mind is that melatonin now is being more and more used in the pediatric setting. So you'll see these melatonin gummies for kids.
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Sleep Expert Matthew Walker: Do THIS to Sleep Through The Night And Never Wake Up Tired Again
And there was some data, gosh, now probably 30 years ago, looking at juvenile male rats, meaning that they're going through that sort of adolescent phase. And they were getting dosed with high amounts of melatonin. And that high dosing of melatonin in the juvenile male rats actually stunted their sexual development.
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Sleep Expert Matthew Walker: Do THIS to Sleep Through The Night And Never Wake Up Tired Again
So it stunted testicular growth and it caused testicular atrophy, meaning shrinking of the testes. Imagine if I were to go to, let's say, a teacher and parent meeting one evening at a school and get up there and say, I would like you this evening to start dosing your children with a bioactive hormone.
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Sleep Expert Matthew Walker: Do THIS to Sleep Through The Night And Never Wake Up Tired Again
Yeah, it's an interesting question. And there is definitely a range. You know, I think there is, and perhaps even populated by idiots like me, that there was this magical eight hour number that was
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Sleep Expert Matthew Walker: Do THIS to Sleep Through The Night And Never Wake Up Tired Again
And it is a hormone that I would like you to dose your children with every night at maybe five to 10 times the natural release. And also it's a hormone that may actually disrupt their sexual maturation and development. Who's with me? And at that point, people would boo you off the stage, rightly so. Now, again, I'm being hyperbolic, and we don't know if there is that concern or not.
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Sleep Expert Matthew Walker: Do THIS to Sleep Through The Night And Never Wake Up Tired Again
I'm simply saying that if we don't know, my sort of suspicion, at least personally, would be I'd probably err on the side of caution, at least at this stage, particularly because the FDA recently released data demonstrating that admissions to hospitals for melatonin overdose have increased by 503% in the past 10 years.
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Sleep Expert Matthew Walker: Do THIS to Sleep Through The Night And Never Wake Up Tired Again
So there is something going on with melatonin, I think, that we need to be mindful of. Again, though, it's largely an inert compound, so I don't mean to be scaremongering here. Your second part of the question was sleeping pills. And it's a really interesting evolution. I think we're now at the stage of sleeping pills 3.0. We sort of web 1.0, 2.0, 3.0. It's kind of the same with sleeping pills.
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Sleep Expert Matthew Walker: Do THIS to Sleep Through The Night And Never Wake Up Tired Again
We started off with the classic benzodiazepines, things like Valium. And they work to go after an inhibitory chemical in the brain, neurotransmitter in the brain called GABA, which stands for gamma-aminobutyric acid. Don't worry about the name. It's simply the red light stop sign for brain activity.
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Sleep Expert Matthew Walker: Do THIS to Sleep Through The Night And Never Wake Up Tired Again
you know necessary and get anything less and there's doom and gloom the range is somewhere between seven to nine hours for the average adult and what we certainly know is that once you start to get less than seven hours of sleep we can measure impairment in both your brain performance as well as your body metrics so there is a range but in some ways it's also a question of What is good sleep?
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Sleep Expert Matthew Walker: Do THIS to Sleep Through The Night And Never Wake Up Tired Again
These things like Valium, they would go after this GABA system in the brain and they would activate it and essentially just knock out your cortex. And then the second generation of sleeping pills came along, the Ambien, Linesta, Sonatas of this world.
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Sleep Expert Matthew Walker: Do THIS to Sleep Through The Night And Never Wake Up Tired Again
They also go after that GABA inhibitory neurotransmitter system in the brain, but they just sort of tickle the receptor in the brain a little bit differently. But for the most part, they are doing the same thing. And that's why we call them the sedative hypnotics. because they are sedating your cortex. Now, if you take an Ambien at full dose, I'm not going to argue that you're awake.
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Sleep Expert Matthew Walker: Do THIS to Sleep Through The Night And Never Wake Up Tired Again
You're clearly not awake. But to argue that you're in naturalistic sleep in some ways is an equal fallacy. Because if I show you the electrical signature of your sleep with and without Ambien, they're not the same. And in some ways, Ambien will come in and it will take a bite out of the deepest of the deep, slow brainwaves of deep non-REM sleep, sort of this big dent that you see that happens.
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Sleep Expert Matthew Walker: Do THIS to Sleep Through The Night And Never Wake Up Tired Again
And so, again, it's not necessarily to say that there isn't a time and a place for the use of those medications. Sleep medicine right now does recognize them as being useful potentially in the short term, but to start to begin treatment for insomnia, but they are no longer the first line recommended treatment.
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Sleep Expert Matthew Walker: Do THIS to Sleep Through The Night And Never Wake Up Tired Again
And one of the reasons that in a book that I wrote where I was sort of, I probably wasn't overly enthusiastic about those web 2.0 sleeping pills, the Ambience, Linus and Sonatus, And it was for several reasons. First, because sedation is not sleep. And when you take those medications, you mistake the former for the latter. But it's not natural sleep.
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Sleep Expert Matthew Walker: Do THIS to Sleep Through The Night And Never Wake Up Tired Again
We also know that those sleeping pills have been associated with higher risks of mortality in certain forms of cancer. Now, those associations, we don't know necessarily that that's causal. But then there was another very interesting study where they looked at how sleep helps your learning and your memory. And one of the incredible things about sleep is
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Sleep Expert Matthew Walker: Do THIS to Sleep Through The Night And Never Wake Up Tired Again
is that it will take recently learned memories and that memory circuit in the brain, sleep, will strengthen the synapses so that you come back the next day and that memory is almost, it's like hitting the save button on those memories.
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Sleep Expert Matthew Walker: Do THIS to Sleep Through The Night And Never Wake Up Tired Again
You cement it into the architecture of the brain. And they did a study where they dosed animals after learning a maze or different types of learning, and they could measure the strength of the memory circuit. And then they gave them natural sleep, and sure enough, the next day, sleep had almost doubled the strength of the memory.
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Sleep Expert Matthew Walker: Do THIS to Sleep Through The Night And Never Wake Up Tired Again
Then they did a version where they dosed the animals with a body-appropriate amount of Ambien, and those animals slept longer. And you would think, well, if sleep is helping the memories and strengthening that memory circuit, sleeping longer should lead to an even greater strengthening of the memory.
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Sleep Expert Matthew Walker: Do THIS to Sleep Through The Night And Never Wake Up Tired Again
Unfortunately, Ambien had unwired the memory, and it had actually reduced the strength of the memory by 50%, 5-0. So to me, that's just a demonstration that... Perhaps the quality of sleep is not a naturalistic quality of sleep, and it may not therefore be transacting the natural functions that sleep typically provides, like learning and memory.
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Sleep Expert Matthew Walker: Do THIS to Sleep Through The Night And Never Wake Up Tired Again
There is a newer class of medications, though, out on the market. And I think the evidence right now is still early, but so far, I actually think that they look really quite effective. And Again, I think people had taken my stance to be I'm very anti-pharmacology in general. I'm not. I'm very pro-pharmacology if the pharmacology is good and not necessarily causing you harm. And these new
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Sleep Expert Matthew Walker: Do THIS to Sleep Through The Night And Never Wake Up Tired Again
a class of medications. They are called the DORAS drugs, and it's D-O-R-A, small s. It's a class of drugs, and there are currently three FDA approved. Probably the first one was called Belsomra, and it's a play on sort of beautiful sleep. And the actual chemical name is Suvorexant. These medications do something really much more elegant.
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Sleep Expert Matthew Walker: Do THIS to Sleep Through The Night And Never Wake Up Tired Again
And should we just use the metric of quantity? And we absolutely should, because using that sweet spot of seven to nine hours, it looks as though the shorter your sleep, the shorter your life. Short sleep predicts all cause mortality. So duration, total amount, is necessary.
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Sleep Expert Matthew Walker: Do THIS to Sleep Through The Night And Never Wake Up Tired Again
The Ambienz and the Linastas, as I said, that's just a sedative hit to the cortex. These new class of medications, the DORAs, they go after a wake-promoting chemical called orexin. You can think of orexin like the wakefulness volume button. And when it's turned up, we're wide awake. And these medications, they come in and they act like an additional set of chemical fingers.
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Sleep Expert Matthew Walker: Do THIS to Sleep Through The Night And Never Wake Up Tired Again
And they just go after the volume button of wakefulness of orexin. and they just dial it down and then they step back and they allow the antithesis of wakefulness to come in its place, which is this thing called naturalistic sleep. And so I think right now I'm probably more bullish on those medications. Again, a lot of water to pass under the bridge before we understand them.
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Sleep Expert Matthew Walker: Do THIS to Sleep Through The Night And Never Wake Up Tired Again
But so far, I think they're a much more elegant and nuanced way of manipulating sleep. The other thing I would be remiss to mention is there is an alternative to these medications in general, and it's called cognitive behavioral therapy for insomnia or CBTI for short. It is just as effective as sleeping pills in the short term.
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Sleep Expert Matthew Walker: Do THIS to Sleep Through The Night And Never Wake Up Tired Again
But what's nice is that when you stop working with your therapist after maybe six or eight sessions, Not only do you, with a sleeping pill like Ambien, when you stop, you typically go back to the bad sleep that you were having, or you actually have rebound insomnia where your sleep is even worse. But with a therapist, they're giving you the tools and techniques.
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Sleep Expert Matthew Walker: Do THIS to Sleep Through The Night And Never Wake Up Tired Again
It's sort of the difference between, let's say, giving a woman or a man a fish versus teaching them how to fish. This way, you actually understand how to manipulate your sleep. They give you the tools and then you can continue to sleep better for years later, even after you've stopped utilizing the therapy, unlike medications.
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Sleep Expert Matthew Walker: Do THIS to Sleep Through The Night And Never Wake Up Tired Again
So I would just say that that's a little bit about both melatonin, the sort of the emergence of these new flavors of sleep medications, and then an alternative should people wish for that.
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Sleep Expert Matthew Walker: Do THIS to Sleep Through The Night And Never Wake Up Tired Again
But if you actually look at the science, what is good sleep can be really answered by a four-part equation that in my mind, there are really sort of four macros of good sleep. Three macros of food, fat, protein, carbohydrate. For sleep, four macros. And you can remember it by the acronym QQRT. And it stands for quantity, quality, regularity, and timing. So quantity, you're absolutely right.
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Sleep Expert Matthew Walker: Do THIS to Sleep Through The Night And Never Wake Up Tired Again
Honestly, I love that you bring this up. And I would say to anyone listening, if you're going to do anything with this podcast in terms of an actionable event, just do this one thing. For the next week, if you get the opportunity, just do me this favor. Set a to-bed alarm one hour before you would normally go to bed.
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Sleep Expert Matthew Walker: Do THIS to Sleep Through The Night And Never Wake Up Tired Again
And when that alarm goes off, shut down 50%, if not 75% of all of the lights in your home. And then see how soporific... That will make you feel how sleepy that you will make you feel. It's really quite striking. And then don't just stop there. Do what I would call the off on off version of the experiment. So baseline, you're coming in, you're normally leaving the lights on blazing.
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Sleep Expert Matthew Walker: Do THIS to Sleep Through The Night And Never Wake Up Tired Again
Now we go into the on version of the experiment, the intervention, which is darkness one hour before bed. And then after that one week, go back to doing what you used to do. Keep all of the lights blazing for right up until you go to bed. And don't just ask the question, did my sleep get any better when I did the manipulation of one hour before bed, switch the lights off?
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Sleep Expert Matthew Walker: Do THIS to Sleep Through The Night And Never Wake Up Tired Again
ask the question, did my sleep go back to being actually worse when I returned to keeping the lights on? And so you show bi-directionality. And when you show bi-directionality, it's usually a much more powerful version of the experiment. And if honestly, you can say to me, it made no difference to my sensation of feeling drowsy and sleepy or the quality of my sleep, then no problem at all.
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Sleep Expert Matthew Walker: Do THIS to Sleep Through The Night And Never Wake Up Tired Again
Keep doing what you're doing. And it just didn't work for you. That's fine too.
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Sleep Expert Matthew Walker: Do THIS to Sleep Through The Night And Never Wake Up Tired Again
Somewhere between seven to nine is that fit. Quality is about the continuity of your sleep. Is your sleep fragmented and littered with all of these awakenings and you're awake for a lot of the night? That's not good quality of sleep. So you could be in bed for nine and a half hours and still get seven hours of sleep, but you're spending two and a half hours of time awake.
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Sleep Expert Matthew Walker: Do THIS to Sleep Through The Night And Never Wake Up Tired Again
I would say there are three things to keep in mind here. When I often hear that description, people will say, I always wake up at, it's about 3.15 in the morning or it's 4.10 and it just happens so reliably. My first question to them is, how do you know it's four o'clock in the morning? That's your problem. you're looking at the clock and knowing that it's 3.15 or 4 a.m.
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Sleep Expert Matthew Walker: Do THIS to Sleep Through The Night And Never Wake Up Tired Again
in the morning does you no favors at all. It's not going to change the outcome. So the first recommendation is remove all clock faces from the bedroom. It's okay to, if you really must do, keep your phone next to your bed, but keep it out of sight, even though I would strongly recommend that you keep your phone in the kitchen or even better still, a friend of mine recommended recently,
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Sleep Expert Matthew Walker: Do THIS to Sleep Through The Night And Never Wake Up Tired Again
Just put it in the garage, put it in your car, in the garage. And that way, the amount of motivation effort to go and get your phone within the first 10 minutes of the morning is very, very high, meaning you're probably not going to do it. So let's baby steps. Let's just say crawl, walk, run. First thing to do, just make sure you can't see any clock faces. And if you wake up, resist the urge.
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Sleep Expert Matthew Walker: Do THIS to Sleep Through The Night And Never Wake Up Tired Again
Because as soon as you start doing that night after night, you're actually training your brain, reinforcing it to wake up at 3.15 in the morning. So we've started that. The next question is, well, what should you do about it? You know, don't tell me the fancy remove the clock. Help me. At that point at night, either if you've woken up or you just can't fall asleep, it works for both of these.
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Sleep Expert Matthew Walker: Do THIS to Sleep Through The Night And Never Wake Up Tired Again
The problem here is that you have to get your mind off itself. Because at that moment, when you're awake, you start thinking, okay, I'm awake. This is now going to just obliterate my day tomorrow. I've got that important meeting. I'm now going to be underslept. At that point, the anxiety starts to begin.
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Sleep Expert Matthew Walker: Do THIS to Sleep Through The Night And Never Wake Up Tired Again
Then you start thinking, oh gosh, I remember now I didn't do that one thing that I should have done for tomorrow morning. And then I've got to do that thing for next week. And I also didn't do that thing last week for... And again, at that point, that's going to keep you awake for the next one or two hours. So your job to try to get back asleep is to disengage the mind. How do you do that?
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Sleep Expert Matthew Walker: Do THIS to Sleep Through The Night And Never Wake Up Tired Again
I would say there are probably four or five different tools that you can use. The first is meditation. It may be or may not be for you, but if you look at the data, meditation for sleep, immensely powerful. If meditation is not your thing, just do something simple like breath work, and you can just Google box breathing and anything like that is great. You could also just do a simple body scan.
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Sleep Expert Matthew Walker: Do THIS to Sleep Through The Night And Never Wake Up Tired Again
That's not good quality of sleep. Then we can speak about regularity, going to bed at the same time, waking up at the same time. It sounds very benign. Well, do I really have to worry about regularity? There's a great study and they looked at regularity and quantity. Both of them predicted all cause mortality.
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Sleep Expert Matthew Walker: Do THIS to Sleep Through The Night And Never Wake Up Tired Again
Start at the top of the head, move down, just, and again, Google body scan, and you can start to train yourself to do that. The next thing you could do is listen to a sleep story or just listen to a podcast. Make sure it's on a timed sort of shut off. But again, all of these things common across all of them is you're getting your mind off itself.
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Sleep Expert Matthew Walker: Do THIS to Sleep Through The Night And Never Wake Up Tired Again
If I'm meditating, I'm not thinking about my worries. If I'm breathing, I'm focusing on the breath. If I'm doing some kind of a relaxation, a body scan again, I'm just moving through my body. It's very hard for me to think about my anxieties. If I'm listening to a sleep story, I'm engaging in, Sort of the externality of the story, not my own internal worries.
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Sleep Expert Matthew Walker: Do THIS to Sleep Through The Night And Never Wake Up Tired Again
And then the final thing that was done is great study done at UC Berkeley, not by my group. They found that taking yourself on a mental walk in hyper detail was wonderful. So let's say it's a walk that I take with my dog. And you've got to remember it in high detail. So I think, okay, I open the drawer, which colored leash am I going to take? I'll take the blue one, clip it in with my right hand.
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Sleep Expert Matthew Walker: Do THIS to Sleep Through The Night And Never Wake Up Tired Again
With my left hand, I open the door, take a left down the stairs, go up. It's at that level of detail. And all of these things are taking your mind off itself because at that time of night, sleep is a little bit like trying to remember someone's name. Sleep is not something that you make happen. Sleep is something that happens to you.
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Sleep Expert Matthew Walker: Do THIS to Sleep Through The Night And Never Wake Up Tired Again
And like trying to remember someone's name, the harder you try, the further you push it away. And it's only when you stop trying, does it return to you. And that's the same way with sleep. And normally, if you engage in some of these methods and tools, the next thing that you remember is is your alarm going off in the morning. Why? Because you took your mind off itself.
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Sleep Expert Matthew Walker: Do THIS to Sleep Through The Night And Never Wake Up Tired Again
If that doesn't work and you are consistently waking up and spending long amounts of time in bed awake, then we may have to implement one of the methods in cognitive behavioral therapy for insomnia, which is something called bedtime restructuring. It used to be called sleep restriction therapy.
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Sleep Expert Matthew Walker: Do THIS to Sleep Through The Night And Never Wake Up Tired Again
And for reasons, obviously you can think it's not the best name where you come to me and say, look, I'm having real problems getting enough sleep. My say, great, we're going to do sleep restriction therapy. And you say, no, no, wait a second. You didn't hear me. I can't get enough sleep. And you're saying you're going to restrict my sleep. It's actually not sleep restriction.
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Sleep Expert Matthew Walker: Do THIS to Sleep Through The Night And Never Wake Up Tired Again
It's time in bed restriction. So you tell me, okay, I am in bed for eight hours and I'm awake for two hours across the night. So I'm only getting six hours of sleep, but I'm in bed for eight hours. To me, as a sleep scientist, I then know we've got to constrain the time with which you are giving your brain the opportunity to sleep because your brain has become inefficient.
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Sleep Expert Matthew Walker: Do THIS to Sleep Through The Night And Never Wake Up Tired Again
It's like saying I go to the gym and I take an hour to work out. But if you were to actually observe me, I'm actually only working out for about 25 minutes because, you know, at the end I finished my, you know, my last rep. Then I do the 11th rep, which is I pick up my phone and I start checking social media and then I'm talking to people and utterly inefficient.
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Sleep Expert Matthew Walker: Do THIS to Sleep Through The Night And Never Wake Up Tired Again
So if you're very regular and you get that seven to nine hours of sleep, you have the lowest mortality risk. But then, because they had these two measures in the same individuals, they put them in the same statistical analysis and did the sort of Coke-Pepsi challenge between the two.
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Sleep Expert Matthew Walker: Do THIS to Sleep Through The Night And Never Wake Up Tired Again
But then at some point someone says to me, look, today you've only got a maximum of 30 minutes in the gym. And as soon as your 30 minutes is up, we kick you out. the first couple of days, I'm still doing what I normally do. And I get through maybe 15% of my workout because I'm not doing it efficiently.
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Sleep Expert Matthew Walker: Do THIS to Sleep Through The Night And Never Wake Up Tired Again
After a week of doing that, I now realize as soon as I go into the gym, I put my phone down and I just go at it real hard. And I still get my 25 minutes of workout in the 30 minutes. It's the same with sleep restriction. You tell me, okay, I'm in bed for eight hours and I only get about sort of six hours of sleep. Well, now I'm going to say, I'm going to limit you
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Sleep Expert Matthew Walker: Do THIS to Sleep Through The Night And Never Wake Up Tired Again
And I'm going to take one hour of sleep away from you. You wake up at the same time, but I want you to go to bed consistently one hour later, maybe even one and a half hours later. You tell me I go to bed normally at 10 p.m. I say, you are now not allowed to get into bed until 1130 p.m. Push through. I don't care. And then you've got to wake up at the same time.
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Sleep Expert Matthew Walker: Do THIS to Sleep Through The Night And Never Wake Up Tired Again
And after about three or four days of this, your brain starts to build up. Now, the first couple of nights, you're still going to be sleeping bad. But then after a couple of nights, your brain starts to build up this starvation, this hunger for sleep. It creates a sleep debt. And then after a while, it's like resetting the wifi button on your router.
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Sleep Expert Matthew Walker: Do THIS to Sleep Through The Night And Never Wake Up Tired Again
The brain thinks, gosh, I don't have the luxury of eight and a half hours of time in bed. I'm only allowed six and a half now or seven. And now all of a sudden it becomes incredibly efficient. You stop waking up in the middle of the night. If you do wake up, you fall back asleep very quickly and you end up getting maybe six and three quarter hours of sleep within seven.
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Sleep Expert Matthew Walker: Do THIS to Sleep Through The Night And Never Wake Up Tired Again
Whereas you used to get six and a half hours of sleep with eight and a half hours of time in bed. So it's a quite convoluted method, but I would say I would use that as the last approach. Firstly, try to get your mind off itself. If it's still not working, think about sleep restriction therapy. You can just Google it. It's pretty simple.
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Sleep Expert Matthew Walker: Do THIS to Sleep Through The Night And Never Wake Up Tired Again
What they found is that regularity beat out quantity in terms of predicting your mortality, meaning regularity may be as, if not more important than quantity. Now, you've got to get both, but... So QQR, quantity, quality, regularity, timing. Timing sounds like regularity and you think, well, what's the difference? Timing is about your chronotype. Are you a morning type, evening type, or a neutral?
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Sleep Expert Matthew Walker: Do THIS to Sleep Through The Night And Never Wake Up Tired Again
Well, I think I was very guilty of doing this. You know, when I first came out a couple of years ago, speaking about sleep, I was speaking all about the science of sleep and the bad things that happen about sleep. And I think someone Even said my TED talk, which I think was called, they name it, sleep is your superpower or something. Should have really been called sleep or else dot, dot, dot.
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Sleep Expert Matthew Walker: Do THIS to Sleep Through The Night And Never Wake Up Tired Again
And it did people with insomnia no favors. I understand that now. But I think what I've tried to do is people have said, okay, I get it. Sleep is important, but how? How do I get it? And I completely suffered what we call in neurology is hemi-neglect.
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Sleep Expert Matthew Walker: Do THIS to Sleep Through The Night And Never Wake Up Tired Again
One half of what I needed to do as sort of a public intellectual regarding sleep was missing, which is telling everyone how critical it was and the bad things that happen when you don't get it. But I wasn't being very helpful because I wasn't telling anyone how it works and how, you know, where is the user manual for sleep? And that's what I'm now trying to do.
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Sleep Expert Matthew Walker: Do THIS to Sleep Through The Night And Never Wake Up Tired Again
So thank you for saying I'm trying to do a little bit better. Trying to do less bad. Let's just say that.
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Sleep Expert Matthew Walker: Do THIS to Sleep Through The Night And Never Wake Up Tired Again
I think I would say that firstly, caffeine has a half-life for the average adult of five to six hours, which means that after about five to six hours, 50% of the caffeine is still circulating in your brain. That means that caffeine has a quarter-life of 10 to 12 hours. So if you have a cup of coffee at noon, 25% of that, a quarter of that cup of coffee is still in your brain at midnight.
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Sleep Expert Matthew Walker: Do THIS to Sleep Through The Night And Never Wake Up Tired Again
So I don't think many of us would get into bed and sort of pour a quarter of a cup of coffee and then swig it and then put your head on the pillow. We understand that that probably doesn't lead to good sleep. But in some ways, that's not dissimilar to what you're doing if you have a cup of coffee at noon.
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Sleep Expert Matthew Walker: Do THIS to Sleep Through The Night And Never Wake Up Tired Again
Keep in mind, however, there is variability that some people have a faster capability to metabolize or at least clear caffeine from the system. And you can do these genetic tests and there's an enzyme called the CYP1A2 gene. And that will dictate the speed of it as sort of a liver enzyme, a cytochrome enzyme that will speed or slow down. And you will know if you're caffeine sensitive or not.
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Sleep Expert Matthew Walker: Do THIS to Sleep Through The Night And Never Wake Up Tired Again
So firstly, the timing of caffeine can be important. Also the dose, and that's why we've looked at people, even if you just have one weekly sort of drip brewed cup of coffee in the evening, let's say it's just 100 milligrams of caffeine, it will not necessarily prevent you from falling asleep as efficiently, but it will increase the chances with which you wake up
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Sleep Expert Matthew Walker: Do THIS to Sleep Through The Night And Never Wake Up Tired Again
And if you wake up, it will increase the duration with which it takes you to fall back asleep. And if it doesn't do that, it can also reduce down the depth of your deep sleep. And we know, for example, that it's during that deep sleep when your brain has a cleansing system that washes away things like the Alzheimer's proteins, amyloid and tau protein.
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Sleep Expert Matthew Walker: Do THIS to Sleep Through The Night And Never Wake Up Tired Again
So you really would prefer not to try to degrade the quality of your deep sleep, considering all that it does for your brain and your body. But in some ways, that's what many of us are inadvertently doing if we have caffeine too late in the day. I would say, though, that I've probably changed my tune a little bit on coffee. I would say drink coffee, but the dose and the timing make the poison.
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Sleep Expert Matthew Walker: Do THIS to Sleep Through The Night And Never Wake Up Tired Again
Try to, as I said, cut yourself off after about three cups of coffee and try to cut yourself off at least 10 hours as a rule of thumb before bed. The reason I reverted back in some ways to say coffee is not necessarily a bad thing to drink is If you look at the relationship between drinking coffee and the health benefits, they are non-negotiably astronomically impressive.
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Sleep Expert Matthew Walker: Do THIS to Sleep Through The Night And Never Wake Up Tired Again
Drinking coffee seems to be a very good thing. Now, again, it's dose dependent. Once you get past about four cups of coffee, then it goes in the opposite direction. It's not a good thing.
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Sleep Expert Matthew Walker: Do THIS to Sleep Through The Night And Never Wake Up Tired Again
And if you look at that list, and it is quite a list of health benefits and disease de-risking that drinking coffee provides, and you compare that to all of the health benefits that sleep provides, it's a remarkable overlap. So people were saying to me, how do you square that circle? Because that doesn't make any sense.
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Sleep Expert Matthew Walker: Do THIS to Sleep Through The Night And Never Wake Up Tired Again
And it turns out, by the way, that if you're a night owl, it's not your fault. It is genetically or largely genetically determined. There are at least 22 different genes that dictate whether you want to be a morning person or an evening person. So you don't get the choice. It's gifted to you at birth.
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Sleep Expert Matthew Walker: Do THIS to Sleep Through The Night And Never Wake Up Tired Again
Well, if you look at the data, the reason that drinking coffee is so beneficial is because the coffee bean itself contains a whopping dose of antioxidants. And because in the Western world, we're so deficient in our dietary intake of antioxidants, This one thing, the coffee bean, has been asked to carry the Herculean weight of all of our antioxidant needs.
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Sleep Expert Matthew Walker: Do THIS to Sleep Through The Night And Never Wake Up Tired Again
And therefore, that's why drinking coffee has such a health predictive signal in the literature. Case in point, if you look at decaffeinated coffee, has almost the same health benefits. So it's not the caffeine, it's the antioxidants in the coffee bean itself. So again, with all of these things, with alcohol and caffeine, I am just a scientist.
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Sleep Expert Matthew Walker: Do THIS to Sleep Through The Night And Never Wake Up Tired Again
I have no right to tell anyone how to live their life. And I don't want to be the healthiest person in the graveyard either. Life is to be lived for good, you know, joie de vivre, for goodness sake, live a little bit. All I simply want to do is empower you with the scientific evidence, and then you can make an informed choice as to how you want to live your life.
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Sleep Expert Matthew Walker: Do THIS to Sleep Through The Night And Never Wake Up Tired Again
But does that help a little bit in terms of navigating caffeine?
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Sleep Expert Matthew Walker: Do THIS to Sleep Through The Night And Never Wake Up Tired Again
Yeah, there I think I probably haven't changed my tune and I don't see any upside in terms of alcohol for health or certainly for sleep. Alcohol is probably the most misunderstood sleep aid that there is out there. Unfortunately, it's not an aid at all. Alcohol will hurt your sleep in at least one of three different ways.
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Sleep Expert Matthew Walker: Do THIS to Sleep Through The Night And Never Wake Up Tired Again
The first thing is that alcohol is also in the class of drugs that we call the sedatives. And again, when you have a couple of sort of night caps in the evening, you say, it helps me fall asleep. Alcohol is simply helping you lose consciousness more quickly. It's not really putting you into natural sleep. The second thing is that alcohol will fragment your sleep in the first half of the night.
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Sleep Expert Matthew Walker: Do THIS to Sleep Through The Night And Never Wake Up Tired Again
And the reason that it does that is that alcohol will activate the fight or flight branch of the nervous system. Now, in the first half of the night, that's when we get most of our deep sleep. And when we go into deep sleep, we shift from the fight or flight branch of the nervous system over to what we call the parasympathetic nervous system, which is this quiescent nervous branch.
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Sleep Expert Matthew Walker: Do THIS to Sleep Through The Night And Never Wake Up Tired Again
And what we find is that if you are not sleeping in harmony with your natural biological sort of rhythm, then your sleep quantity and quality is worse. So let's just say we take someone who goes to bed at 10 PM and wakes up at 6 AM. Well, if you're a slight morning type, that's actually quite ideal for you. But if you're an evening type who likes to go to bed at 2 a.m.
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Sleep Expert Matthew Walker: Do THIS to Sleep Through The Night And Never Wake Up Tired Again
Now, alcohol will crank you back over to the fight or flight sympathetic nervous system, which then makes your sleep, the depth of your sleep far more shallow. So you don't get as much deep sleep. You wake up more frequently, but those awakenings are so brief. But you never commit them to memory.
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Sleep Expert Matthew Walker: Do THIS to Sleep Through The Night And Never Wake Up Tired Again
So you never think alcohol is harming my sleep by fragmenting it and sort of littering it with all of these awakenings. So your deep sleep suffers, your sleep is fragmented. And then finally, alcohol is very potent at blocking your dream sleep or your rapid eye movement sleep. And dream sleep is critical for things like emotional and mental health. It's essential for creativity.
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Sleep Expert Matthew Walker: Do THIS to Sleep Through The Night And Never Wake Up Tired Again
It's also important for hormonal health. It's during REM sleep when we release our peak levels of testosterone in both men and women. alcohol will sort of shortchange you of that REM sleep. So on all of those counts, you know, I just can't say in good conscience, even a glass of wine with dinner, you know, is that okay? We can see the blast radius.
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Sleep Expert Matthew Walker: Do THIS to Sleep Through The Night And Never Wake Up Tired Again
It is in some ways, both a dose and also time dependent process such that if you have, let's say a glass of wine with lunch versus a glass of wine with dinner, the glass of wine with lunch will have less of a damaging impact on your sleep at night.
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Sleep Expert Matthew Walker: Do THIS to Sleep Through The Night And Never Wake Up Tired Again
So the completely politically incorrect thing that I would never say on a podcast would be go to the pub in the morning and that way the alcohol is out your system in the evening and no harm, no foul. But no, of course I would never suggest something like that. But yeah, what are you doing tomorrow morning?
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Sleep Expert Matthew Walker: Do THIS to Sleep Through The Night And Never Wake Up Tired Again
and maybe wake up at 10 a.m., then it's the same eight-hour window that they're getting. But if the night owl, 2 a.m. to 10 a.m., is forced to sleep from 10 p.m. to 6 a.m., still eight hours. the quality of their sleep that they get will nowhere be as sufficient as the morning type. So some people will come to our sleep center and say, I have terrible sleep onset insomnia.
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Sleep Expert Matthew Walker: Do THIS to Sleep Through The Night And Never Wake Up Tired Again
Yeah, I like the way that you're thinking there in the sense that so many of us see sleep as a cost to our lives. Yes. And instead, I think what we have to realize is think of sleep like an investment in tomorrow, not a cost of what I get for today. And you're right when you look at some of the mentality of, you know, I'll sleep when I'm dead.
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Sleep Expert Matthew Walker: Do THIS to Sleep Through The Night And Never Wake Up Tired Again
I mean, firstly, what we know from the data is that if we adopt that mentality, you will be both dead sooner and the quality of your life will be significantly worse as a consequence.
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Sleep Expert Matthew Walker: Do THIS to Sleep Through The Night And Never Wake Up Tired Again
But also if you look at the data between short sleep and cardiovascular disease, if you look at short sleep and certain forms of cancer, not all forms of cancer, short sleep and dementia risk, imagine if you were to say in 20 years time when you're at the hospital and you've just lost a third of your heart function because you've had a massive coronary blockage,
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Sleep Expert Matthew Walker: Do THIS to Sleep Through The Night And Never Wake Up Tired Again
If I were to at that point say, I could wave a magic wand right now in the hospital at your bedside, and if only you could go back 20 years and start investing in your sleep instead of maybe adopting what some, not all people, but some have this sort of almost this It's almost like a sleep machismo attitude.
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Sleep Expert Matthew Walker: Do THIS to Sleep Through The Night And Never Wake Up Tired Again
I think in certain sectors of the workplace, we've got this competitive under sleeping, you know, mentality, the sleep braggadocio notion. But I know no one who 20 years later in a hospital wouldn't say, if I could go back and remove all of this cardiovascular consequence that you've just had by way of this heart attack.
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Sleep Expert Matthew Walker: Do THIS to Sleep Through The Night And Never Wake Up Tired Again
If only you'd gone back and started just to try to invest even just five or six days a week in consistent good sleep, would you do it? Most people at that point would say, absolutely. I wish I could take it back. But it's so hard for us to prospect into the future. and do back casting. Many of us just can't do forecasting at all very well in terms of our health. So what do we do?
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Sleep Expert Matthew Walker: Do THIS to Sleep Through The Night And Never Wake Up Tired Again
We burn the candle at both ends. Also, I think it's not anyone's fault regarding this global sleep loss epidemic and this consistent sort of sleep neglect. Because firstly, I think society is conspiring against us to get sufficient sleep because sleep has this image problem.
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Sleep Expert Matthew Walker: Do THIS to Sleep Through The Night And Never Wake Up Tired Again
We think of people who get sufficient sleep as slothful, as lazy, that sleep, whoever the PR agent for sleep has been, we probably should have fired them long ago because I'm going to try and push back at least. But also from a perspective of someone who doesn't know anything about sleep, I would just think, well, my body's at rest. My mind is dormant.
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Sleep Expert Matthew Walker: Do THIS to Sleep Through The Night And Never Wake Up Tired Again
How much danger is there really in losing one hour of sleep or even two hours of sleep? Surely there's not much danger. It can even actually change your very nucleic alphabet. So I'll tell you about a fascinating study that impressed upon me the importance. They took perfectly healthy individuals and they limited them to six hours of sleep a night for one week.
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Sleep Expert Matthew Walker: Do THIS to Sleep Through The Night And Never Wake Up Tired Again
By the way, six hours of sleep a night for one week is actually what many people are getting in society. At least a third of the population seems to be getting six hours or less during the week. So it was a very sort of ecologically relevant experiment.
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Sleep Expert Matthew Walker: Do THIS to Sleep Through The Night And Never Wake Up Tired Again
And then they measured the change in their gene activity profile relative to when those same individuals were getting a full eight hour night of sleep. And there were two key findings. First, a sizable and significant 711 genes were distorted in their activity caused by that six hours a night of sleep.
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Sleep Expert Matthew Walker: Do THIS to Sleep Through The Night And Never Wake Up Tired Again
If that wasn't impressive enough, the second was that about half of those genes were increased in their activity. The other half were decreased.
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Sleep Expert Matthew Walker: Do THIS to Sleep Through The Night And Never Wake Up Tired Again
I get into bed and I'm awake for the first two hours and then I fall asleep. And we do a chronotype assessment, which is morning type, evening type. And by the way, people can do this online very quickly right now. You can just type into Google MEQ test, MEQ. It stands for morningness, eveningness questionnaire. And it fits very well with your genetics, takes about three minutes.
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Sleep Expert Matthew Walker: Do THIS to Sleep Through The Night And Never Wake Up Tired Again
Now, the genes that were increased in their activity were genes that were associated with biological stress and cardiovascular disease, genes that were associated with the promotion of tumors, and genes that were associated with long-term chronic inflammation within the body. Whereas those genes that were actually switched off or turned down were genes associated with your immune system.
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Sleep Expert Matthew Walker: Do THIS to Sleep Through The Night And Never Wake Up Tired Again
And so to me, what that demonstrated was that there's no aspect of our wellness that can retreat at the sign of sleep deprivation and get away unscathed. That it's almost like a broken water pipe in your home. That sleep loss will leak down into every nook and cranny of your physiology and even tamper with the very DNA alphabet that spells out your daily health narrative.
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Sleep Expert Matthew Walker: Do THIS to Sleep Through The Night And Never Wake Up Tired Again
And so why, if you didn't know that evidence, why would you think that sleep is so necessarily important? If I, just as a lay public person, would be thinking, well, my mind's dormant, my body gets a bit of a rest. Well, I can rest when I'm watching Netflix. My body gets plenty enough rest there, so I don't need my sleep.
On Purpose with Jay Shetty
Sleep Expert Matthew Walker: Do THIS to Sleep Through The Night And Never Wake Up Tired Again
But if you think about it, sleep is the most idiotic of all evolutionary creations. Finding a mate, you're not reproducing, you're not caring for your young, you're not foraging for food, and worse, you're vulnerable to predation. Sleep should have been strongly selected against during the course of evolution if it wasn't important. It is absolutely important.
On Purpose with Jay Shetty
Sleep Expert Matthew Walker: Do THIS to Sleep Through The Night And Never Wake Up Tired Again
It serves a constellation of different vital functions for brain and body. But if I didn't know about them, of course I'd neglect my sleep. So I'm simply saying that to both impress the importance of sleep, but also try to be compassionately sensitive to why I understand people neglect it. Not because they're trying to show how brave and Teflon coated they are.
On Purpose with Jay Shetty
Sleep Expert Matthew Walker: Do THIS to Sleep Through The Night And Never Wake Up Tired Again
It's just because no one understands sleep. So that's why I've tried to sort of make it impart a mission for life is Sleep has been the neglected stepsister in the health conversation of today. We speak a lot about diet and exercise, and that's great.
On Purpose with Jay Shetty
Sleep Expert Matthew Walker: Do THIS to Sleep Through The Night And Never Wake Up Tired Again
And because of people like you, I think we're speaking so much more about emotional and mental health, which to me is the fourth pillar of life and health. Sleep is one of those pillars too, though. And so hopefully this helps a little bit.
On Purpose with Jay Shetty
Sleep Expert Matthew Walker: Do THIS to Sleep Through The Night And Never Wake Up Tired Again
regularity digital detox. Going to bed at the same time, waking up at the same time. Do that, so many other things like quantity and quality will fall into place. And then the second is, as much as you can, in the last hour before bed, try to stay off your phone. And in the morning, give yourself 10 minutes. Why? Because what we do is we train ourself.
On Purpose with Jay Shetty
Sleep Expert Matthew Walker: Do THIS to Sleep Through The Night And Never Wake Up Tired Again
What's the first thing that most people do when they wake up? They open their phone. And there's this wave, the tsunami of anxiety comes flooding in. Every day you are training yourself when you go to bed at night to expect that huge wave of anxiety when you wake up. It's what we call anticipatory anxiety. And most people will have had this.
On Purpose with Jay Shetty
Sleep Expert Matthew Walker: Do THIS to Sleep Through The Night And Never Wake Up Tired Again
You have an early morning flight and you know you've got to wake up for it. It's essential. And you also know that your sleep that night will be so shallow and so sort of diminutive- Well, this is a diet version of that. But every single day, by way of swiping open on your phone next to you, just give yourself 10 minutes in the morning. I promise your sleep will be better.
On Purpose with Jay Shetty
Sleep Expert Matthew Walker: Do THIS to Sleep Through The Night And Never Wake Up Tired Again
When we do this type of assessment with them, what we realize is that they don't have insomnia. They're a night owl, but they're trying to sleep like a morning type. And so when you sleep sort of against your natural biological predilection, your sleep is not going to be as good as it could be if you moved yourself closer to your natural innate biological tendency. Does that make some sense?
On Purpose with Jay Shetty
Sleep Expert Matthew Walker: Do THIS to Sleep Through The Night And Never Wake Up Tired Again
So regularity digital detox.
On Purpose with Jay Shetty
Sleep Expert Matthew Walker: Do THIS to Sleep Through The Night And Never Wake Up Tired Again
that you can make up sleep at the weekend. You can't accumulate a debt and then hope to fully pay it off at the weekend. And there's some great evidence looking at all sorts of brain and body metrics that for the most part, some of them, you can kind of sleep back at the weekend.
On Purpose with Jay Shetty
Sleep Expert Matthew Walker: Do THIS to Sleep Through The Night And Never Wake Up Tired Again
But for the most part, when you look at your cardiovascular system, your metabolic system, your immune system, your hormonal system, if you look at your brain processes, your cognition, your emotional stability or instability, All of these things do not fully recover by way of weekend sleep. So you can't do this binge purge process.
On Purpose with Jay Shetty
Sleep Expert Matthew Walker: Do THIS to Sleep Through The Night And Never Wake Up Tired Again
So I would say that the myth of makeup sleep is unfortunately just that, that it's not like the bank.
On Purpose with Jay Shetty
Sleep Expert Matthew Walker: Do THIS to Sleep Through The Night And Never Wake Up Tired Again
If it was like that, trust me, Mother Nature would have figured out a way to have us short sleeping all the time because sleep is so deleterious to any organism. And if there was a way to shortchange, we would have been shortchanging long ago and it would be baked into our sort of sleep DNA biology.
On Purpose with Jay Shetty
Sleep Expert Matthew Walker: Do THIS to Sleep Through The Night And Never Wake Up Tired Again
The fact that it's not, that human beings are the only species that will deliberately deprive themselves of sleep for no apparent good reason is testament to the fact that you just can't make it up like that. The system doesn't work like that.
On Purpose with Jay Shetty
Sleep Expert Matthew Walker: Do THIS to Sleep Through The Night And Never Wake Up Tired Again
Firstly, you become much more emotionally erratic. You become pendulum-like.
On Purpose with Jay Shetty
Sleep Expert Matthew Walker: Do THIS to Sleep Through The Night And Never Wake Up Tired Again
Yeah, part of the reason is because there is a part of your prefrontal cortex right down in the middle. So my prefrontal cortex sits right above my eyes. It's the most evolved part of our sort of hominid brain. It's what makes us human beings. That middle part of the brain acts like almost a brake pedal on our emotional accelerator regions deep in the brain.
On Purpose with Jay Shetty
Sleep Expert Matthew Walker: Do THIS to Sleep Through The Night And Never Wake Up Tired Again
And when we are underslept, that part of the brain gets shut down. So now we become all emotional gas pedal and too little regulatory control brake, as it were. And that's why we become so reactive. We become, you know, it's that... I just snapped dot, dot, dot, fill in the blank when I am underslept. So firstly, our regulation of our emotions becomes impaired as a consequence.
On Purpose with Jay Shetty
Sleep Expert Matthew Walker: Do THIS to Sleep Through The Night And Never Wake Up Tired Again
Secondly, the anxiety centers of the brain can become 30 to 40% more reactive when we're not getting sufficient sleep. You can flip that narrative then and say, well, if that's the bad that happens when I take sleep away, What is it about sleep when I do get it that is beneficial? And what we've discovered is that it's REM sleep or dream sleep that provides a form of almost overnight therapy.
On Purpose with Jay Shetty
Sleep Expert Matthew Walker: Do THIS to Sleep Through The Night And Never Wake Up Tired Again
Dream sleep is emotional first aid. And it's during dream sleep that your brain takes those painful, difficult experiences and acts almost like a nocturnal soothing balm. And it just takes the sharp edges off those painful, difficult experiences so that we come back the next day and we feel better about them. It's that idea of, it's not time that heals all wounds.
On Purpose with Jay Shetty
Sleep Expert Matthew Walker: Do THIS to Sleep Through The Night And Never Wake Up Tired Again
It's time during sleep and specifically dream sleep that provides emotional convalescence. And there's a wonderful, gosh, I wish I'd come up with this quote by an American entrepreneur, E. Joseph Kossman. And he once said that the best bridge between despair and hope is a good night of sleep. That's exactly what dream sleep provides.
On Purpose with Jay Shetty
Sleep Expert Matthew Walker: Do THIS to Sleep Through The Night And Never Wake Up Tired Again
When you have had a good night of sleep, I think we all sense this. you wake up and you are dressed in a different set of psychological clothes. It's almost as though sleep provides this sort of emotional windscreen wiper benefit. And we can see clearly. And to me, that's, I think, one of the most powerful aspects.
On Purpose with Jay Shetty
Sleep Expert Matthew Walker: Do THIS to Sleep Through The Night And Never Wake Up Tired Again
Sleep gives me back the rose in the tint of my worldview glasses every single morning.
On Purpose with Jay Shetty
Sleep Expert Matthew Walker: Do THIS to Sleep Through The Night And Never Wake Up Tired Again
So those to me would be, yeah.
On Purpose with Jay Shetty
Sleep Expert Matthew Walker: Do THIS to Sleep Through The Night And Never Wake Up Tired Again
Yeah. You know, I'll sometimes say that to my much better half, you know, when I wake up, I'll say to her, look, you know, darling, I am, I am so sorry. I didn't sleep well last night. I am not the best version of myself for whatever I do today, whatever idiocy that I, you know, enunciate or behave in. Yeah. Please forgive me.
On Purpose with Jay Shetty
Sleep Expert Matthew Walker: Do THIS to Sleep Through The Night And Never Wake Up Tired Again
And I will make sure that I will do all the dishes for the next two months. Yeah.
On Purpose with Jay Shetty
Sleep Expert Matthew Walker: Do THIS to Sleep Through The Night And Never Wake Up Tired Again
We've done some studies looking at what I would think of as more complex pro-social behavior. And what we found is that a lack of sleep will immediately make someone become more asocial, meaning that they withdraw socially. They do not wish to have the contact with other people that they typically do. They become therefore more isolated. They feel more lonely as a consequence.
On Purpose with Jay Shetty
Sleep Expert Matthew Walker: Do THIS to Sleep Through The Night And Never Wake Up Tired Again
And we know that there is this epidemic of loneliness happening. We didn't realize how much a lack of sleep was contributing to that. Worse still, when you interact with someone who is sleep deprived and you are well-rested, having had that interaction with the sleep deprived person, when we ask that person, do you feel any more or less lonely in this moment?
On Purpose with Jay Shetty
Sleep Expert Matthew Walker: Do THIS to Sleep Through The Night And Never Wake Up Tired Again
They rate themselves as now feeling more lonely themselves having interacted with a sleep deprived individual. In other words, the loneliness that a lack of sleep creates is contagious and it is transmitted from one person to the next. The second thing that we looked at was perhaps one of the most fundamental components of us homo sapiens, which is that we help each other.
On Purpose with Jay Shetty
Sleep Expert Matthew Walker: Do THIS to Sleep Through The Night And Never Wake Up Tired Again
It's what we call pro-social behavior. And I cannot imagine any modern civilization that has emerged without pro-social helping between individuals. It's a fundamental ingredient. We help each other. And what we found is that when you are underslept, you withdraw your natural tendency to help other human beings. We observed it at the level of me helping other people.
On Purpose with Jay Shetty
Sleep Expert Matthew Walker: Do THIS to Sleep Through The Night And Never Wake Up Tired Again
We observed it at the level of entire groups helping each other. And we also found it across entire nations. And you think, how do you figure that one out? There is a global experiment that's performed on 1.6 billion people across 70 countries twice a year, and it's called Daylight Savings Time. Yeah.
On Purpose with Jay Shetty
Sleep Expert Matthew Walker: Do THIS to Sleep Through The Night And Never Wake Up Tired Again
And what we did, we looked at the national donation database across the United States, which is in some ways a measure of selfless giving. I give to charity, I give to other people. And what we found is that in the days after the spring daylight savings time, when we lose one hour of sleep, there was this huge dent in proactive giving by way of donations to charities. we become more stingy.
On Purpose with Jay Shetty
Sleep Expert Matthew Walker: Do THIS to Sleep Through The Night And Never Wake Up Tired Again
We become more self-centered. So I would say that it's this new wave of sleep science that goes beyond the DNA nucleus that we spoke about. It goes beyond cells. It goes beyond physiological systems. It goes beyond entire brain networks. It goes beyond the organism themselves. It now translates to a lack of sleep impacting our interrelationships and impacting the very fabric of society itself.
On Purpose with Jay Shetty
Sleep Expert Matthew Walker: Do THIS to Sleep Through The Night And Never Wake Up Tired Again
It's a really good question. I get asked that a lot because in some ways, what I'm talking about is the ideal world. And drum roll, none of us live in the ideal world. We live in this thing called the real world. So, you know, stop your fancy sleep science and tell me just, you know, can that change?
On Purpose with Jay Shetty
Sleep Expert Matthew Walker: Do THIS to Sleep Through The Night And Never Wake Up Tired Again
That to me has been stunning and quite the surprise.
On Purpose with Jay Shetty
Sleep Expert Matthew Walker: Do THIS to Sleep Through The Night And Never Wake Up Tired Again
Self-forgiveness.
On Purpose with Jay Shetty
Sleep Expert Matthew Walker: Do THIS to Sleep Through The Night And Never Wake Up Tired Again
Because I think that there is so much ill grace that is enacted by ourselves on others because we are not good with ourselves that it makes me sad at some times.
On Purpose with Jay Shetty
Sleep Expert Matthew Walker: Do THIS to Sleep Through The Night And Never Wake Up Tired Again
And I think so much of what we react to others is really about a mirror being held up to ourselves and the pain of that, that if we just let go and gave ourselves self-compassion and self-forgiveness, society would be, I think, demonstrably, which is to say demonstrably,
On Purpose with Jay Shetty
Sleep Expert Matthew Walker: Do THIS to Sleep Through The Night And Never Wake Up Tired Again
Thank you. And can I just say thank you to you for what you do for society. You have dedicated yourself to the wellness and the health of the rest of humanity. But what I see as a big differentiator is that you have a very genuine passion for doing this. You mean it. when you say it.
On Purpose with Jay Shetty
Sleep Expert Matthew Walker: Do THIS to Sleep Through The Night And Never Wake Up Tired Again
And I think that's why in part you've had just this incredible impact on society. Authenticity is a very rare thing. And as human beings, we're actually very good at identifying it and also identifying its absence.
On Purpose with Jay Shetty
Sleep Expert Matthew Walker: Do THIS to Sleep Through The Night And Never Wake Up Tired Again
And one of the reasons that I just have such admiration for what you do is not just that what you're doing is an incredible service, but the authentic way that you're doing it because you genuinely mean it is something that I think is a remarkable beauty to behold. So for all that you do for society, thank you so much.
On Purpose with Jay Shetty
Sleep Expert Matthew Walker: Do THIS to Sleep Through The Night And Never Wake Up Tired Again
There was a study done by a group in Australia, and they took, I think it was about 11 different things that you had to do as a night owl to see if they could drag you back so you felt more capable of going to sleep earlier. And it was things like, as soon as you wake up, eat a large breakfast, go and get daylight, first thing, exercise before midday, do not nap, Take an earlier lunch.
On Purpose with Jay Shetty
Sleep Expert Matthew Walker: Do THIS to Sleep Through The Night And Never Wake Up Tired Again
Thank you.
On Purpose with Jay Shetty
Sleep Expert Matthew Walker: Do THIS to Sleep Through The Night And Never Wake Up Tired Again
Don't nap again in the afternoon. In the afternoon, start to get as much darkness as you can, meaning put shades on if you're going to go outside. In the evening, make sure that you eat at least three hours before you expect to go to bed. And then try to push your sort of alarm clock the next morning by about one to two hours. And they collected all of these different sort of regiments.
On Purpose with Jay Shetty
Sleep Expert Matthew Walker: Do THIS to Sleep Through The Night And Never Wake Up Tired Again
And sure enough, they were able to drag people back by a little bit over one hour, which sounds great. But the problem is these were extreme night owls who would prefer to go to sleep at maybe, let's say, 1.30 a.m.,
On Purpose with Jay Shetty
Sleep Expert Matthew Walker: Do THIS to Sleep Through The Night And Never Wake Up Tired Again
that means they're still having to go to bed biologically at 12 30 a.m it's not the 9 30 pm or the 10 pm that you would prefer and imagine trying to capitulate and adhere to that regiment for the rest of your life so there is some wiggle room it seems that you can sort of manipulate
On Purpose with Jay Shetty
Sleep Expert Matthew Walker: Do THIS to Sleep Through The Night And Never Wake Up Tired Again
But in truth, I think what we have to try and do as best we can is to say, how can I align myself better with my biology? When you fight biology, you normally lose. And the way you know you've lost is disease and sickness. And that's what we see with night owls who are sort of trying to sleep against their tendency. That said, though,
On Purpose with Jay Shetty
Sleep Expert Matthew Walker: Do THIS to Sleep Through The Night And Never Wake Up Tired Again
Is there a way that you can, I mean, hack isn't the right word, but there are ways that you can try to help yourself. So think about what you do in the morning that takes time. So is it that you sort of, you know, make the coffee, you put the coffee in the coffee pot, you get your clothes ready for work, you pack your bag for the gym after work.
On Purpose with Jay Shetty
Sleep Expert Matthew Walker: Do THIS to Sleep Through The Night And Never Wake Up Tired Again
All of these things you can do ahead of time the night before to take that 15 minutes of added time the next morning and say, allow yourself to sleep a little bit later so you're at least getting closer to your natural tendency. Then go to the front end of sleep and say, what is it that I do in the last 15 minutes before I go to bed?
On Purpose with Jay Shetty
Sleep Expert Matthew Walker: Do THIS to Sleep Through The Night And Never Wake Up Tired Again
Well, I usually sort of, maybe I take a shower, maybe I change for bed, maybe I brush my teeth, maybe some people take their makeup off, whatever it is. set an alarm two hours before bed, do all of those things. And then right before you go to bed, when that alarm goes off, the to bed alarm, all you do is get up and you go straight to bed. So you've saved yourself 15 minutes on the front end.
On Purpose with Jay Shetty
Sleep Expert Matthew Walker: Do THIS to Sleep Through The Night And Never Wake Up Tired Again
So you can go to bed 15 minutes sort of later and you can wake up 15 minutes later, but you're not necessarily having to go to work any later. So does that make some sense? So you can try to short sort of thin slice some of that a little bit.
On Purpose with Jay Shetty
Sleep Expert Matthew Walker: Do THIS to Sleep Through The Night And Never Wake Up Tired Again
So I think the first thing, let's go back to the four principles. Are you getting a consistent seven to nine hours of time, at least in bed? Next, are you trying to assess your sleep and say, am I waking up a lot throughout the night? I would say that's one of the first places I would go to.
On Purpose with Jay Shetty
Sleep Expert Matthew Walker: Do THIS to Sleep Through The Night And Never Wake Up Tired Again
and you're getting four hours of sleep a night, then it's obvious. It's just not the right quantity. But if you're being good and you're spending sufficient time in bed, but still feeling unrefreshed and restored, we have to ask, are you waking up a lot throughout the night? If you are, let's figure out why.
On Purpose with Jay Shetty
Sleep Expert Matthew Walker: Do THIS to Sleep Through The Night And Never Wake Up Tired Again
Is it that you are, for example, snoring a lot throughout the night and you have undiagnosed sleep apnea? And you can just download an app on your phone. I have no association with them. It's called Snore Lab. So Snore Lab. And you download it. It records your breathing. You place the phone next to you on your bed.
On Purpose with Jay Shetty
Sleep Expert Matthew Walker: Do THIS to Sleep Through The Night And Never Wake Up Tired Again
Then in the morning, it shows you a Richter shock sort of scale throughout the night. And it quantifies your snoring into quiet, moderate, loud, and epic. And the frightening thing is you can then tap anywhere throughout the night and you can hear yourself snoring in a way that we don't. So next thing is let's make sure that you don't have an undiagnosed sleep disorder.
On Purpose with Jay Shetty
Sleep Expert Matthew Walker: Do THIS to Sleep Through The Night And Never Wake Up Tired Again
Then I would say, is it a case that you're maybe over-consuming on caffeine during the day? Some people will feel completely comfortable having an espresso with dinner and they say, I fall asleep and I stay asleep. So I'm one of those, and it is genetically determined, who can metabolize caffeine quickly and it has no effect.
On Purpose with Jay Shetty
Sleep Expert Matthew Walker: Do THIS to Sleep Through The Night And Never Wake Up Tired Again
We've done studies and unfortunately, even if you do fall asleep and stay asleep, that caffeine can prevent you from going into the deepest stages of what we call deep non-rapid eye movement sleep. That's where you get a lot of restoration sensation from. So maybe we need to ask how much caffeine are you taking? The dose and the timing make the poison.
On Purpose with Jay Shetty
Sleep Expert Matthew Walker: Do THIS to Sleep Through The Night And Never Wake Up Tired Again
Try to cut yourself off after about three cups and try to stay away from caffeine at least 10 to 12 hours before you expect to go to bed. The final thing I would probably say is, are you also using anything in the evening to help you fall asleep? And the principal thing I'm talking about here is alcohol. It's probably the most misunderstood sleep aid that there is out there.
On Purpose with Jay Shetty
Sleep Expert Matthew Walker: Do THIS to Sleep Through The Night And Never Wake Up Tired Again
It's actually not a sleep aid and it will fragment your sleep and block you from getting rapid eye movement sleep. So what we would do is we would march you through a set of environmental behavioral things. What are you doing in terms of your bed timing? Are you spending a lot of time awake? And also the things that you're taking into your body, alcohol, caffeine, et cetera.
On Purpose with Jay Shetty
Sleep Expert Matthew Walker: Do THIS to Sleep Through The Night And Never Wake Up Tired Again
The final thing I would say is stress. and anxiety if there is one outside of skeletal pain the principal reason that we as a society seem not to be sleeping is this rolodex of anxiety because and you've spoken so eloquently about this in this modern era we are constantly on reception very rarely do we do reflection
On Purpose with Jay Shetty
Sleep Expert Matthew Walker: Do THIS to Sleep Through The Night And Never Wake Up Tired Again
And the only time now in the modern world when we do reflection is when our head hits the pillow. And that's the last time that we need to do reflection because at that point, the Rolodex of anxiety starts whirring. At that point, you start to ruminate. When we ruminate, we catastrophize. And then everything feels twice as bad in the dark of night than it does in the light of day.
On Purpose with Jay Shetty
3 Tools To Build Self Confidence in a World where People Make You Feel Insecure
It's a show dedicated to helping you figure out the trickiest parts of adulting.
On Purpose with Jay Shetty
3 Tools To Build Self Confidence in a World where People Make You Feel Insecure
Let's learn about all of it and then some. Listen to Grown Up Stuff How to Adult on America's number one podcast network, iHeart. Open your free iHeart app and search Grown Up Stuff.
On Purpose with Jay Shetty
Brain Expert: 6 Habits to Boost Focus & Concentration By 48 Percent (Hack Your Dopamine!) with TJ Power
It's a show dedicated to helping you figure out the trickiest parts of adulting.
On Purpose with Jay Shetty
Brain Expert: 6 Habits to Boost Focus & Concentration By 48 Percent (Hack Your Dopamine!) with TJ Power
Let's learn about all of it and then some. Listen to Grown Up Stuff How to Adult on America's number one podcast network, iHeart. Open your free iHeart app and search Grown Up Stuff.
On Purpose with Jay Shetty
Do THIS to Stop Spiraling (7 Steps to Instantly Break the Cycle of Negative Thoughts)
Hey, everyone. This is Molly and Matt, and we're the hosts of Grown Up Stuff How to Adult, a podcast from Ruby Studio and iHeart Podcasts.
On Purpose with Jay Shetty
Do THIS to Stop Spiraling (7 Steps to Instantly Break the Cycle of Negative Thoughts)
like how to start planning for retirement, creating a healthy skincare routine, understanding when and how much to tip someone, and so much more.
On Purpose with Jay Shetty
4 Types of Toxic People in Your Life & 4 Tools to Stop Letting Them Drain You
Hey everyone, we want to tell you about our podcast.
On Purpose with Jay Shetty
4 Types of Toxic People in Your Life & 4 Tools to Stop Letting Them Drain You
Hello, I'm Kelly Wienersmith. I study parasites along with nature's other creepy crawlies and there's just endless things about this universe that I find fascinating.
On Purpose with Jay Shetty
4 Types of Toxic People in Your Life & 4 Tools to Stop Letting Them Drain You
And on our podcast, Daniel and Kelly's Extraordinary Universe is all about the mind-blowing discoveries we've made about this crazy, beautiful cosmos.
On Purpose with Jay Shetty
4 Types of Toxic People in Your Life & 4 Tools to Stop Letting Them Drain You
Each Tuesday and Thursday, we take an hour-long dive into some science topic, during which time I try to suppress my biologist training and keep the poop jokes to a minimum.
On Purpose with Jay Shetty
4 Types of Toxic People in Your Life & 4 Tools to Stop Letting Them Drain You
We love learning about this extraordinary universe.
On Purpose with Jay Shetty
4 Types of Toxic People in Your Life & 4 Tools to Stop Letting Them Drain You
And on our podcast, Daniel and Kelly's Extraordinary Universe, that's what we're going to do.
On Purpose with Jay Shetty
4 Types of Toxic People in Your Life & 4 Tools to Stop Letting Them Drain You
I'm Kelly Wienersmith. I study parasites, and there's just endless things about this universe that I find fascinating.
On Purpose with Jay Shetty
4 Types of Toxic People in Your Life & 4 Tools to Stop Letting Them Drain You
Each Tuesday and Thursday, we take an hour-long dive into some science topic.
On Purpose with Jay Shetty
4 Types of Toxic People in Your Life & 4 Tools to Stop Letting Them Drain You
Grown Up Stuff. We love learning about this extraordinary universe.
On Purpose with Jay Shetty
4 Types of Toxic People in Your Life & 4 Tools to Stop Letting Them Drain You
And on our podcast, Daniel and Kelly's Extraordinary Universe, that's what we're going to do.
On Purpose with Jay Shetty
4 Types of Toxic People in Your Life & 4 Tools to Stop Letting Them Drain You
I'm Kelly Wienersmith. I study parasites, and there's just endless things about this universe that I find fascinating.
On Purpose with Jay Shetty
4 Types of Toxic People in Your Life & 4 Tools to Stop Letting Them Drain You
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On Purpose with Jay Shetty
3 Ways to Recharge Your Battery & 3 Daily Practices to Reduce Stress by 100% with the CEO of Calm @davidko
It's a show dedicated to helping you figure out the trickiest parts of adulting.
On Purpose with Jay Shetty
3 Ways to Recharge Your Battery & 3 Daily Practices to Reduce Stress by 100% with the CEO of Calm @davidko
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On Purpose with Jay Shetty
Can You Be Friends with Your Ex?
It's a show dedicated to helping you figure out the trickiest parts of adulting.
On Purpose with Jay Shetty
Can You Be Friends with Your Ex?
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On Purpose with Jay Shetty
5 Ways to Achieve a ‘Rich Life’ & Change Your Mindset from Scarcity to Abundance
It's a show dedicated to helping you figure out the trickiest parts of adulting.
On Purpose with Jay Shetty
5 Ways to Achieve a ‘Rich Life’ & Change Your Mindset from Scarcity to Abundance
Let's learn about all of it and then some. Listen to Grown Up Stuff How to Adult on America's number one podcast network, iHeart. Open your free iHeart app and search Grown Up Stuff.
On Purpose with Jay Shetty
6 Step Blueprint to Achieve All Your Goals for 2025 (Proven Method- Don't Skip This)
We love learning about this extraordinary universe.
On Purpose with Jay Shetty
6 Step Blueprint to Achieve All Your Goals for 2025 (Proven Method- Don't Skip This)
And on our podcast, Daniel and Kelly's Extraordinary Universe, that's what we're going to do. I'm Daniel.
On Purpose with Jay Shetty
6 Step Blueprint to Achieve All Your Goals for 2025 (Proven Method- Don't Skip This)
I'm Kelly Wienersmith. I study parasites, and there's just endless things about this universe that I find fascinating.
On Purpose with Jay Shetty
6 Step Blueprint to Achieve All Your Goals for 2025 (Proven Method- Don't Skip This)
Each Tuesday and Thursday, we take an hour-long dive into some science topic.
On Purpose with Jay Shetty
6 Step Blueprint to Achieve All Your Goals for 2025 (Proven Method- Don't Skip This)
Grown Up Stuff. We love learning about this extraordinary universe.
On Purpose with Jay Shetty
6 Step Blueprint to Achieve All Your Goals for 2025 (Proven Method- Don't Skip This)
And on our podcast, Daniel and Kelly's Extraordinary Universe, that's what we're going to do.
On Purpose with Jay Shetty
6 Step Blueprint to Achieve All Your Goals for 2025 (Proven Method- Don't Skip This)
I'm Kelly Wienersmith. I study parasites, and there's just endless things about this universe that I find fascinating.
On Purpose with Jay Shetty
6 Step Blueprint to Achieve All Your Goals for 2025 (Proven Method- Don't Skip This)
Each Tuesday and Thursday, we take an hour-long dive into some science topic.
On Purpose with Jay Shetty
Are Men Less Attracted to Successful Women?
It's a show dedicated to helping you figure out the trickiest parts of adulting.
On Purpose with Jay Shetty
Are Men Less Attracted to Successful Women?
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The School of Greatness
3 Steps To Building A Healthy Relationship
It was like complete opposites. Yeah.
The School of Greatness
3 Steps To Building A Healthy Relationship
Well, I think the people that trigger us the most are the people that we're closest to. So it's hard to, you know, well, they uniquely know how to push our buttons as well. Hopefully they don't do that on purpose, but, you know, they have the knowledge to be able to push our buttons. But also just, it's like family.
The School of Greatness
3 Steps To Building A Healthy Relationship
You know, you think you've grown so much and you think you have become so kind of wise and you've healed. And then you go back for Christmas with family or for the holidays. Just push your buttons and trigger you. Within two days, something happens. has you feeling like a 14-year-old who's mad again. Those people that are closest to us have this unique ability to impact us.
The School of Greatness
3 Steps To Building A Healthy Relationship
So I think it's really easy to have patience with people like, oh, it's so much easier with my friends. Yeah, no.
The School of Greatness
3 Steps To Building A Healthy Relationship
you don't see your friend every night of the week you see them once every couple of weeks it's like a little honeymoon every time you get together because you just you're just excited to see each other of course they don't push your buttons the same way but the person you're with every day is going to so um i think having we we have to almost step back from it a little bit and go this isn't necessarily a sign that my partner is so much worse than everybody else it's a sign that
The School of Greatness
3 Steps To Building A Healthy Relationship
This person is so close to me that it's the easiest place for me to get triggered. And it's probably the place I have the least patience. because I give so much energy everywhere else in my life, I take for granted that this person's gonna be there at the end of the day.
The School of Greatness
3 Steps To Building A Healthy Relationship
We go to work and we give our best energy and then we go home and whatever is left, we hand to our partner and we've reserved our patience for everyone else in our lives. So I think taking a step back and going, what would it look like
The School of Greatness
3 Steps To Building A Healthy Relationship
This is a very hard thing to do, but what would it look like if I gave my partner the kind of grace or patience or understanding that I give to other people in my life that frankly probably do a lot less for me? that show up a lot less for me. What would it look like if I started showing up for them in that way, I think isn't a bad question. Interesting. What would you add to that?
The School of Greatness
3 Steps To Building A Healthy Relationship
I think it's well, it would be it would be termed the trauma bond right that there's a there's this behavior that makes life really hard with this person or it might even make it intolerable but we tolerate it for as long as we can and then you know if it ever got too too bad for too long we would just have to leave right if it was if it was just hell 24 7 no matter what We would leave.
The School of Greatness
3 Steps To Building A Healthy Relationship
It would be enough. We would reach a certain pain threshold. But there's doses of moments, right? Of good moments. There's that moment where someone does something that hints at a different side of them. It hints at the potential for kindness, the potential for understanding. It hints at what the relationship is. could be. Or was in the beginning. Or was in the beginning.
The School of Greatness
3 Steps To Building A Healthy Relationship
And that reels us back in and we are so elated and so happy to have this moment that we then say, okay, I'm gonna go back in. And then of course the other shoe drops, which it always does. And I think of it as a broken clock. The broken clock is right twice a day. It's not a good watch for telling the time. It's failed in its fundamental function.
The School of Greatness
3 Steps To Building A Healthy Relationship
But when it's right, you go, well, you know, that kind of relationship you're describing is the broken watch. we're trying to use this thing to tell the time thinking that, oh no, it was right a minute ago. Well, maybe it is working after all. And then we have to wait another 12 hours before it's right again. So you have to ask yourself, am I in that broken watch relationship?
The School of Greatness
3 Steps To Building A Healthy Relationship
And if I am, what's the way to get out of that? Well, I think one of the ways is to properly tune into your feelings. Because I think we don't really tune into what our experience is. We are so focused on where it could go or the fact that we think that we will never be okay if we lose this person. How will I get by? Can I... Can I deal with the pain of losing this person?
The School of Greatness
3 Steps To Building A Healthy Relationship
If I could just get them and turn them into the thing that I need them to be, then I'll be happy. We're so fixated on that, that we're not fixated on the pain that we are in constantly, which is making us miserable. Or if we really paid attention, we'd look at how this disproportionately makes us miserable. I worked with someone who ended a relationship with a very toxic person.
The School of Greatness
3 Steps To Building A Healthy Relationship
And this person was never around. This person was completely dismissive. Even on the weekends when they were together, this person was just on their laptop paying them absolutely zero attention. And the woman that I was coaching, I remember at the end of the relationship, she said, I just don't know how I'm going to do this, how I'm going to be on my own. And then I showed her the relationship.
The School of Greatness
3 Steps To Building A Healthy Relationship
Yeah, like if I'm not, I don't know how I'm gonna be on my own. And then I actually showed her the relationship. You are on your own. And I said, this person's never home. They stay out. On the weekends, you're completely alone, even when you're in the same room. You've spent the last five years learning how to be alone. You're already good at this.
The School of Greatness
3 Steps To Building A Healthy Relationship
You just have this old association that when I leave, I'm not gonna be able to take it, but you already have the tools.
The School of Greatness
3 Steps To Building A Healthy Relationship
Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you.
The School of Greatness
How To Let Go Of Toxic Love & Attract A Healthy Relationship
Well, I think the people that trigger us the most are the people that we're closest to. So it's hard to, well, they uniquely know how to push our buttons as well. Hopefully they don't do that on purpose, but they have the knowledge to be able to push our buttons. But also just it's like family.
The School of Greatness
How To Let Go Of Toxic Love & Attract A Healthy Relationship
You know, you think you've grown so much and you think you have become so kind of wise and you've healed. And then you go back for Christmas with family or for the holidays. And within two days, something happens. has you feeling like a 14-year-old who's mad again. Those people that are closest to us have this unique ability to impact us.
The School of Greatness
How To Let Go Of Toxic Love & Attract A Healthy Relationship
So I think it's really easy to have patience with people like, oh, it's so much easier with my friends. Yeah, no. You don't see your friend every night of the week. You see them once every couple of weeks. It's like a little honeymoon every time you get together because you're just excited to see each other. Of course they don't push your buttons the same way.
The School of Greatness
How To Let Go Of Toxic Love & Attract A Healthy Relationship
But the person you're with every day is going to. So I think having... we have to almost step back from it a little bit and go, this isn't necessarily a sign that my partner is so much worse than everybody else. It's a sign that this person is so close to me that it's the easiest place for me to get triggered. And it's probably the place I have the least patience.
The School of Greatness
How To Let Go Of Toxic Love & Attract A Healthy Relationship
because I give so much energy everywhere else in my life, I take for granted that this person's gonna be there at the end of the day. We go to work and we give our best energy and then we go home and whatever is left, we hand to our partner and we've reserved our patience for everyone else in our lives. So I think taking a step back and going, what would it look like
The School of Greatness
How To Let Go Of Toxic Love & Attract A Healthy Relationship
This is a very hard thing to do, but what would it look like if I gave my partner the kind of grace or patience or understanding that I give to other people in my life? that frankly probably do a lot less for me, that show up a lot less for me. What would it look like if I started showing up for them in that way, I think isn't a bad question. Interesting. What would you add to that story?
The School of Greatness
How To Let Go Of Toxic Love & Attract A Healthy Relationship
I think it's, well, it would be, it would be, termed the trauma bond right that there's a there's this behavior that makes life really hard with this person or it might even make it intolerable but we tolerate it for as long as we can and then you know if it ever got too too bad for too long we would just have to leave right if it was if it was just hell 24 7 no matter what
The School of Greatness
How To Let Go Of Toxic Love & Attract A Healthy Relationship
we would leave, we would reach a certain pain threshold. But there's doses of moments, right? Of good moments. There's that moment where someone does something that hints at a different side of them, it hints at the potential for kindness, the potential for understanding, it hints at what the relationship could be. Or was in the beginning.
The School of Greatness
How To Let Go Of Toxic Love & Attract A Healthy Relationship
And that reels us back in. And we are so elated and so happy to have this moment that we then say, okay, I'm gonna go back in. And then of course, the other shoe drops, which it always does. And, you know, I think of it as a broken clock, right? The broken clock is right twice a day. You don't think it's a good... It's not a good watch for telling the time, right?
The School of Greatness
How To Let Go Of Toxic Love & Attract A Healthy Relationship
It's failed in its fundamental function. But... when it's right you go well you know like that kind of relationship you're describing is the broken watch we're trying to use this thing to tell the time thinking that oh no it was right a minute ago well maybe maybe it is working after all and then we have to wait another 12 hours before it's right again so
The School of Greatness
How To Let Go Of Toxic Love & Attract A Healthy Relationship
that you have to ask yourself am i in that broken watch relationship um and if i am what's what's the way to get out of that well i think one of the ways is to properly tune into your feelings Because I think we don't really tune into what our experience is. We are so focused on where it could go or the fact that we think that we will never be okay if we lose this person. How will I get by?
The School of Greatness
How To Let Go Of Toxic Love & Attract A Healthy Relationship
Can I... Can I deal with the pain of losing this person? If I could just get them and turn them into the thing that I need them to be, then I'll be happy. We're so fixated on that that we're not fixated on the pain that we are in constantly, which is making us miserable. Or if we really paid attention, we'd look at how this disproportionately makes us miserable. I worked with someone who
The School of Greatness
How To Let Go Of Toxic Love & Attract A Healthy Relationship
ended a relationship with a very toxic person. And this person was never around. This person was completely dismissive. Even on the weekends when they were together, this person was just on their laptop, paying them absolutely zero attention. And the woman that I was coaching, I remember at the end of the relationship, she said, I just don't know how I'm gonna do this, how I'm gonna be on my own.
The School of Greatness
How To Let Go Of Toxic Love & Attract A Healthy Relationship
And then I showed her the relationship. Yeah, like if I'm not, I don't know how I'm going to be on my own. And then I actually showed her the relationship. You are on your own. I said, this person's never home. They stay out. On the weekends, you're completely alone, even when you're in the same room. You've spent the last five years learning how to be alone. You're already good at this.
The School of Greatness
How To Let Go Of Toxic Love & Attract A Healthy Relationship
You just have this old association that when I leave, I'm not going to be able to take it, but you already have the tools.
The School of Greatness
How To Let Go Of Toxic Love & Attract A Healthy Relationship
I mean, I think if we have a very different vision for how we wanna live our lives, you know, those are really hard. You know, one person wants a family and the other one doesn't. You know, these are... But to the point of communication, those are things that often people turn a blind eye to. Why is that?
The School of Greatness
How To Let Go Of Toxic Love & Attract A Healthy Relationship
We have a scarcity mindset. It's that fear of nothing better is going to come along. Look, I think that in our love lives especially, We really want to meet someone. It's a universal thing. We really want to meet someone. And when we haven't met someone, we can start to get scared as time goes on. And we...
The School of Greatness
How To Let Go Of Toxic Love & Attract A Healthy Relationship
think there's something wrong with us and I'm broken and I'm never going to find someone and what if it never happens for me and God it's so hard to meet someone and so the most dangerous moment in love and dating is the moment you meet someone you're attracted to that is the most dangerous moment because if you meet a person you're attracted to in a place of scarcity and fear
The School of Greatness
How To Let Go Of Toxic Love & Attract A Healthy Relationship
That is precisely the time that you lower your standards and you lose your boundaries. Because the instinct is don't do anything that could mess it up. The instinct is not, let me see how right this is. Don't do anything to screw this up. Now, people have different ways of dealing with that fear. But if you take, you know, one example is some people go into like anxious fawning, right?
The School of Greatness
How To Let Go Of Toxic Love & Attract A Healthy Relationship
I'm scared. I'm just going to do everything. What kind of characterizes anxious fawning? I'm going to... Anxious fawning? Fawning, yeah. Fawning, okay. I'm going to like, so I'm anxious. And my instinct when I'm anxious is to try to make you happy. Because if I can make you happy, maybe you'll never leave me. So for a lot of people, what that means is I overgive myself.
The School of Greatness
How To Let Go Of Toxic Love & Attract A Healthy Relationship
at the same time as under-communicating what I really need, which is a really poisonous combination. Because it simultaneously means you burn out giving to someone, but also no one knows what you really want.
The School of Greatness
How To Let Go Of Toxic Love & Attract A Healthy Relationship
Yeah, you resent them, but you're too afraid to rock the boat because you don't want to lose them. And it's fascinating to me. You can literally look at different types of people and how they react to that. If you are doing that and you come across an avoidant, Someone who's avoidant is gonna get pushed away. They're gonna be like, this is a lot.
The School of Greatness
How To Let Go Of Toxic Love & Attract A Healthy Relationship
And you're gonna keep giving even though they've pulled away, because that's what you do, but you're not gonna communicate that it's hurt you that they've pulled away. So with an avoidant type, you won't get your needs met Because you won't communicate as they pull away. You'll just keep giving, hoping that they'll come back.
The School of Greatness
How To Let Go Of Toxic Love & Attract A Healthy Relationship
If you come across an anxious person and you're anxiously fawning, that person might consume you. Most people, not most people, some people have had that experience with a parent where their parent was just trying to get their own needs met. And they became the child that gave and gave and gave and gave and gave to try to make the parent happy. But because they had no boundaries around that.
The School of Greatness
How To Let Go Of Toxic Love & Attract A Healthy Relationship
They became deeply resentful of this one sided relationship with their parent. People then go into that in relationships, too, where it's like they just live in service of this other person who's anxiously taking as much as they can. If you come across a secure person and you're anxiously fawning, then that person is going to have a hard time connecting with you.
The School of Greatness
How To Let Go Of Toxic Love & Attract A Healthy Relationship
Because they're not going to know what your preferences are. They're going to say, what do you want for dinner? And you say, what do you want for dinner? And they'll go, I don't know, Chinese food. And you'll go, that was me too. I wanted that. And if you do that three times in a row, they'll realize they don't know who you are. They can't connect with you. They don't know how to make you happy.
The School of Greatness
How To Let Go Of Toxic Love & Attract A Healthy Relationship
And they can't really trust you. because they can't trust that you're ever really saying what you really think. So I say this to highlight the fact that this is how these dynamics get started, is we're coming from a place of fear. And when we're coming from a place of fear, we go to the weapons that we know how to use, right? We all have our weapon of choice.
The School of Greatness
How To Let Go Of Toxic Love & Attract A Healthy Relationship
For some people it's, I don't let anyone screw with me. And that's their weapon of choice. And the moment they think they could get hurt, they reject someone before that person can reject them. Other people is my weapon of choice is making, trying to do as much as possible for you that I make myself indispensable. It's worth everyone asking like, what's my weapon of choice? What do I default to?
The School of Greatness
How To Let Go Of Toxic Love & Attract A Healthy Relationship
And if I never question what I'm defaulting to, I'm going to always be in the same kinds of relationships. And by the way, that anxious fawning I'm talking about, who does it attract? The toxic person, right? Because that person sees a free lunch. I'm going to come and take everything from the buffet here. And then when I'm done with it, I'm out.
The School of Greatness
How To Let Go Of Toxic Love & Attract A Healthy Relationship
So then we go, why do I always attract people like this? Or why do I always fall into these patterns? is because there is a weapon that we are overusing. And at some point we have to, like, it's a very brave thing to go, what weapon am I overusing? And recognize, by the way, that's meeting a need. that there's some need it's meeting, right? If I'm... Not a healthy need.
The School of Greatness
How To Let Go Of Toxic Love & Attract A Healthy Relationship
But if I crack jokes and make everyone laugh and I know I can do that, then it meets a need for me. It's control. I know that I can control the room through making people laugh. Now, it also might be a barrier to connection in situations where sincerity is called for and we never get deep because I'm always making jokes. But if I stop joking...
The School of Greatness
How To Let Go Of Toxic Love & Attract A Healthy Relationship
And I say, I'm gonna try and create a deeper connection and that means I'm gonna pull back from the sarcasm, let's say. I have taken away my own most practiced sharpened weapon. And I may not know how to operate in this new territory. I now may find myself almost like a toddler in conversation, going, I don't know how to play this game.
The School of Greatness
How To Let Go Of Toxic Love & Attract A Healthy Relationship
I don't know how to connect with people when I'm not being funny. And it requires us almost to get worse before we get better, to feel like we're taking a step backwards before we take a step forwards. The step forwards might ultimately be a far healthier relationship or a far better relationship than anything we've ever experienced. But...
The School of Greatness
How To Let Go Of Toxic Love & Attract A Healthy Relationship
we might have to go almost like go back to like learning how to walk again in an area and give up that power we're used to feeling so that we can have something much more rewarding on the other side of it.