Dr. Matthew Walker is a neuroscientist, professor at UC Berkley, and author. Many of the mental and physical challenges you might be facing could have a surprisingly simple solution: more sleep. But why is sleep so essential? What happens when we sleep, and how can we optimize our sleep to maximize its benefits? Expect to learn what defines good sleep, how stress impacts your sleep, the keys to getting and maintaining a regular sleep pattern, the best sleeping positions, how to stop snoring, why sleeping with your partner is making your sleep worse, if alcohol, THC and other supplements actually give you a better nights rest, the evolutionary reasons why we dream, the latest science and tech for hacking your sleep and much more... Sponsors: See discounts for all the products I use and recommend: https://chriswillx.com/deals Get 10% off the world's comfiest sleep mask at https://mantasleep.com/modernwisdom (use code MODERNWISDOM) Get the best bloodwork analysis in America and bypass Function’s 400,000-person waitlist at https://functionhealth.com/modernwisdom Get a 20% discount on the best supplements from Momentous at https://livemomentous.com/modernwisdom Sign up for a one-dollar-per-month trial period from Shopify at https://shopify.com/modernwisdom Extra Stuff: Get my free reading list of 100 books to read before you die: https://chriswillx.com/books Try my productivity energy drink Neutonic: https://neutonic.com/modernwisdom Episodes You Might Enjoy: #577 - David Goggins - This Is How To Master Your Life: https://tinyurl.com/43hv6y59 #712 - Dr Jordan Peterson - How To Destroy Your Negative Beliefs: https://tinyurl.com/2rtz7avf #700 - Dr Andrew Huberman - The Secret Tools To Hack Your Brain: https://tinyurl.com/3ccn5vkp - Get In Touch: Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/chriswillx Twitter: https://www.twitter.com/chriswillx YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/modernwisdompodcast Email: https://chriswillx.com/contact - Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Chapter 1: Why is sleep so essential?
You might be the British man with the best hair that I know.
I think it is the greatest cry of a midlife crisis that you are ever going to see. It's a total train wreck. I'm suggesting that no one told me the pandemic was over and that you can get your hair cut. Right.
any therapy pill uh bills that you have to uh have after seeing me and being confronted by me send them to me i will pay for them oh my goodness fantastic well uh what a good opening to it it is it is what it is um talking about sleep today we had a lot of conversations about it on the show previously but i really want to dig into some sort of more rare insights that people probably know that they need to know but don't yet know so just to get started
How do you come to think about what good sleep is? How do we conceptualize good sleep?
Yeah, it's an interesting question because I think everyone, most mornings, let's say you've got a significant other, you come down the stairs and you say, you know, how do you sleep? And they'll say, I slept well, or I didn't sleep well. So everyone themselves has a subjective estimate of what this thing called good versus bad sleep is. Science is a little different though.
And medicine teaches us that there are essentially what I would describe as the four macros of good sleep.
and so three macros of food fat carbohydrate and protein four of sleep and you can remember it by the acronym qqrt quantity quality regularity timing and there's all sorts of stuff on the internet about you know take this supplement do this particular thing and and it's the shangri-la of all good sleep and you'll have this utopian blissful night
Honestly, if you just focus on these four main principles, you're 80% of the way there. So quantity is what we used to espouse in sleep as the measure of good sleep, which is somewhere between seven to nine hours for the average adult. And there is variability. The next one is quality.
And I think this is probably... Actually, I need to jump in on the quantity before you even move on. Yeah. Quantity of sleep, time in bed, time asleep.
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Chapter 2: What defines good sleep?
And all of a sudden you've got 95% sleep efficiency because as soon as you get into bed, you are asleep and you sleep almost through the night. Then gradually I will step you back out. If you start to get lazy again, we stitch you back up again. And gradually, that's how we retrain the system.
What about the reverse when it comes to sleep quality? That somebody is staying in bed for a good amount of time, but that quality doesn't seem to want to change. Cinching it down doesn't really seem to make that much of a difference. They're just... Waking up too much throughout the evening. They're not hitting REM. They're staying quite light.
They're getting up earlier than they want to, et cetera, et cetera.
Yeah. At that point, we've got to then start to ask if we've driven enough pressure in the system, what we call sleep pressure or sleep debt, and you are still waking up throughout the night. First, medical conditions. Let's do blood work. Let's see if you're suffering from a sleep disorder like sleep apnea, restless leg syndrome.
If we exclude all of those that you're medically healthy, then we have to ask, what are you doing in your life? Exogenous components, principally. Caffeine, alcohol, light, and the principal one that we don't talk about is stress and anxiety. If there is a principal reason why most people in society, absent sleep disorders, are not sleeping well, It's because of this wired but tired phenomenon.
We have people come to my sleep center all the time and they say, I am just so tired. I'm so tired, but I'm just so wired that I can't fall asleep or stay asleep. So at that point, when we've built up all of that pressure, forced you to be efficient and you haven't been efficient, we exclude you medically, that you're healthy, no sleep disorders.
Then we've got to figure out what's going on in your life.
Let's dig into that wired but tired stress thing. what is going on in the body from a sleep perspective, in the body and the brain, when you're in a high-stress lifestyle?
Yeah, there's probably at least two things going on in the body and at least one thing going up in the brain. The first in the body is the balance between the two branches of your nervous system. One is the fight or flight branch called the sympathetic nervous system. It's very poorly named. It's anything but sympathetic. It's very agitating and activating. And then there's the parasympathetic.
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Chapter 3: How do stress and anxiety affect sleep?
back and just you're not making any judgments you're just being aware of your body that's fantastic too the final thing if none of those appeal mental walk in hyper detail so think about let's say a walk that you do with your dog And what I want you to do is think about this at the level of, okay, I open the drawer. Which leash am I going to take? The blue or the red? I'll take the blue one.
Clip the dog in with my right hand. I'm closing the drawer with my left. Open the front door with the left. I go down the stairs. I look across. There's that weird Berkeley house. It's kind of just a little bit hippie, but no problem. And then the cars always come too quickly around that bend. That's the level of hyper detail.
And what's interesting, if you look across all four of the things I've just described, the commonality is that they all get your mind off itself. Meditation, you're starting to focus on something other than your mind. If you're doing box breathing, you're all of a sudden body centric, not mind centric.
If you're starting to do some type of body scan, again, it's hard for you to think about your worries and your stresses if you're doing it. Mental walk, same thing. Because sleep at that time of night is a little bit like trying to remember someone's name. The harder you try, the further you push it away. Sleep is something that happens to us. It's not something that we make happen.
And when you get that mind focused, distracted away from itself, the next thing you typically remember is the alarm going off in the morning. Why? Because you got your mind off itself.
Okay. So first one, quantity. Second one, quality, that being a component of that. Is there anything else to say on quality before we move on?
Yeah, probably. The other way that we measure, and most people can't do this, but is in the sleep laboratory, we place electrodes on your head. You And the other way we measure quality is the depth of your deep non-REM sleep. So we have two main types of sleep, REM and non-REM. Non-REM, for most sleep trackers, you divide it into light non-REM and deep non-REM.
Deep non-REM is where you get these incredible, deep, powerful, slow brainwaves that are just epic.
And the depth, the size of those brainwaves and how dense they are, the number of them that you're having is another great measure of the quality, the electrophysiological quality of your sleep versus the, are you waking up lots throughout the night and therefore you're spending a lot of time awake, that sleep efficiency, that's another measure of quality.
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Chapter 4: What are the keys to maintaining a regular sleep pattern?
The main thing is that you lose the pleasurable feelings of normally pleasurable things. That's what we call anhedonia. Sleep-induced anhedonia. Correct. And anhedonia is the principal underlying feature of depression. And that's why we see such strong links between sleep.
In fact, in the past 20 years of studying, we have not been able to discover a single psychiatric condition in which sleep is normal. To me, that is one of the most, I think, demonstrable indications of this tenuous link between your sleep health and your mental health. They are so intertwined. And there's a lovely quote by an American entrepreneur, E. Joseph Kosman.
And he once said that the best bridge between despair and hope is a good night of sleep. And that's exactly what the data demonstrate.
What else is there to say on regularity? So we mentioned gold standard, 15 to 20 minutes of wobble for sleep time, 15 to 20 minutes of wobble for wake time. Yep. Black standard at the bottom end, bottom quartile, Two hours of wobble. So from when you typically on average would go to sleep an hour earlier, an hour later, and the same at your wake time.
Is there anything else to say when it comes to regularity?
I think there is. I think it's probably you. You came onto it beautifully with the Netflix description, which is where most of us get hammered with our regularity is the front end of sleep, going to bed.
And the Netflix phenomenon is really what we call sleep procrastination, which is you are plenty tired enough to sleep, but there are things that are getting in the way, be it online shopping, checking social media and what to do about that. I would just at least say set a to bed alarm, not just a wake up alarm, but a to bed alarm. It goes off one hour before bed.
maybe even let's just say 30 minutes before bed and live in the real world. At that moment, at least dim down half of the lights in your house and see if you can do at least a digital detox. Fine, keep watching your Netflix on your TV, but for the most part, see if you can put your phone away. My goodness, that's the other thing that will activate you. We used to think it was the blue light,
from tablets and screens. And there was a great study from Harvard that indicated certainly one hour of blue light exposure before bed blunts something called melatonin, which is this bioactive nighttime hormone, which signals sleepiness. And it certainly did that. And it disrupted sleep.
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Chapter 5: What are the best sleeping positions?
They've been using it for three or four years. So we don't know. And it could be perfectly harmless. The second concern about melatonin is that it's a hormone that regulates the timing signal for when you should sleep. It doesn't participate in the generation of sleep itself. So melatonin is like the starting official at the 100-meter race.
It brings all of the sleep races to the line and begins the great sleep race, but it doesn't participate in the sleep race itself. That's a different set of chemicals and compounds.
So that's why when people have done what we call meta-analyses, where you get all of the individual studies looking at melatonin in sleep, and you put them all together in the same big statistical bucket, and you ask, what's the overall effect? Melatonin only improved the speed with which you fell asleep by about 3.9 minutes, which is not that much more relative to placebo.
And it only improved your sleep efficiency by about 2.2%. So again, largely trivial. Now, I think, however, despite touting those statistics, I think there is a subset of people for whom melatonin is sleep generating. And therefore, melatonin is not just the starting official. It's also one of the racers. And we don't yet understand why.
I think one of the ways that melatonin could be a sleep generating agent... and this will bring me back to CBD in a second, is that melatonin can make you cold. Melatonin has the ability to produce not hypothermia, don't worry about that, but it will drop your core body temperature a little bit.
And it turns out that we do need to drop our brain and core body temperature by about one degree Celsius to fall asleep and stay asleep. It's a reason that it's so hard on those summer nights when it's brutally hot and you've got no air conditioning. You can almost not fall asleep despite how tired you are in a warm room. But in a cold room, you typically can sleep.
It's always because the cold room is at least taking you in the right temperature direction for good sleep as melatonin in some individuals may be mildly hypothermic and move you in that direction. So I think that's, I'm fascinated by that and I want to pick that apart. But for most people, firstly, it's not going to move the needle.
That's the reason that no one, no doctor has ever prescribed melatonin for people with insomnia. You have to have a circadian disruptive clinical syndrome causing the insomnia to receive melatonin. That's where it can be helpful. The other thing about, or two other things about melatonin, if you could go down that purple aisle, now a large part of it is dedicated to pediatric melatonin for kids.
And what we know is that melatonin is a bioactive hormone. We did some work and we were looking at great scientist Craig Canepari at Yale, and we spoke with the FDA about this. Admissions to the hospital for melatonin poisonous overdose have increased by 503% in the past 10 years. which is a stunning statistic.
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Chapter 6: How does sleep affect relationships?
And that was hard to do for a long time. And now we know that there are two benefits of dreaming independent of necessarily having REM sleep, although it is beneficially supported by the physiology of REM sleep. The first is that dreaming provides a form of overnight therapy.
Dreaming is emotional first aid because it's during dream sleep at night that dreaming acts like a nocturnal soothing balm that just takes the sharp edges off those difficult, painful experiences so that you come back the next day and you feel better about them. And what REM sleep dreaming is doing is essentially it's divorcing the emotion from the memory experience.
Because what makes a memory emotional is that at the time of the experience, you had this whole visceral emotional reaction and that wraps the memory with this emotional blanket. But what dreaming does is it goes in there and it divorces the emotion from the memory.
It strips the bitter rind from the informational orange so that you wake up the next day and you have a memory of an emotional event. But it's no longer emotional itself. You don't regurgitate the same intensity of visceral reaction that you did at the time of the experience. And so that's why we think... Dreaming provides a form of, it's emotional convalescence.
And the quintessential disorder that we've studied that this process seems to fail in is PTSD, post-traumatic stress disorder. Because when you speak to those patients, what they will tell you is, I can't quote unquote get over the event.
Mm-hmm.
What they mean is that every time that they relive the memory, let's say it's the war veteran, they're walking through the supermarket car park, a car backfires, and instantly they have a flashback to the trauma memory of the detonation of the land mine. And what they're describing to you is they have not stripped the emotion from the memory. It's still bound to the experience.
it's not coincidental that one of the diagnostic features of PTSD is repetitive nightmares. And what we've done is put forward a theory that in PTSD, because they have two higher levels of a stress-related chemical called noradrenaline in the brain, They are not able to do the elegant trick of stripping the emotion from the memory. So what happens?
The next night, the brain comes back and says, look, sleep, please. I've got this highly charged emotional trauma memory. Please do your trick of divorcing the emotion from the memory. And it fails again because of this two high levels of a stress chemical called noradrenaline. And so it becomes this repetitive, almost like a broken record.
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