Dr. Matt Walker: Protocols to Improve Your Sleep | Huberman Lab Guest Series

welcome to the hubman lab

guest

series

where i and an expert

guest

discuss science and science-based tools for everyday life. I'm Andrew Huberman and I'm a professor of neurobiology and ophthalmology at Stanford School of Medicine. Today marks the second episode of our Sixth Episode Series on Sleep with our expert guest, Dr. Matthew Walker. During today's episode, we discuss the do's and don'ts of

sleep

ing, focusing, for example, on how to use light and the absence of light, as well as the temperature of the

sleep

environment, specifically the bedroom. . you're on

your

body temperature and much more to regulate the timing and quality of

your

sleep and we discuss how things like alcohol, caffeine and cannabis impact sleep and the various stages of sleep and we discuss the various tools that exist now and they are increasingly available to

improve

your sleep.

This episode is essential for anyone trying to optimize their sleep and when I say optimize their sleep I mean trying to optimize the formula that was addressed in the first episode of the

series

, which is the qqr formula, quality. quantity, regularity and timing of your sleep, four variables that combine to determine whether or not your sleep is optimized for you and therefore provides the greatest restoration and

improve

ment to your mental health, physical health and performance before you begin. I would like to emphasize that this podcast is independent of my teaching and research duties at Stanford; However, it is part of my desire and effort to bring to the general public zero-cost consumer information on science and science-related tools in accordance with that topic.

I would like to thank today's podcast sponsors our first sponsor is Helix Sleep Helix Sleep makes

matt

resses and pillows that are customized to your unique sleep needs. It is very clear that sleep is the foundation of mental health, physical health and performance. When we get enough quality sleep, everything in life works like that. much better and when we don't get enough quality sleep, everything in life becomes much more challenging now, one of the key things to getting a good night's sleep is having the right

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to save up to $350 off and two free pillows. Today's episode is also included. For us by whoop whoop is a wearable fitness device that tracks your daily activity and sleep, but also goes further by providing real-time information on how to adjust your training and sleep schedule to perform better. I've been working with whoop on their Scientific Advisory Board to try to help advance wop's mission of unlocking human performance as a whoop user. I've experienced the health benefits of their technology firsthand for tracking sleep, monitoring other features of my physiology, and giving me plenty of feedback on the metrics within. my brain and my body that tell me how hard I should train or not and basically point out the things I'm doing correctly and incorrectly in my daily life that I can adjust using

protocols

, some of which are actually inside the whoop app since Many of us have goals like improving our sleep, creating better habits, or simply focusing more on our overall health.

Whoop is one of the tools that can really help you get personalized data recommendations and advice for your overall health if you are interested in trying Whoop. you can go join. whoop.com huberman today to get your first month free again, so join. Today's episode of woop.com huberman also introduces us to awakening awakening is a meditation app that has hundreds of different meditations as well as scripts for Yoga Nidra and sleepless deep rest

protocols

or nsdr, now there are a large number of data showing that even short daily meditations can greatly improve our mood, reduce anxiety, improve our ability to concentrate and improve our memory, and while there are many different forms of meditation, most people find it difficult find and follow a meditation practice in the most comfortable way.

Beneficial for them, the awakening app makes it extremely easy to learn how to meditate and carry out your daily meditation practice in the most effective and efficient way for you. It includes a variety of different types of meditations of different lengths. as well as things like NRA yoga, which put the brain and body into a kind of pseudo-sleep that allows you to emerge feeling incredibly mentally refreshed. In fact, the science around Yoga Nidra is truly impressive and shows that after a Yoga Nidra session dopamine levels in certain areas of the brain are improved by up to 60%, putting the brain and body in a state of improved readiness for mental and physical work.

Another thing I really like about the awakening app is that it provides a 30-day introductory course. So, for those of you who haven't meditated before or haven't gotten back into a meditation practice that's fantastic, or if you're someone who is already an expert and regular meditator, Wake Up also has more advanced meditations and yoga sessions for you. you, if you wanted. If you want to try the awakening app, you can go to waking up.com huberman and again access a free 30 day trial which is waking up.com huberman and now for my conversation with Dr. Matthew Walker, Professor Matt Walker , welcome back, we're all so happy to have you here and in episode one you wonderfully described the biology of sleep, why sleep is important, what happens when we don't get enough sleep, you encouraged good sleep in adequate amounts, you defined what it is. sleep well and you provided some excellent practical protocols and tools for sleeping well, however today you are going to tell us, I think, about the protocols to really optimize sleep, both the conventional tools and protocols and some, let's say, unconventional, non-heretical , but unconventional tools to optimize sleep, so let's get started.

With the basics, what are the basics of what I think I've heard you refer to before as sleep hygiene? Yes, I think a lot of us can relate to the idea of ​​dental hygiene, but it turns out there's something called sleep hygiene and there's probably me. I would say five sleep hygiene edicts. I offer them as tools and not necessarily as rules because I don't think people respond to rules, people respond to reasons and not rules, so if that's okay, I'll probably just unpack each one of them instead of just stealing them from you. and I hope people assume that's the right answer.

I'll explain the answer so people understand why it's important. Like I said, there are probably five things you can start doing tonight to try to improve your sleep. The first one that we talked a little about in that first episode is part of the four macros of good sleep. First piece of advice: Regularity: Go to bed at the same time and get up at the same time, regardless of whether it is a weekday or weekend. queen and the reason is that when you feed your brain programmed regularity signals for your sleep, it will anchor your sleep and improve the quantity and quality of that sleep because some of that regularity signal enters your brain in terms of that behavior repeated night after night, in other words, it helps train that 24-hour Cadia core clock that we also talked about in the first episode, so that's the first tip, try to keep it as regular as possible.

In my opinion the advice is darkness, we are a society deprived of darkness in this modern era and we also need darkness at night, which you have talked about to release a hormone called melatonin, and melatonin will help time the regular onset of your dream, so it sounds great. but what boots on the ground Matt, what does that mean? I would suggest the following in the last hour before bed, try dimming 50%, if not more, of the lights in your house and you will be quite surprised how sleepy and dull that will be. make you feel that I will do this in a regimented way.

I have a little reminder that pops up telling me that now is the time to dim the lights based on your bedtime. I'll go and turn off the lights in my room. In fact, I'll have a small bulb and it'll probably go down to just five lux and look, it's just a metric of the light, it's way down and it's also a very deep orange color, a red, and we can move on to Why it's like that, that's the first thing, before you even think about sleeping, start dimming the light, for example, if you were there, let's say, with a standard sleep schedule of 1000 p.m. and you normally go to bed at 10:30 p.m. but you feel quite awake if there was a power outage and you lost your phone magnetic so that the phone turns off the lights go out Total Blackout my suspicion is that pretty soon you would say God how you feel quite sleepy, whereas if the lights were on You have TV on your phone on with a lot of stimulation, you'll probably think it's 10:30, no, I could probably go on for at least another hour, so try to diffuse that light and then if you need to wear an eye mask, blackout. curtains are always good too, but we need that Darkness at night because when you give the brain the Dark signal, it effectively releases a brake pedal, that brake pedal has normally been applied as a light by releasing that tap of melatonin and when you release the brake pedal and it starts pumping to the brain.

Also, of course, you can probably reverse engineer this trick in the morning and this is another component of why you've been, I think, a wonderful advocate for light in the morning. It does a lot of things, but one of the things that What it does is reapply that melatonin disruption and therefore you lose the Dark signal to your brain. That's what melatonin does in a way. We often call it the Darkness hormone or the vampire hormone. not necessarily because it makes you look longingly at people's necklines and want to bite them, which is great if you're into that, but it's actually just about releasing melatonin, which tells the brain, oh my god, it's nighttime. , but if you have light. light on you come from your office you are driving home so you have artificial light during the day that is probably not strong enough to stimulate you and wake you up you come home and you have bright light again but it is still strong Now it is enough to prevent the release of melatonin, you start to change your timing and you can have problems with your sleep, so that's the second tip that I would love to ask you about Morning Light two and the alertness benefits that I have as The sleep researcher focused more on the component night light and reducing it, but you have done a great job.

I don't know if there's anything, yeah, there are a couple of quick points that are based on some of what I think are really good studies. There is beautiful work in humans showing that exposure to bright light in the morning, especially sunlight, but if one does not have access to sunlight for whatever reason, so-called sad lamps exist commercially. Effective seasonal disturbance lamps range from 5,000 to 10,000. Lux very bright W but um, but certainly uh, morning sunlight viewing and lamps of the type I just described have been shown to increase the amplitude of the morning cortisol peak by up to 50% 5, so what people hear cortisol and they freak out thinking that's not good, I want your cortisol to be low, but you actually want your cortisol to be higher in the morning and lower in the afternoon and at night, and there are many reasons for that elevated mood, focus and alertness in the morning and throughout the day, and the ease of getting to sleep at night reduces anxiety, reduces depressive symptoms, etc., so Bright light also serves to control the amplitude of cortisol in the direction you want in the first part of the day.

The other thing is more of an underlying dynamic of the circadian visual system, which is a system I worked onFor years, these wonderful cells in the eyes that do not serve to form images but to detect sunlight and bright light in order to establish the circadian rhythm, is that the sensitivity of that system is early. in the day it's pretty low, so you need a lot of bright light early in the day to effectively wake up your system and turn off drowsiness signals like melatonin, but later in the day it's a pretty diabolical system, even you need very little light . from artificial sources to disrupt the circadian rhythm and override melatonin with just 15 seconds of bright light at night.

I think the CH Chuck Zer lab at Harvard Medical School showed that you can now override melatonin at night. I don't want people to be scared and I think that if they go to a hotel bathroom, which is often brightly lit in the middle of the night, they turn on the light and it will completely ruin their circadian rhythms, but if I'm honest, they would be much better. Use your phone as a flashlight to navigate. People always say: "Wait, but the flashlight on the phone is very bright, but let's be logical here, a light shown in your eyes, like a flashlight, is very different from looking at a flashlight.

Make a beam on the ground , yes. A very far difference, so the point is that if you don't get enough bright sunlight or light in your eyes early in the day and then you are inside under artificial lighting, you might think that this is very bright lighting, This is the type of lighting that could disrupt my circadian rhythm at night and is therefore enough to wake me up. My system is not early in the day and throughout the day you need a lot of bright light as much as possible to avoid burns. solar lights and things like that that you don't want, but then when night comes after sunset, you need very little artificial light to disrupt their circadian rhythm and then very quickly, candlelight, fireplaces, okay, This is kind of interesting, it looks bright, but measurements indicate that it won't change your circadian rhythm.

Candles are great, but of course, don't burn your house down so the orange and red tones at night are dimmed, that's the way to do it early in the day, bright, bright light, as bright as you can safely tolerate and what I like about your mention in the first place. of cortisol, did you describe how cortisol rises in the morning and that's great and that's a good thing and in the evening it starts to go down and if you look at your prototypical bedtime, we'll talk later in this episode about what your true natural bedtime is. going to bed versus what you may be taking right now it's very interesting that cortisol will almost reach its lowest point, something we call your Nader, it's the lowest point at that lowest point of your decline right at the time when you should be sleeping, however, there is a large study that looked at people with insomnia and in later episodes we will discuss this as well, but one of the ways we think about or conceptualize insomnia is in two different ways: sleep onset insomnia.

I can't fall asleep and sleep maintenance Insomnia I wake up I can't go back to sleep and what they looked at was essentially cortisol levels. They had a catheter in the arm and they were sampling the bloodstream and they were able to do this every 30 minutes, so it's a little bit like time-lapse photography and you'll get one data point every 30 minutes over the 24-hour period that looks at the cortisol over a full 24 hour period and of course when you look at health. Controls who can sleep well and patients with insomnia look almost identical throughout the day, but when it comes to falling asleep around that bedtime period, healthy controls go down all the way, patients with insomnia they go down and down and down and then they have they go up again right around the sleep onset period and then they start to go down again just like the control group, but then they also usually have a peak in the middle of the night which then goes down and then They both stay. low during the early morning period and then starts to rise again, so it's not that there is generally a higher level of cortisol in people with insomnia, it seems to be right in those trigger zones that map very well to problems of sleep.

Very interesting sleep maintenance issues like someone who wakes up in the middle of the night and sometimes has trouble going back to sleep, that resonates. I don't have any problems falling asleep. Yes, knock on wood. I'm superstitious about this right now, but I use tools like no other. -sleep deep chest Yoga Nidra exhale long breathe but you know and I think these awakening episodes seem to happen more when I'm processing a lot of things in my daily life, that's right, you know, it's the unconscious brain, a lot of times it's working. through things and it will wake us up yes, I often think that the sleep maintenance insomnia you just described is the revenge of unresolved daytime emotions, that's a great way to put it, yes, that's how it would be, that's why we've talked about regularity.

We've talked about darkness and we've talked about the opposite of that in the morning, which is light, a little bit of cortisol, so the third of the five will be temperature and the advice here is to keep it cool, as we mentioned a little bit. a little bit in the first episode and we're going to go into great detail when we talk about not only these conventional and unconventional tips, but we're also going to delve into the future of science and where sleep science is taking us to optimize and even improve. In our sleep, we will talk a lot about temperature, suffice it to say that it is necessary to lower your body's core temperature and your brain's temperature by a little less than 1° over 2 to 3 days to fall asleep and stay asleep, the general goal that I have in sleep science, if you look at the literature, it's around 67 Dee Fahrenheit or I'm trying to do the math, maybe 18.5 is degrees C, now I know that sounds cold and cold it is, but you can also wear thick clothing. socks to bed, you can have a hot water bottle at the end of the bed, that's also great, but the environment must be cold.

The fourth tip is to go out and what I mean is don't stay in bed for long periods of time. I wake up and I think we mentioned this maybe in the first episode as well, when you're awake in your bed for long periods of time because your brain is an incredibly associative device and it will quickly learn that this thing called my bed is where I am. I'm awake and not asleep and what you have to do is break that Association if you've learned it over and over again because you've stayed in bed and the rule of thumb is just a rule of thumb of about 20 to 25 minutes if you can't get back to it. sleep or you can't fall asleep it's okay just say tonight is not my night it's not a problem it's tomorrow it's not fully filmed it's okay I'm just going to get up get out of bed if you can if you're lucky try to go to a different room and , in low light, read a book, listen to a podcast, whatever relaxes you, just do that, don't check email, don't eat, because if you start eating again, that trains your brain to start waking up and feed at that time and only return to bed when you are sleepy and there is no time limit for that.

I don't want him to come back after half an hour when he's still awake and not getting enough sleep. because you're going to go back to bed and you're going to have the same problem again and gradually, if you do this and you find it difficult to relearn the association that you had, I'm sure when you were a child, that's your bed. it's this place of sleepiness because often people say, "I feel very tired at night" and then they get into bed and say "but now I can't fall asleep at all" and I don't understand it, that's partly why .

I learned Association, so that would be the fourth tip, the fifth tip, it makes me even more unpopular as a personality and character who tries to be aware of alcohol and caffeine. Now, in a later episode, we'll go into great detail about how. Caffeine works with its mechanisms, why it disrupts sleep and why, in fact, maybe you've even changed your mind about caffeine and its benefits, but it also has a significant detriment to sleep, so the general rule of thumb here It would be trying to disconnect. of caffeine probably at least 10 hours before you expect to go to bed and you can just estimate it and try to limit it so that the dose and timing will get the poison out after maybe two or three cups of coffee. and then that timing component counts down stop drinking decaf coffee it's not so bad if you also find the right thing if you need that fix alcohol is probably one of the most misunderstood sleep aids quote unquote no sleep aid in Now , if I didn't understand what I know about alcohol and sleep, I'd think the same thing too, which is watching when I grab a night cap or two right before bed, even though I don't wear them.

I can actually fall asleep. very easily and I feel like I fall asleep very deeply throughout the night so it is a great sleep aid and it really helps me. There are at least three problems with alcohol. The first is that alcohol belongs to a class of drugs that we call Sedatives and sedation are not sleep, but when you drink alcohol at night you confuse the first with the second and think that it helps you fall asleep. The second thing is, because it's sedation or actually, it's probably related to sedation. I show you the electrical signature of your deep sleep when you're just sleeping naturally versus when you have alcohol in your system, it's actually not the same, it's not a naturalistic form of deep sleep, it mimics it, it doesn't look very different, but it does.

I really do my analysis and I almost like that Pink Floyd album where I take the white light of brain electrical activity that comes out of your head while you sleep and I break it down into all the different components, there are some components that are no longer present or some that are abnormally present the second problem with alcohol is that it fragments your sleep, so it will mess it up with all these punctuated awakenings throughout the night. The danger is that a lot of those alcohol awakenings you don't remember because they're too brief but then you wake up the next day and think well I didn't have any problems falling asleep I didn't have any problems falling asleep but I just feel bad I just don't feel restored by my sleep and you don't Let's put two and two together, the last concern with alcohol is that it is a fairly potent blocker of rapid eye movement sleep or REM sleep and in later episodes we will go into great detail about the incredible learning and creativity benefits of the memory obtained.

Through REM sleep, it is also essential for our emotional regulation and recalibrating our mood, so for all those reasons, I would say two things first, if you are having difficulty sleeping and don't feel recovered with sleep, be Take into account your alcohol consumption and also alcohol consumption. In general, keep in mind that if you are thinking about your dream and want to preserve it, much of what you just said will resonate. I confess that in my life I have had periods of quite spectacular sleep. I characterize myself as someone who could fall. I sleep anywhere and anytime but I have also experienced extreme sleep challenges and that relates to different things, life circumstances etc. in fact I have recently had some challenges with sleep despite using the protocols that I and others suggested he had not done.

I've heard some of the things you're referring to here and waking up in the middle of the night has become a bigger problem. I communicated this to my ex-girlfriend who I was in a relationship with when I was a junior professor. I mean, before I got tenure and she said, you don't remember you had an Andrew, but I did, you had an employer back then of um, after I fell asleep, you continued working on your laptop, probably on grants. um and then I would fall asleep. working and then according to her I would wake up in the middle of the night and work a little until I got tired again and then I would fall asleep and then this would repeat itself so it really squashed the associative learning element that I talked about before so that was probably the first period of time in my life where I created this um quite uh delusional association of working in the middle of the night in bed, right um and then more recently I had the experience of I wake up probably because of things like the ones in the day where I wake up in the middle of the night thinking and now, due to our argument during the course of filming this series, I get out of bed even after 1015 minutes, um, so I can start to eliminate that Association and another part is that I have always felt that when I get out of bed in the middle of the night because I can't sleep and I go to the couch many times I can sleep very well, which is why If you are right, it is an experiment control demonstrating that the location of sleep is and the association of wakefulness during sleep in bed rather than on the couch is a clear component and this is in an environment that has the same temperature.

Is not perfect. experiment, right, it's anakataas we say, but I think the associative piece is very strong for many people, so this is something to really take seriously. I love that notion and people often say, I just get up, go to the couch or couch and that's where I'll wake up in the morning. They will also say that when I travel and go to a hotel room, I can now sleep well. For some people it's the opposite, but for those people it's context. The difference means that the change of environment is so unknown that it has not been linked to the association of wakefulness, it is related to sleep or at least the opportunity to sleep, sometimes I have even heard from some people and there are no studies or data about it.

Now this is difficult if you have a partner in bed, but you just switch from top to bottom of the bed, grab the pillow, pull the duvet all the way down, and place the pillow on the opposite end of where your feet used to be. be and you lie in bed and even just look around and feel some kind of difference that on its own is so subtle but can make a real difference, so again keep these things in mind. I know it sounds strange or all this kind of getting up. get out of bed break the associate and we'll get to something good, in fact I'm going to address it now because I think it's one of the unconventional tips and you mentioned it, a lot of people tell me it all sounds great. science makes sense I just don't know it's dark it's a little cold I really don't want to get out of bed so give it some alternatives I think the best unconventional sleep advice I can give you is to do anything that distracts you from yourself, the main reason why if you look at insomnia as a physiological condition or a mechanistically current working model of how insomnia plays, um What happens is you're in this state of almost low level anxiety and you're kind of stressed and when you get You go to sleep or you try to sleep or you wake up and try to go back to sleep, you just have this Rolodex. of anxiety in the modern world we are constantly in reception and very rarely reflect and unfortunately for many of us and I have been guilty of this, the only time we reflect is when we put our head on the pillow and turn around the light goes out and that is The last time you want to reflect, that's the worst time and at that point I think everyone can empathize with the idea that you turn off the light, you're under stress, your mind focuses on those few things in the darkness of the night thoughts. it comes back almost 10 times worse than in daylight and at that point you start ruminating, when you ruminate you start catastrophizing and when you catastrophize you're dead in the water for the next two hours, so what do you do?

The problem is, like I said, your mind is on itself and goes through these repeated loops. Anything you can do, for example, you can do some type of meditation. When I was researching data for my book a few years ago, I researched meditation and I was not a meditator. I was a hard scientist and I didn't really embrace that notion or even that um, that group of people, but over and over again I read article after article and the data was very strong and it came from research groups that I respected a lot, so I thought, well I should probably try it and that was 6 years ago and since then I now meditate for 10 minutes every night before going to bed. guided meditation because I'm not particularly skilled so I use an app that guides me through that, but you can do whatever you want, any meditation you want, that's one example, the second example is you can do breathing methods because again you're focused on your breathing and what you're not focused on in your thoughts and anything that allows you to explore some other focus, maybe it's a body scan where you start at the top of your head or you start at your feet and work your way up and you're just saying you know moving across my neck what sensations I'm feeling now in my shoulders moving down to my chest now I can feel the tips of my fingers am I feeling something? and when you start doing that or any of these types of things the next thing you know is your alarm went off in the morning because you got distracted, so I would say that's probably one of the unconventional tips, but let me get back to conventional.

Anything else I've probably missed or I'm not clear about um, actually, I should probably say one thing in terms of these: no, they're not advice. I don't like the word, I know you don't either or hacks or um, these are protocols and they are well informed. scientific protocols in this whole discussion today, you can implement all of these things and still have problems with sleep, the reason is that you may be suffering from a sleep disorder, so the analogy would be let's say I'm your athletic trainer and you're a sports superstar. I can perfect everything. I can perfect your diet, your supplements, we can perfect your technique, we can perfect, but if you have a broken ankle, none of those things are going to alter your performance right now.

We have to go to a doctor and get that scene and then we can re-tune its performance. The same goes for sleep. If you have a sleep disorder, such as snoring, sleep apnea, or insomnia, we should take you to a doctor. doctor first and then only after that come back once you're sorted then we can start optimizing that's the only other thing I should probably mention yeah this is all a very useful discussion because I think of course there will be those people out there. I sleep so well at night, you know, consider yourself blessed. Many people struggle with sleep challenges and I think it's fair to say that sooner or later, most people experience some challenges with sleep for whatever reason. look at the statistics, it is very likely that throughout your life you are more likely to go through a period of difficult sleep or indeed insomnia.

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We know that alcohol causes these disruptions in sleep directly, meaning by changing the release pattern of neurotransmitters like Gaba, things like that, or is this an indirect effect. I know this is through the gut microbiome which then affects sleep and the reason I'm asking is maybe we could come up with some more specific protocols and not, so for example if someone wants to have a cocktail, what How close to the dream can it be? and uh, not slowing down your rapid eye movements, sleeping too much, you know, because people will still want to drink, um and with that being said, if people have a couple of drinks and then go to sleep, is there anything they can do? do? before bed to try to rescue some of the quality of sleep, it's a big question, so in terms of the mechanism, it actually appears to be not the alcohol, but some of the metabolic byproducts of the alcohol.

We think that perhaps the main culprit may be some of the aldah highs which are metabolic consequences and separate from the metabolism of alcohol, you have a good point although in terms of the dose response time curve, how late or how early do I have to give up alcohol? People have done those studies and I've found that even a single glass of wine in the afternoon, if you measure sleep the way we measure it at my center with High Fidelity, you can see compromises and deficiencies. I wish I could tell you otherwise. I would say that, based on that data, the main protocol advice I would give you is to go to the pub in the morning that way, when you are about to sleep, the alcohol will have already left your system and you couldn't, you wouldn't. , I would never do it, as a public scientist, I would never recommend it. necessarily by wanting, I'm just kidding, but um, that's one of the unfortunate consequences, there seems to be an impact in saying there isn't, I'm just not being honest about the data, but again, if you think about the tradeoff here is if you're going out or you're going to invite friends over and you're going to have an amazing evening full of memories and you're going to open your favorite bottle of wine and have a couple of glasses of wine. sleep will be compromised, yes it is, but maybe it's worth the trade-off for that specific night.

I just wouldn't want you to and you've talked a lot, as has our dear friend Peter and others, there just doesn't seem to be any. safe amount of alcohol um, but I would say think about that tradeoff just though, don't get into the habit of doing it, you know, several nights a week or more, that would probably be great advice, what about food and the dream? How close to sleep? Is it okay to eat if you want to optimize your sleep? I like to eat my last meal around 6:30 p.m. m. but and I go to sleep around 8:30 900 p.m.

In an ideal world, sometimes I go to sleep a little later, sometimes I eat a little later, it's just that you know there's some variability with this, but put another way, what's the relationship between intake of food and sleep quality in terms of timing of food intake? and then maybe we can talk a little bit about dietary macronutrients. It's very interesting. There was kind of a dogma out there that we have to stop eating, you know, three or four hours before bed to get optimal sleep. If you look at the data, the data is. pretty widespread, no pun intended, there are some people for whom it works very well and if they eat even two hours before bed, they are just disrupted in terms of their sleep, some of that is because people just feel too full and not comfortable.

Other aspects are that when you are lying down when you go to bed you have a higher risk of the gastric reflux coming back up and therefore you have heartburn and that is quite miserable and people will also describe it as a greater proximity of food intake in relation to when you're falling asleep though if you look at the data and I did a very deep dive into this myself about 12 months ago, it's not as extreme as the Dogma makes it out to be, if you eat 2 hours before bed on average, It is not like this.

It seems like it necessarily harms your sleep now, that's very different than saying what's best for improving or enhancing your sleep, but the way these studies were designed was to look at harms that they then looked at 90 minutes before sleep onset and even there didn't seem to be 60 minute market impermanence, maybe you started to see some signs, but on average the effect size was kind of weak, but then when you get closer to 45 minutes or so, things started to deteriorate. I think it depends hugely on your chronotype and it also depends on your appetite and also on Cadian rhythm preferences.

I am someone who is not very hungry when I wake up in the morning. I don't feel very hungry for most of the day and I'll probably take in most of my calories in probably a period of about 4 hours, maybe even less in a 3 hour period and then I'll log off about 90 minutes before bed. , so classically I would have been considered, as you know, violating this sleep dogma of cutting at least three hours. I think it's very personal, although just experiment with it and you'll know the situation. As for macros and specific food components, the data is a bit conflicting.

Without a doubt, what we know is that if you eat a diet high in sugar and low in protein, your sleep is worse, why would that be? Well, one of the reasons we believe is that if you consume sugar, it can be something that is metabolically active and when it becomes metabolically active, it can increase your body temperature, even your core body temperature. only in a very subtle way,but that's enough to disrupt your sleep like we talked about with temperature, but I think in terms of really you know what would be the ideal macron nutrient and even micronutrient, a dietary recommendation that I would have for you.

I think we still have enough data beyond that statement, um, yeah, yeah. I have experienced this when following a very low carb diet that I have experimented with in the past, perhaps even a full ketogenic diet for short periods of time. although I'm an omnivore, so I eat meat and eggs and I also eat starches, pasta, rice, etc., but we know this thanks to the beautiful work of, for example, Chris Palmer of Harvard Medical School, who is a guest on this podcast. I hear it. It was a great podcast, yes, Chris is spectacular and U has advocated for the exploration of ketogenic diets for the treatment of various psychiatric conditions, not all but psychiatric conditions, and it seems like he agreed with me on this that when people consume too much little starch. very low carb diets which can sometimes experience a bit of hypomania, some people can and challenge this with sleep and sometimes there are psychiatric reasons why people stick with those diets anyway and then have to do other diets things to promote sleep through their pharmacology or supplements or some combination, but I can say anecdotally for myself that if I don't eat starches for an extended period of time for a couple of days, I find it very difficult to get quality sleep like the trackers indicate of sleep um and uh and just, sleeping late, the latency to fall asleep is longer than ETC, so I've chosen to eat most of my carbs later in the night, which violates all the rules of eating carbs early at night. day and and I think there's some data to support that eating carbs early in the day may actually have some benefits for weight maintenance or weight loss, so I figured that out, but those aren't my goals right now.

Weight maintenance, yes, weight. No loss, so I think I certainly feel after eating a dinner that has a little more rice with starchy pasta. Things like that and a little less protein rather than the opposite, like eating a couple of steaks. riy and a salad, but no starch, that means my sleep is substantially better and I always attributed that to the relationship between some of the starches and the serotonin tryptophan pathway, yes there is some data on that with carb intake per the night and, of course, that tryptophan and that carbohydrate intake will contain the precursor ingredients to something else that we've talked about, which is melatonin, etc. that can actually help to healthily increase that melatonin signal and there's some data on that to back that up.

We also did a study where we were looking at night sleep after night sleep and next day carbohydrate intake and it seemed to support what you're describing in terms of some of the benefits of carbohydrates, we also found a strange result that was almost the prediction The opposite is that we ate carbs in the morning to also help people wake up and we weren't a little sure why. but let's go into more detail, the reason you mentioned the suggestion of not consuming carbohydrates at night is based in part on the evidence that your body's ability to eliminate sugar and obviously when you eat carbohydrates, it can having a higher sugar spike now that partly depends on what you're eating with that carbohydrate and also, of course, the nature of that carbohydrate, whether it's simple or complex, whether it's simple sugars versus you know, more starchy complex . carbohydrates, but the idea is that your body, even if you ate the same amount of carbohydrates in the morning, afternoon or evening, the same dose and type of carbohydrates, but your body's ability to eliminate them without having excessive spikes glucose is worse. at night, better in the morning, that is, if you are worried about your blood sugar and metabolic health, maybe that is what you should do.

I think that data is unclear based on whether your blood glucose is normal, meaning you currently have it. If you don't have signs of type two diabetes or you're not prediabetic, then that's not necessarily the case and I think that's why it could be beneficial for you and I know you've thought about it deeply. that and um, I've even been tracking blood sugar. I don't have any signs of that, but I'm fascinated by some of that data and how it interacts with my sleep because I'm a sleep nerd, so I think right now we just don't have enough data to recommend any particular sleep diet, between quotes, for better optimization.

However, I would say that we can be a little more relaxed about the timing of our food. You mentioned caffeine C earlier and caffeine is a topic that we'll delve into substantially in episode three, but there and now I'll emphasize that caffeine is the most commonly used drug around the world. I think the statistic says that more than 90 percent of adults consume caffeinated beverages every day, which is remarkable and a A few years ago, I remember there was an article in The Economist that described the countries in which the consumption of caffeine was higher and was far from the peak.

The peak was almost triple or quadruple what the country in second place consumed each day. Can you guess the country that consumes the most caffeine could be tea, coffee, any form? I'm going to suggest that it's a Scandinavian country, no, but, uh, but they're, they're up there, they're up there, it was Switzerland, now I don't know. I know if that's still the case, but apparently the reason I went was thinking it was because I'd seen the graph. I was thinking it was Sweden but Scandinavian and if I'm wrong, someone will certainly put it in the comments.

YouTube I remember that the Swiss drink so much caffeine that they have a lot to think about, so I love caffeine, I drink black coffee, black espresso and And Brontë, um, I love yerba monte, I've been drinking it since I was little, um , because the Argentinians in My family and I drink it early in the day, usually a couple of hours after I wake up. I take my first sip of caffeine and then try to stop drinking caffeine around noon or 1 p.m. I occasionally have a shot or two of espresso early in the afternoon if there's important work to do and I need to get it done, but I've noticed that even that can disrupt my sleep in ways it doesn't.

I like it, but afternoon coffee, for some reason, tastes much better to me than morning coffee. I don't know what it is, so it's a coffee of the year packed early in the day and a lot for me. Yes, I have a high tolerance. Well, but then I let it decrease is that an optimal contour of caffeine intake. Zero caffeine would be better if someone is just really committed to sleeping and doesn't like caffeine. Zero would be better than any other and what about that afternoon coffee or tea? that contains caffeine, I mean how disruptive it is to sleep, so the profile that you describe, which is high at the beginning and first thing in the morning when you wake up and then gradually decreases until you reach the kind of ideal first thing in the morning late, I think it's great in that sense. afternoon coffee, it really depends again on when you expect to go to sleep now for someone like you.

I would say I would love to abstain from that or just change it if you are using these capsules or however you want. We're setting it up, let's just turn it off and do an experiment for two weeks and we'll see how much afternoon coffee really impacts your sleep and we'll track your sleep with some degree of high fidelity with a wearable device and let's try it. hypothesis because you go to sleep pretty early you're an early riser maybe bordering on an extreme um early riser and we'll talk about um or we've talked about those different flavors of chronotype I would prefer if you didn't have that caffeine in the afternoon based on how early you go to sleep and I bring up that preference because of what you described regarding your sleep maintenance insomnia, one of the problems with caffeine is that not only can it make it harder for you to fall asleep, but you don't. partly because if you wake up frequently enough during the night and struggle to get back to sleep, you will have a sleep debt every night and that debt continues to grow and is almost like compound interest on a loan. in fact, sometimes the speed at which people fall asleep and some of these sleep trackers will almost penalize you for falling asleep too quickly because, in sleep science and clinical sleep medicine, if you should take it. somewhere you know that the onset of healthy sleep is 5 to 15 20 minutes, but if you put your head on the pillow and turn off the light and in about a minute you are dead to the world and gone, exactly I worry that now have a dead dream, not necessarily, but I would like to explore it with you and then I would say that even if you can fall asleep, it's okay this factor of waking up in the middle of the night is also related to caffeine, because caffeine can not only make it harder to fall asleep (not your problem), but it keeps you out of that deep sleep and puts you in a more superficial non-rapid eye movement state.

In this superficial state it's easier to wake you up, but I think the biggest problem is that it's harder for you to go back to sleep because your brain doesn't necessarily want to go back to that deep sleep and hasn't. it comes out of that deep sleep so that you're not in that wonderful, glorious dream state, when you wake up, you go to the bathroom, you come back and you know this is going to be great. I'm like As long as I can get back on my mattress, I'll be asleep in another two minutes, whereas for you you probably wake up and feel pretty awake.

I'd like to see what happens when we deny that. afternoon coffee on the frequency and duration of those middle-of-the-night awakenings for you, yes, I'm definitely making an effort to avoid afternoon caffeine consumption and I think I'm already starting to see some of the positive benefits of doing it as well as evidenced by the days that I consume caffeine in the afternoon and experience the deficits, it's a real thing and I think you've talked about the numbers, in a different podcast earlier I might talk a little bit about caffeine metabolism and um and maybe. even some of the variations that exist between people in terms of the metabolic regulation U of caffeine, so how long let's say you drink a standard cup of coffee or a cup of espresso and have gosh?

I don't know, 150 milligrams of caffeine is that 200 could be 150 200, let's say 200 because you certainly know that a barista these days is going to consume a drink above the index, yeah, so let's say 200 milligrams and someone consumes that after lunch at 100 p.m. and their bedtime is, let's make them more conventional than me, between 10:00 and 11:00 p.m. Yeah, okay, so they're 10 to 9 to 10 hours away from bedtime. They're having a nice, strong cup of coffee, quote, after lunch. What does that look like in terms of your biochemistry and your impact? When sleeping, caffeine has something we call a half-life of about 5 to 6 hours, which means that after 5 to 6 hours, about 50% of that caffeine is still circulating in the bloodstream and therefore, in the brain, which means caffeine has a quarter life somewhere. between 10 and 12 hours now this is on average and we'll get back to the variations but think about it this way if you're having a cup of coffee like you described there at noon and then you go to bed at, say 11: or midnight, that It would be the equivalent, according to what I just told you, the quarter of a life of going to bed and just before going to bed, you drink a quarter cup of coffee and wish yourself a good night. of the dream and it most likely won't happen again now, that's a bit hyperbolic of a statement, but try to conceptualize it that way, you'd never think of coming unstuck with that last quarter cup. of coffee right before you put on your eye mask, no, but I have some friends and actually someone who works with the podcast team and we'll go out to dinner as a team when we're on the road and he'll order like a big coffee just after 9:00 p.m. dinner and I said: can you keep sleeping?

Oh yeah, no problem and that's not the problem, part of it is this. I have no problem falling asleep, but if we were to do so based on the data map, there would be electrical brain activity. I can see this reduction in deep non-rm sleep and it may reduce it if you look at the data by 15 to 20%. Now, to reduce your deep sleep by 15-20%, I would probably have to age you. around 20-22 years old or you could just do it every night with a late night coffee if you wanted to again. I've changed my mind about caffeine and maybe we'll talk about this in later episodes.

I've changed my mind about caffeine. I think in the morning. use of caffeine or coffee. I have to say that being more specific is okay because I think there are health benefits and we can explain in later episodes why coffee and coffee itself can provide those benefits, soI've become a little more optimistic about it. caffeine in the morning but caffeine at night. I just think the data doesn't support it, even if it is and there are variations and you were very astute in your question. Some people said that, on average, caffeine has a half-life of about 5 to six hours per day.

For some people it's faster and for others it's slower. Why is it based on one gene and we know that the gene is part of a set of liver enzymes and the gene is called the cyp1 A2 gene and are there variations on that? Gene what we call polymorphisms and you can do these genetic tests, you can buy these kits and they will probably all tell you who you are, whether you are sensitive or not, you probably already know, so some people will not be as sensitive and therefore, they may have a more compressed half-life because it leaves your system more quickly, so again, I'm not trying to be facetious.

I think you can have coffee in the morning and you'll be fine. that late night coffee, I'd like you to skip that if you're someone who's doing it and afternoon coffee sounds like a you know, maybe just once in a while and you try to do it mostly decaf or decaf, actually, yeah actually it's just for the taste, yes, if it's just for the taste, go decaf, if it's not, I understand that I'm somehow talking about the ideal world and drum roll, it turns out that most of us don't live in that. We live in this thing called the real world and therefore if you are faced with a circumstance where you are under pressure at work or if you are a high performance athlete and this is the event, this is you, it is all in a thought .

I understand that you're going to sacrifice some sleep at night, but maybe that sacrifice is worth it, so again, I'm very open-minded. I'm not trying to be, you know, just too rigid about this. I want to give a brief summary. break and acknowledge our sponsor insid tracker insid tracker is a personalized nutrition platform that analyzes data from your blood and DNA to help you better understand your body and help you achieve your health goals. I have long believed in the need for regular blood tests. For the simple reason that many of the factors that affect your immediate and long-term health can only be analyzed by a quality blood test, however, the problem with many blood tests is that they obtain information about metabolic factors, hormones, etc. , but you don't know what to do with that information.

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I talked about food and its effects on sleep. What about THC and CBD? They are sometimes referred to more generally as cannabis. You know it's interesting. You know, God, when I was a kid. You know cannabis was illegal. Today, it is legal, tolerated or decriminalized. in many places, not all, but I would say that there has been a turning of the tide in terms of cannabis, which means that many people use cannabis who use it legally and use it for many reasons that other people use alcohol, since You know. a sedative effect a slight hypnotic effect I mean, you know, the actual definition of what these drugs do applies to certain terms in psychiatric literature, of course, but to, quote, soften yourself to feel more relaxed to reduce your anxiety um, it's a lot different than when I was a kid, when I used to get in a lot of trouble, uh, if you got caught smoking a joint or smoking a bong in the middle of the day, but no, and I realize that most people people don't I don't do that at work, I guess it depends on where you work, but you know, edible tinctures, I mean, THC and CBD consumption is pretty strong in a lot of places, so, with all the legality issues and the fact that young people, um, shouldn't consume them, me, people 18 and under, not just for legal reasons, but the brain is still developing, um, what's the story with THC, CBD , edible cannabis, smoked, tinctures for sleep specifically, it is very interesting if Look first at the motivational reasons why people use cannabis according to the published study which is among the two main reasons: sleeping to fall asleep and staying asleep staying asleep and staying asleep obviously usually the first main reason is just to get high and have the experience and the pleasure. of being high if that's what floats your um floats your train floats your train but it's certainly what you know how to sleep um how and what we call a hypnotic to put you asleep from um the Greek derivative of the god to sleep that is high among The reasons why people will use it, we currently don't recommend it and here's why THC certainly helps you fall asleep faster.

The data is very clear: the problem is that you first start to develop tolerance and get the same sleep onset benefit that you need. to use it it should say a higher dose, so you start to develop dependency and your dosage regimen starts to increase. The second problem with THC is that it is very good at blocking your sleep, your REM sleep. In fact, many people when they come and tell you. Look, I was a heavy cannabis user, even a light cannabis user for a while and then I stopped using it and one of the strangest things happened to me.

I started having crazy, vivid, wild dreams and I didn't know what was happening. and it's a very simple explanation, since you've been using your brain, it's been compromised in the amount of REM sleep it's been getting, and you've been chronically accumulating REM sleep debt, and your brain is intelligent in the sense that it's intelligent. does. Try to measure to some extent a counter of how much REM sleep you've lost and a lot of people will say yeah, I don't really remember my dreams when I'm using, but when they finally stop the brain because it's been cleansed of that stuff. that's the obstacle to REM sleep, not only did they go back to having the normal amount of REM sleep that people would have, but they also have what we call a REM sleep rebound, which is increasingly intense REM sleep, which it leads to more I suspect there are a lot of people who have had that experience listening to whether they have been users and have stopped doing so, so that's the second reason we don't advocate for it.

The third third reason is that when you stop doing it. using yourself also happens or you go through a very vicious insomnia withdrawal syndrome that many people will go through now that depends on you knowing how much you have been using for how long you have been using if you look at the data and by the way part of the clinical diagnosis, the psychiatric diagnosis, The description of cannabis withdrawal is insomnia, that's how reliable this insomnia problem is when you quit cannabis and if you look at the data, it's one of the main reasons why people relapse and start using cannabis. again even though they don't want to it's because they can't deal with the insomnia that withdrawal has caused them so you don't want to get into that vicious cycle if you want it again it's your choice so I think THC should not be recommended.

Right now CBD is interesting. I don't think there's enough data yet for us to have a very solid opinion, but I can at least offer mine. The data so far is a bit conflicting on what we call effect size; in other words, how reliable it is. and how powerful the benefit of CBD is for sleep, but it does seem to have some benefit. The interesting thing is that it doesn't seem to have the harms I just described or the THC. You have to look at the data a little. A little bit careful with CBD, it has what's called a U-shaped function, which is that if you're taking too little and again, I'm really very conscious of not trying to be well, here are the numbers, but if the you look I would say you know, if you cross your eyes, if you squint, maybe less than 25 milligrams you run the risk of CBD promoting wakefulness instead of sleep, but once you get past, if you look, they're 50 milligrams or more, then you start going. in the opposite direction where it seems to promote sleep and I mention that only because at least here in the United States and in many places in the world that industry is not regulated, so it may say 50 milligrams on the bottle, not really Now I know that some of those companies will have what's called third party lab testing where they'll send it out and you'll be able to scan a qri code and you'll be able to look at an independent lab that tested it and they'll show you the p p uh purity of it so you can I think CBD has favorable evidence right now, if that's the case, let's say you and I talk five years from now and there's very good data on this now, what might the mechanisms be?

I think there are at least probably there are at least two, maybe three mechanisms, the first one is an indirect mechanism. CBD has been shown very well in some fantastic studies to be an anotic, which is a fancy term for saying it reduces anxiety and previously you and I discussed anxiety and stress. It is one of the things that will keep you awake indirectly, it eliminates this type of door that prevents you from advancing along the Royal Path of sleep and reopens the door because it eliminates that door mechanism that generates a lot of anxiety and, by the way, of Being an anxiolytic softens that anxiety and it is easier for you to fall asleep.

I think that's probably the main mechanistic bet. I would do another indirect mechanism right now if you look at some of the rat studies and we do some human work at my sleep center, so we don't do animal studies, but if you look at the rat data, CBD can be hypothermic, which it means it lowers your core body temperature and as we talked about earlier in this episode, it should lower your body. temperature to fall asleep, so I think that's the second reason. I think the third reason is that it might have a direct sleep-promoting mechanism.

I think at this point it's unclear exactly how it interacts with the brain's sleep machinery. We have some hypotheses. Again, the danger is that it's just not a well-regulated substance, so I'm actually telling you very clearly that I'm working with a company in the UK, in collaboration with King's College and the Institute of Psychiatry there to see if we can create an analogue, a clean analogue of CBD, but I think its positive potential not only for sleep but for a number of different psychiatric conditions, such as anxiety, could be beneficial, so I would say that right now that is the type of person who consumes THC and and CBD is fine, so just to make sure I have the basic list of sleep hygiene factors correct.

I have regularity is King, yes, light and dark, which means that one should optimize or at least seek to optimize their light exposure in the morning and throughout the day. and at night to darken and darken things, yeah, temperature and there you have a little bit um, it's not a montra, but what is it? It's a warm up to cool down and fall asleep and then stay cool like Fonzi, stay cool to stay asleep and then warm up to wake up, yeah, and we'll get back to that, I think in a little while again, then you have to get out, which is, if I understand correctly, if you are trying to fall asleep or go back to sleep and it is taking you longer than about 20 to 25 minutes, you should just get out of bed and go somewhere else in the house, do something else, such Maybe even lie down on a different surface in the house to try to see if you can sleep there, but don't stay in bed. create a birth association between waking and your bed because that can lead to problems in the following nights, yes, and I would just say try to resist if you can, if you really want your bedroom to be the place where you now constantly fall asleep, try to don't do it.

You start sleeping somewhere else constantly because you suddenly link it to good sleep and you undo this notion that we're trying to relearn, which is knowing that your bedroom is the place to sleep, so it's okay to go somewhere else. , try to stay. Wake up and force yourself to stay awake until you're completely sleepy, then go back to bed, okay, and then we talk about alcohol, caffeine, and THC, CBD, also known as cannabis, and with respect to alcohol, it's clear that Neither is better if you are going to have a drink. You don't want to drink too early in the day, but you don't want to drink too much or too close to bedtime because it can disrupt rapid eye movement.

Sleep. Meal. It seems that creating a kind ofbuffer between your last bite. of food and anyway bedtime is between 2-3 hours but for some people it will be more like 90 minutes and of course that will depend on the size of the meal etc but eating a large meal and then going straight to bed is probably not a good idea caffeine has a long half life so if you are going to indulge, which I do early in the day, be careful with the afternoon caffeine, yes take the Hubman cover, that's what I'll call it. Now, what's not interpretively dense, it's just the ribbon of caffeine and then THC, CBD, it doesn't do anything good for sleep architecture, although some people are under the impression that it's good for sleep because it makes it easier for them to fall asleep. dream, but what? what they don't know is that it is altering the quality and architecture of the different stages of sleep in ways that do not benefit people, that seems to be the case with THC and I think CBD is promising and research needs to do more, including my own and you, um, very kindly emphasize that you're not telling people what to do, they just need to know what they're doing so they can make changes, if they choose to, that's true, I would always say that, um, I'm No.

I try to be a doctor. Any advice I give is simply scientifically descriptive advice. It is not prescriptive medical or lifestyle advice. I'm smiling because what I always say is, "I'm a scientist, not a doctor, so I don't prescribe." anything, but I profess many things, or as my good friend who is a musician, Tim Armstrong, says, I'm not a policeman, so do what you want, okay, what a wonderful list to jump into the unconventional and more advanced tools for Sleep Improvement, so let's go there, so I think a lot of people may have heard of some of the conventional ones, but what about the unconventional ones?

I would probably offer five or six. The first thing I would say is that if you have trouble sleeping and you have had a bad night's sleep the first recommendation is to do nothing and what I mean by this is that if you have had a bad night's sleep you are awake for 3 hours no. sleep later in the morning don't go to bed earlier don't increase your caffeine intake to try to compensate and don't take naps during the day, why do I tell him those things if he wakes up later the next morning? Your adenosine clock that we talked about about this buildup of sleepiness that happens when we wake up will start later in the day, so when it comes time to fall asleep at what would be the night after your normal time, you won't feel as sleepy, right? because?

Because you woke up much later. and you're setting yourself up for failure again, still don't go to bed earlier if you've gotten used to it and your brain has gotten used to it and your Cadia clock has gotten used to going to bed at a certain time and, hopefully, You are doing it. regularly and then going to bed 2 or 3 hours earlier has the danger that it is not a certainty, but there is the danger that you will then go to bed and think well. I know I slept badly last night but I still can't. Go to sleep immediately so now you're spending another 90 minutes in bed at first because you went to bed 90 minutes earlier thinking it's a good idea to compensate don't do that either hold on even if you feel tired my recommendation would be after that bad night of sleep hold on forever As close to your natural bedtime as possible, then go to sleep and you'll have the best chance of success.

Don't consume too much caffeine, that's the obvious choice. Follow the beautiful Hubman taper and then obviously try not to compensate with a nap why because that nap that happens when we sleep is going to eliminate some of that sleepiness that creeps in and once again you lie in bed and you don't have as much sleep like you would naturally, so you either have a bad night again because you have trouble sleeping or you wake up and can't go back because you have less weight of sleepiness on your shoulders from the nap you took earlier, so I know it's hard , but I would say that when the alarm goes off after a bad night, you just think I don't want to get up.

It's been a very hard night. I know it's a short-term gain, but trust me, it's a long-term loss because then you'll get into this vicious cycle, so that's the first one. unconventional advice, I can pause for a second. I'm a little wide-eyed because I didn't know any of that. Typically, if I sleep poorly at night, I will do everything I can to catch up on that sleep. um, take a nap. I'll, you know, adjust to bedtime the next night. um so I hope everyone pays close attention to what Matt just said. I mean, that's an important list because I think it's one of the most common.

The thing is, people just don't sleep well at night and I think most people think okay, I'll drink a little more caffeine, I'll go to bed a little earlier tonight, you know, maybe. Maybe I'll take a nap in the afternoon, this kind of thing. um and I would have thought that too and maybe even suggested that and if you listen to the first episode and where you know I apocalyptically list the things that can happen in one short night, you would think that's what I would then recommend it, but it was recorded in Me by a wonderful sleep clinician, U Michael pee, who described some of these characteristics and exactly the reasons underlying them and I think I just tried to put that into a formula that makes sense again it's not about the period, it's about to explain it because when you explain it at the beginning it sounds contradictory and paradoxical when you understand it, hopefully it sounds logical and feasible, so that would be the first suggestion, could I apologize for interrupting again?

My audience hates it when I interrupt, but I do it on their behalf because because because I like to think that there is some value in at least what you say in response. I saw a really great post by Dr. Ronda Patrick. who we both know and admire for his public education work, public health education work, and he described a study where, if people, I think, were slightly sleep deprived, maybe within a few hours the regulation would be disrupted. of blood glucose in the morning. It is known to accompany partial sleep deprivation and certainly complete sleep deprivation, but in this case the partial sleep deprivation could be compensated for by exercising in the morning, that's right, which, frankly, I have to say, if not I've slept so well, so you know that normally I'm like H, maybe today is the day I don't exercise, but now that I heard that information I make it a point to continue exercising, sometimes with a little less intensity, yeah, because not I want to be completely exhausted in the afternoon um and go to sleep at 4 p.m. or something really disrupted my schedule, but I thought it was really interesting because it's kind of a partial inoculation of the blood glucose disruption caused by lack of sleep.

I'm so glad you mentioned it, it's a fantastic study and I, Rond, and I, I think I even tried to discuss it a few years ago on a show, but I like it because it offers a degree of practical hope and a strategy for sugar in the bloodstream. Absolutely critical blood, it is very sensitive to sleep when you don't. you get enough goes in bad directions you used a very specific word cleverly so that word was partially at first you listen to or read that study and Ronda never suggested this nor am I saying to think carefully about whether it compensates the blood sugar and the The city said that the Exercise can cancel out lack of sleep.

You conflate that one benefit with the idea that well, but maybe it doesn't really make up for or compensate for deficits in immune function or concerns about cardiovascular disease or my hormonal health or my learning. in memory or in my emotional and brain health maybe yes, but maybe not, so I think I would always warn people that when you hear a study like that it's very natural to think, oh, that must mean that it translates to everything the rest. in my body and everything else in my brain, maybe, but it's not great either, so if you don't sleep that well, do your best to get some exercise, but be aware of the fact that you know in winter. months, especially if you push yourself too hard at the gym or run, you might have a little bit of compromised immunity, just be aware of the fact that you're a more vulnerable being when you're sleep deprived and stuff, but that exercise can help adjust things in the right direction and if it's early in the day, presumably that's not going to disrupt your proper bedtime and if it's later in the day, I guess as long as you don't need caffeine to be able to uh do that exercise and /o um, if you're familiar with working out later in the day, that's fine.

You know, I think if I exercise I'm not one of those people, I think I can go for a run at 7:00 at night. and then just shower, you're a morning type because I'm a morning type, other people can, okay, we'll work out a little more in a later episode, we'll make sure to do that, but anyway, I'm just bringing that up now. Well, what are some of the other unconventional sleeping protocols? I think other suggestions I would have after doing nothing would be to try to think about limiting your time. Embed if you have difficulty sleeping.

This is something that is probably used in most cases. well-validated psychological intervention for insomnia and is called cognitive behavioral therapy for insomnia or cbti for short. What happens is you work with a doctor, they interview you, they evaluate all the reasons why you might not be sleeping, and then they create from their toolbox many different options, a kind of customized saval R soup recipe for you for your treatment if you look at the studies of that collection of different tools in cbti Box for the intervention of insomnia and ask for all those that seem to offer the best impact on insomnia that has the greatest type of severity, it seems to be what we call reprogramming of bedtime, it used to be known as sleep restriction therapy, but obviously, if that's what you mean, you're saying look, I'm not sleeping very well.

I have insomnia I say I understand it and I have a treatment for you called Sleep Restriction Therapy and you say no, no, no, you didn't understand. I'm not getting enough sleep, but I'm not, that's how it works. If you spend so much time in bed, too much time in bed, you're not forcing your brain to be efficient, and by limiting your sleep window to even, say, five hours a night to begin with, Brute Force, ruthless efficiency of your dream. brain after several days, so another analogy would be, let's say you're trying to make a nice thin pizza base, you put the dough on the table and start rolling it out, if you roll it too thin, you start to get gaps. and holes in it, why, because you've spread it too far and you've started to create these absences, that's the same thing that happens and it's very natural as a patient with insomnia, you would say I'm just not getting enough sleep, so I'm going to start Spending more time in bed is the worst idea.

Another way would be to say look, I go to the gym and you know, I spend about an hour and a half working out, but if I videotaped you a bunch of people are doing I think you, I've coed like your sentence, but um, the eleventh repetition where people you know do the 10 repetitions and then suddenly there's the selfie or there's social media, oh yeah, the texting, they finish the last one got off and then immediately on the TT and if you look, just They're training for, say, 45 minutes and the other is wasted, what if the next day you came to the gym and I said, look, I'm sorry? and there are some big doormen at the door.

You can only exercise for 40 minutes and then we'll kick you out and the first day you come back and do the same thing and then you're just passed. 30% of your workout, to get you started, the next day you do a little bit more again and you start again after about five or six days, you've developed such a strong desire and hunger to exercise. you walk in, you put your phone on silent, you put it in the corner and you just get to it and that's the same thing we're trying to do with sleep restriction therapy, so you have to be a little careful, do it underneath. supervision, especially if you're driving or operating heavy machinery, we just want to be vigilant, it's not necessarily a big concern, but we would say, Okay, Andrew, you're currently spending almost the full, you know, 8 hours or 7 and a half hours. in bed tonight I'm going to restrict you to 5 hours a night and we're going to do this for the next week and the way we normally do it is: I don't change your wake up time, I change your bedtime time why it's easier staying awake longer than waking up earlier, so I put it in front of the commitment and at first things don't change, but after about four or five days of going through this, I built up enough of a short-term debt in his system that your system suddenly thinks, Oh my God, I can't be so lazy anymore.

I can't do this thing where I wake up in the middle of the night and spend an hour and a half awake. I do not haveoption, there is so much physiological buildup and pressure to do this and gradually what happens is you sleep more, you don't wake up as much and after about 2 weeks of doing this you suddenly go to bed at this is later so let's say you normally go to bed at 8: I'm going to make you go to bed maybe at 10:30 11: but we'll still wake you up at that time like 4:30 a.m. Mark that normally you would wake up and suddenly you go to bed at 10:30 11 you're out like a light and then again the next thing you remember is the alarm going off saying, "I'm sorry." We have to wake up and what happens through that reset is we'll do it gradually and then once you're stable we'll start backing off and we'll start getting you to go to bed at 10: and if it stays stable then a 9:45 then 9:30 and we take you back to where you were and if there's any sign that you're starting to not sleep well, we close it again.

The goal here is, in a way, almost like pressing the reset button on your Wi-Fi Router. I'm trying to retrain your brain to sleep better because when you don't sleep well, you lose confidence in your ability to sleep and when I do this technique with you, gradually your system and you cognitively learn that you sleep well and you can trust sleep and now your sleep doesn't control you you control your sleep, however the hard part is that it's not easy to go through that and we have to be, we usually have to ask people two questions, first what is your motivation to sleep better , we need to know that you are really motivated and secondly, you just stay with a high touch white glove frequency checking on people and motivating them to keep going because it's very easy to fall off the wagon, so that's the next suggestion, sleep restriction therapy or bedtime rescheduling as we would call it, you said it's hard for people to go through that, you know it takes a little rigor, a little attention, it means in some cases sleeping less than whatever you'd like, but compared to something you sadly know, I've experienced a lot of things in my life of having trouble sleeping and trying to put things in order and looking at the bed and just saying, "Oh my God, Battle Ground, you know." , Battle Ground, you know." it's um I think it makes a lot of sense and I love the gym analogy in a way, if there's a 1 hour restriction to get in and out the door or maybe 70 minutes to get in and out the door CU, you should put your stuff in the locker or something, at least for me it's always done better when you only have those limitations.

I think there's something about the human brain that we don't do well in unconstrained systems and I really think guardrails are fantastic. I love deadlines, for example, yes, discipline is essentially hard deadlines, as or as they say in academia, because we know you write grants all the time, deadlines that exceed that limit, but if you don't meet it, that's it. , it's like there's Hey, I'll send this to you tomorrow at 5:00 p.m. m. PST, that website is closing and it will be better, Bo, are you doing things suddenly? It's surprising how much distraction you can. You know, cut out the noise and focus on the signal.

It is an excellent signal-to-noise ratio. Yes, and I love the idea that you can control your dream instead of the dream controlling you. I think that's um and this notion of sleep confidence um one's confidence in their ability to sleep these are important terms and they're more than just terms because I think it's a field and an area of ​​health practice and oh my goodness. , what is more important than sleep is the basis of mental health, physical health and performance period, it really thrives with a common and common nomenclature. I really appreciate that you're peppering these episodes with new nomenclature that captures much of the essence of the protocols and mechanisms, so that's my editorial, please continue.

I would say in terms of other things maybe. Just to go over them a little quicker, we've talked a little bit about a relaxation routine. Most people underestimate the importance of a relaxation routine. We often think of sleep as a light bulb that we dip into bed and turn off the light. The light bulb and the dream should appear equally quickly. It isn't true. Sleeping in terms of a process is much more physiological than trying to land a plane. It just takes time to descend into the terraferma of good sleep at night. Whatever you enjoy as a relaxation method. participating in it could be listening to a podcast it could be reading a book maybe it's a meditation it's a light stretch maybe it's whatever you do just build it into your regiment you know you'd never do it you'd be driving down the highway and then you'd stop at your garage at the same speed of 40 mph you gradually decelerate and stop, it's the same with sleep, so you need to find some way to decelerate and we have already talked about methods to do that, the next tip is a bit quirky and fun, don't count sheep.

There's a great study by my colleague Dr. Alison Harvey at the University of California at Berkeley, and she put this to the test. She didn't make people fall asleep faster, but rather it took them longer to fall asleep. However, he found an Another alternative if you don't like meditation, podcasts, sleep stories or whatever you want, try taking a mental walk and it has to be a walk that you know very well, so let's say you take a walk to your dog every day. and you know there are a couple of walks you take with your dog, do them in great detail.

So you close your eyes, you go to the front door, you hook the dog to the leash, you get out, you go down the stairs to the driveway and then you turn right but you always go through and look left and the right CU, that's it the place where the traffic always comes, you cross and now you're walking up and there's this weird kind of garbage that's been outside of that. house for a long time and you don't know why it hasn't been cleaned and then you move, that kind of high fidelity detail allows you to do what we said before, which is stop thinking about yourself and when you do it again, usually you fall asleep faster and that's what they found, it was a great study, I really enjoyed it, I'm curious as to why it works so well and I don't question that it works.

I imagine having closed my eyes and something like that. imagine what that would be like, it's very nice, um, there could be here. I'm just speculating something about involving procedural memory because that's procedural memory, you're trying to remember how you do something, as opposed to declarative memory, which is about facts that I know I remember this and this is going to happen tomorrow. I'm wondering if there's something about using a procedural memory instead of a declarative memory display. Someone should do that study and I think it's certainly possible that when you incorporate In some aspect, you know some aspects of the scene and the information is more truthful and perhaps EP as episodic declarative memory, but when you take a mental walk, what is the fundamental premise that it is a walk, it is a movement, it is a procedure? memory and then maybe it has something to do with being more attentive to becoming embodied because when you go for a walk and move around it is a more embodied experience than just sitting at your desk, which is mostly your head and very little. your body, so I think it's an intriguing idea and I think it's another tip that I now think about that also comes from Dr.

Allison Harvey's work when people approach me after some kind of public event or see me in the airport. I'll say look every night for some strange reason at 2:45am. m. I wake up and it happens three or four nights a week. My first question for them is how do they know it's 2:45? and they tell me, well, I look at the clock. or I look at my phone, best advice: Next, remove all the clock faces from the room, no matter how bad you are going to sleep that night, knowing what time it is will only make things worse, not make things worse. better and that can create an anxiety trigger that you think it's 245 and then you're tossing and turning, you look back at the clock and now it's 3:14 a.m. and you think I have to be awake at 600.

I have that big meeting and now it's 5:2, don't do that to yourself and I, although I normally have no problems sleeping, I don't have clocks in my room, the phone What I use to help me do guided meditation is old. phone and it only has Wi-Fi connectivity and nothing else and I'll just press play and then never turn it over. I won't look at the watch face, it just doesn't help me, it's another incentive to keep the phone out. from the room um if you can, I understand that there are reasons why one would want the phone in the room if you know that it is potentially indicating an emergency, you know that well.

I think it is a very important point and we have worked a little on it. In this area also what that phone does is create a low level of anxiety, it is what we call anticipatory anxiety, one of the separate mechanisms of that, well, it is related to that, if you look at a teenager's phone, use one of the reasons why they don't sleep. great at night is that they are constantly checking their phones for fear of missing what happened while they slept and the data is surprising, but for most adults the other reason I don't like to advocate using the phone when the alarm rings alarm in the morning, what's the first thing you do when you're in bed?

You swipe right or unlock your phone and you instantly start checking social media emails, text messages and this tsunami of stress and anxiety just washes over you, hits you like this wall of anxiety and I mention this because again train your brain for the expectation that anticipatory anxiety has a consequence on your sleep and everyone knows it, let's say you have booked an early morning flight and you have to wake up at 5:00 am. m., when you normally wake up at 7 a.m. m., usually two things will happen first: you know you're not going to sleep as soundly that night because you're nervous and this is for an interview or it's for a critique like this, it's a non-negotiable journey that has to happen, you have to wake up.

The second thing is that when you wait for that wave, you need to wake up and maybe it's just I'm waiting for the phone again. You will wake up just a few minutes before the alarm goes off. It's surprising how many people will say I had this big flight the next day and you almost know I'll wake up 2 minutes before my alarm goes off. Because? Because your brain has been kept in this shallow state of anticipatory anxiety and you don't sleep as much and now we've shown that we, the rest of us, when you have that low level of anxiety, the depth of your deep sleep is not as deep. you don't get the good stuff, so again, don't try to dictate what people do, just be aware that when you create that behavior and that regiment, it becomes almost like a kind of jack knee, a kind of trained habitual response. .

Great, let's talk about some of the things. advanced tools to improve sleep, you know what kind of methods could be incorporated, you know, what some of the data is and is there a way we can group it into some kind of framework or categories, because I know they exist? There are a lot of different tools and I guess this would be, you know, I know our pet friend has talked about medicine 3.0. I think this would probably be sleep optimization 3.0, what's coming in the future, what's in the research and I think I know it could come to market or has come to market, but we're still on the cusp.

We've seen Wei again on the Royal Wii. We have been able to increase human sleep in at least four different ways. There are methods to control sleep. Brain stimulation, there are methods for acoustic sleep stimulation, so electrical sleep stimulation, acoustic sleep stimulation, thermal sleep manipulation and finally kinesthetic sleep manipulation, i.e. brain-based stimulation. movement, and maybe I can analyze each one of them, the electrical stimulation. it's probably the best render of all those four, partly because we started there and we and here it's not the Royal Wii that we've worked a lot on and I can tell you a little bit about a company that comes out of that, but when you try to manipulate the human brain , the main currency with which the brain communicates is electricity.

Now there are many things that help it do this, such as chemicals, but the main language and verbiage of the brain is electricity, so if you are going to manipulate the brain, why don't you talk in its electricity currency? So we and others have developed a method based on something called direct current brain stimulation and specifically something called transcranial direct current stimulation and I'll unpack that trans. means movement, so if you've heard of Transportation, it's about moving things from one port to another, a transatlantic movement, you know, across the Atlantic, so here the beginning is moving, you're moving something from one place to Next, it means transcranial through your skull, so we're moving something throughhis skull.

Transcranial direct current is the type of voltage or the type of electrical impulse that we are applying to it, it could be alternating current or it could be direct current and the first methods and the ones that we use have It has been direct current, so transcranial direct current and then stimulation, we are trying to stimulate the brain, specifically the cortex, and the way we do that is we apply electrode pads to your head and we insert a small amount of voltage into your brain, now it's so small that you normally don't feel it, but It has a measurable impact on that electrical activity of the brain.

From very early on in scientists and we were not the first to do this by any means, there was a great paper now famous in my field by a wonderful scientist born in Germany and they took a group of subjects and they applied these electrode pads and specifically on the front part of the brain and I will explain why we target the front part of the brain with electrical sleep improvement or the electrical part. slow, powerful waves that define deep sleep and what they did in one of those groups the other group was the placebo group they still had the electrodes applied they still went to sleep in the stimulation group they waited until those individuals went into deep sleep and I told them In the first episode, you saw that those deep sleep brain waves were going up and down very, very slowly, maybe just once or twice a second, so you started stimulating the brain by introducing stimulation pulses at a rate very slow, trying to match the rhythm of the brain. in fact, they were less than a hertz, less than a cycle per second in terms of pulse, it's almost like we were trying to act as a chorus for a faltering lead vocalist and as these brain waves go up and down, you're trying to sing to the beat of those deep sleep brain waves and by doing so, you are trying to increase and amplify the size of those deep sleep brain waves.

To begin with, they simply waited until they entered deep sleep and started stimulating at that frequency and I'll get back to why that's important in a second, but effectively what they showed was that they were able to increase the electrical quality of that deep sleep by about a 60% and were also able to almost double the amount of memory benefit. that dream provided wow, which is very impressive, that's impressive. Now I should point out that more recently there was an attempted replication of that paper and they did a very good job, they really did it to the letter and were unable to replicate the effects as powerfully, however subsequent studies have taken a more nuanced approach. and it is the one that we have also adopted and it is called closed-loop stimulation.

Clos Loop here simply means that I'm not going to wait until you go into deep sleep and then just take a chance and start stimulating your brain without knowing the synchrony of my pulses in your brain in relation to the brain waves you are experiencing. The closed loop does that, so what I'm doing is measuring the electrical brain waves that occur and because they're nice and slow they're very predictable and I can program my algorithm and my brain stimulation machine to say I'm going to wait and wait and as soon as you're at this peak of your slow wave it turns out to be the negative point, but I'll give up that we then try to attack at that midnight point when you're going through the biggest, most powerful kind of drop in brain waves and we're trying to improve The same thing happens with the spike, so this is where we take a stimulus from the brain, your brain electrical activity and then we create a timed response, so it's a stimulus response, it's a call and response.

A loop, and in doing so, it is a much smarter specific method than a more generalized one. I'm just going to stimulate and hope to catch those waves in the Peaks. The reason is important because different people have different speeds of their slow brain waves. They are all slow, but your brain wave speed. maybe a little different than mine and if I go off on my stimulation, say just half a second or a quarter of a second over and over again, I may be leaving some benefit on the table, but closed loop stimulation creates this personalized electrical prescription. of stimulation and when you do that you get very reliable benefits, you can increase those deep slope brain waves, you get memory benefits, but also what we found is that not only do you increase those deep sleep brain waves, but you also increase another electrical signature of the one I talked about in the first episode is called sleep spindles and it seems to be the combination of those two things through electrical stimulation that provides the benefits.

Now you should know that I haven't mentioned this before. You can buy these devices on the Internet. The DIY style does not. that if you go to the internet you can also find some horror stories people have misappropriated the voltage they have burns on their skin they have lost their sight for several weeks do not do this at home I promise you that you will use it you know, wait until These products come out market and that's one of the reasons why we've turned it into a company and we're trying to do this. We have a long way to go, but we have a lot of testing we need to do first.

You know, I feel ready to really put it on the table and say you should buy it, it's worth it, but we're getting really close, I'd say great, what about thermal manipulations? relationship between temperature and sleep and wakefulness, in fact, what kind of technology tool protocols are there to use thermal manipulation as a way to increase sleep? I love this topic because there are high fidelity, low fidelity and noi technologies that you can use the sleep story and the temperature as you mentioned before and reiterated in terms of the three part verse that I would describe is again you need to warm up to cool down to fall asleep you need keep you cool to stay asleep You need to warm up to wake up, which technically refers to sleep science is what we call thermal activation zones, so warming up to cool down and fall asleep is what we call sleep onset thermal activation zone sleep, cool down or stay cool to stay.

Falling asleep is the trigger zone for deep sleep and then warming up to wake up is the trigger zone for alertness. The studies if you looked at them to begin with before they manipulated them they found something fascinating if I take you to Andrew Huberman and bring you to my lab. and I take away your phone, your entire laptop and you say goodbye to your friends and family and I take you downtown and there's no sign of what time of day there's no windows or anything and I'm just going to say look I'll keep asking you, but in The moment you feel sleepiest, let me know.

It turns out that before that we did the delicious intervention of inserting a rectal probe because that's the best way we can measure your core. body temperature, so we're measuring your core body temperature and sure enough, even though you don't know anything about what time, it's the time when you're going to tell me that I'm ready to go to bed and that I'm sleepy, it's the time when the one you are in the best moment. The deceleration trajectory of core body temperature is high and highly predictive of how sleepy you will feel. The way your body does this is by pushing blood to the superficial regions of your skin, especially your hands and feet, because these are highly vascular regions. and you had a great podcast from one of my heroes and good friend Craig Hel, who did an amazing job on this at Stanford so naturally as we lie down, the blood rushes to our hands and feet and also to our head and we start to release that heat. trapped in the core of our body and by releasing that heat to the surface, the core body temperature drops, therefore the external surfaces of the hands, feet and face have to be heated so that the core cools and can stay slept and, in fact, there was In a great nature article a few years ago they simply measured the temperature of someone's feet and watched how quickly they fell asleep and when they fell asleep, effectively, the warmer your feet were, the faster you fell asleep. you were sleeping, why?

Because the heat reflects the dilation of the blood and pumping blood to the periphery and then they did it in rats where they started to heat the pores of the rats and the rats fell asleep more quickly and I love this notion again, we don't make a type of love. the idea of ​​wrapping a beautiful little rat in a cotton wall and I'm warming his feet with this pad and Bliss comes out of it and then poof, he's gone after her. I respect his privacy, um, so that was the initial evidence. That then led to a series of manipulation studies, the most notable one being brilliant, coming from a colleague in the Netherlands, using Summeran and his group, they created essentially what was a wet suit, but that suit is covered in all of these. thin tubes almost like veins that run all the way through the suit to all the territories of your body and then what they could do is examine lukewarm water or hot water exquisitely in different parts of the brain or body cool, amazing, yeah, it's not a game of words.

Thank you, what they did was they started manipulating these peripheral regions and sure enough, when they did this, they were able to get people to fall asleep 25% faster and they were healthy people who normally sleep in a very natural rapid period. of time, but they were able to reduce 25% of that time by simply heating certain parts of the brain to raise the body's core blood and by doing so they accelerated the deceleration of the core temperature and therefore increased or accelerated the temperature. The speed with which the dream came to these individuals, the dream came much more quickly than it would have otherwise, although it was still fast, so, not being satisfied with that, they moved on to the Deep sleep trigger zone and this is not what they need. to stay cool to stay asleep and now they started to continue to cool the core, the central aspects of the body, what they were able to do was increase the amount of deep sleep somewhere between 25 to look at some of the data, almost 40 minutes they were able to increase the amount of deep sleep with thermal manipulation and when they measured the electrical brain waves and decomposed those brain waves, even the power and the electrical quality of those slow waves increased very impressively and then they were not satisfied.

With that, they turned to older adults for the reasons that we have just described. What they found was that in those older adults, when they were not manipulated with this thermal temperature in the second half of the night, there was a 50% probability that they were going to be awake for part of the second half of the night, when they did the thermal manipulation, they reduced that number to 5%, so they reduced the 50% chance of waking up to 5% in older adults and again improved the quality of their deep sleep Think, by the way, about why it was so effective for older adults.

I guarantee you've probably seen that you've been in a warm climate or you've been to the beach, you know, here sort of um. in Los Angeles and people go out in shorts, t-shirts or crop tops and from time to time there is someone, and I love seeing these places where you know that a child is walking next to his elderly parents, it is a beautiful scene of affection. but the seniors are not dressed the same way everyone else is dressed on the beach, they are warm, some of them have a wool hat. Why can't older adults regulate temperature as well as younger adults? and that is the reason why older adults will always be saying I am very cold and my hands and feet especially are always cold now that is a problem for sleeping because if you cannot dilate Vessel at the level of your hands and feet you cannot draw core blood you can't lower your core body temperature that much and we're starting to understand from that kind of data that part of the equation for the sleep-related problem of aging is not just that the brain deteriorates in sleep-related regions. sleep in which we have been doing most of our work are also part of a body equation and a thermoregulatory equation.

There was also a large unrelated study in Australia that looked at patients with insomnia and put their hands or feet in warm water. water and by doing that is a manipulation, you can see how quickly their hands and feet, what we call vasodilation, fill with blood. The healthy people dieted very quickly in response to that warm water, which means that their hands and their feet, as you know, were this red or at least for my feet, they would be this shade of red for them, however, in the patients with insomnia they didn't dilate Vaso as well, so again it suggests that when you have problems with sleep, part of the equation may be that we have an imperfect thermoregulatory ability and we see this in patients with insomnia, so that was it.

I think it was abrilliant causal manipulation. The problem is that most of us don't have access to some sort of thermal eye suit when we go to bed, so what can we do? as a scam, please don't say that I get into terrible trouble, rightly so, so I should be punished, you'll be right, what they did then was say, well, let's look at this, is there something we can do that's cheaper? and more accessible to the general public and if you look, there is literature that preceded that manipulation and it is so reliable that we now have a term for it in sleep science, it's called the warm bath effect and a lot of people will say, look, I love having a warm bath or a hot shower before I go to bed and I think when I get out I'm nice and warm and it's because I'm nice and warm that I fall asleep and I stay asleep it's the exact opposite when you get out of the warm bath or in the shower you have a dilated vessel on the surface of your skin again you get out of the bathroom you get this huge thermal discharge of heat away from the core what happens you fall asleep and you fall asleep more deeply now there are other reasons why that has a benefit: it's relaxing , you decompress, you stay away from technology, etc., but that's one of the thermal benefits and in fact, there were studies done by a legend in my field who passed away just a few years ago, um Jim Horn at Lury.

University in the United Kingdom and they did some of these pioneering studies. They were able to improve the amount of deep sleep by almost 40 minutes in some people. What was the protocol there, as I remember? I think they were in the bathroom for some time or in the bathroom. The running time was around 30 minutes, but they were doing sort of segments where it was maybe 40 minutes, 10 minutes, and then you could leave. I think the temperature, as it was in the UK, was around 40° Celsius somewhere in there. I may be wrong with those numbers because I know we like to protocolize some of this, but they were able to show some really nice benefits of deep sleep.

It also helped people fall asleep, it helped them fall asleep about 25 minutes faster in those people. those who really have a hard time sleeping I'm going to take a hot bath tonight. Sometimes I go to the sauna at night before going to sleep. I'm a big fan of the cold in the morning. Cold shower. Immerse yourself in the morning. Reverse engineering. the equation you are trapping the heat in the center of your body, you are waking up right and then, and at night I have used the sauna, the only problem with the sauna is that it really increases the heat of the sauna and then sometimes yes you do that right before you go to bed, you take a warm shower right after you go to bed, a lot of times I wake up thirsty and then, um, because it dehydrates you and then if I drink a lot of water to hydrate myself afterwards in the sauna, then I wake up too much in middle of the night, so I think the sauna is great, but right before bed I try it.

I'd love to. I don't have a sauna at home or access to one. I mean, there are saunas in and around where I live, but what I want to do is make it close to my bedtime and my bedtime because I'm a neutral guy, you know, around 11, nowhere is open and willing to allow me to sit for how long. Do you sit there normally? I'm a little crazy about this. Well, if it's at night and I just want to relax, I would say maybe 20 or 30 minutes and I tend to be very warm, warmer than I want to stay here.

Q, pet our friend. I have done a sonic cold bath with pet. He usually does it at night. Sonic cold. Sonic cold. Sonic cold. Sonic cold. Okay, warm shower, um, and I don't know how many nights a week you're doing that, but the terms of The sauna temperature is usually between 175 and 210°, depending on how adapted you are to the heat, but I think a Hot bath is great or a nice hot shower. Yes, I certainly have and when traveling jet lagged. Absolutely, that's part of my kind of jet lag protocol. I'll make sure to do that because I don't really have a hard time sleeping at least at the moment, but when I'm jetlagged and coming home to London, of course, it's hard to make the worst of it and do everything I can, so I think that's probably the end of the thermal story, although we're now trying to see if we can approach it with low fire where we can.

We're going to do some feet, we're trying to develop some foot technology that can be integrated into, maybe, a mattress and some mattress companies, there are some great ones. I know, obviously, Mato sleeps at 8 and they are doing incredible things. I think it's your company again. I have no affiliation, but we connect really well and he's brilliant, so they're doing something like that. I use and love my eight sleeper. This is what I would love for someone to design and we have many. people who listen to the podcast Do you think about product development? It would be wonderful to have a portable pair of socks so you can use them when traveling or on the go.

You know how to sleep anywhere in the house or somewhere else that would warm your feet at the beginning of the night. so this is a place for us to recap warm up to cool down to fall asleep stay cool stay cool to stay asleep and then warm up in the morning to wake up and that's pretty simple to incorporate into a pair of socks that someone can do this, someone, do this, uh, so we've done electrical, we've done thermal, what about auditory auditory stimulation, so acoustic, in a very similar way to electrical stimulation where you try to target that deep sleep and see if you have a A better analogy is probably a metronome and you're trying to see if you can force the metronome more back and forth with these types of technologies to get the auditory stimulation back on the map.

I think probably the yam born group in Germany was one of the first to do this they initially started with this same generalized approach where they would take acoustic tones and first assess what your threshold level of awe is so that you were asleep and they would just have these tones, very clear tones kind of like a ping ping and they would gradually increase the volume and look to see what is the point where that volume of the tone wakes you up and then they would understand your specific threshold, which is called the wake threshold, and they would set the volume at a cool Sub-Wake Threshold, so you've got it locked in place and now you start and they did it within the first 90 minutes of people falling asleep.

They started playing these Awakening sub-level tone volume levels, but they were playing them at this very moment. slow frequency like they were again trying to synchronize and match the slow dance rhythm of the slow brain waves and sure enough, in that first study and it was indiscriminate, meaning they just set the PL tones like a metronome, set the pitch, They established the and I'm sorry. set the volume and then set the cadence of the volume, the speed, the frequency of those tones to a little less than a hertz, a little less than a cycle per second and then you fell asleep and they played it for the first time. 90 minutes because that is the rich phase of deep sleep and they were able to significantly increase the amount of deep sleep.

The problem in that first study was that they also did a memory test because in all of these studies, including mine, even if I increase your sleep tonight Andrew Hubman my next one if that's the result you show me I have four words for you as a scientist Yes and then what is functional because if I increase your sleep but nothing changes in your body the next day? I'm going to suggest that that improvement is Epi phenomenal, not functional, so it has to improve some um some reasonable metric in wakefulness that improves improved memory um improves task switching ability, so your result measures strength, corrects something, yes, so even if for example, you know lower your blood pressure with a new medication if I'm not changing your risk of cardiovascular disease, then the question is why do I stay on the medication if it's not actually changing the same thing here and what they found was that when they did the memory test the next morning, that deep sleep improved; there wasn't really a memory benefit so maybe what was happening is that this just wasn't specific so again they came back and now others have gone back to the closed loop mechanism where now I have electrodes on your head and I'm measuring your slow wave brain waves and I'm literally in the next room and I'm watching those slow brain waves go up and down and then I have a computer algorithm that's watching the quote unquote watchers watching that too and it's predicting when it's coming the next wave and when it does, the auditory tone clicks.

When you wake up, you don't wake up and sure enough, when you tone the brain at that moment, you increase the size of that brain wave and once again they increased the size of those deep sleep brain waves, they also improved those faster bursts of activity of the sleep spindles and now they were indeed able to improve memory, however if you look at that paper and Here's why I think the first method may not have worked very well and why I don't suggest that people start trying to set this up by themselves when they continue to stimulate the brain slow wave after slow wave after about three or four hits of the metronome to boost. those slow waves the benefits stopped and if they continued you began to inhibit the amount of deep sleep brain waves that occur naturally.

Why would these deep sleep brain waves make? I told you in the first episode that they are an act of incredible neuronal coordination, it is mass coordination. Now, one of the extreme versions of mass coordinated propagated activity that is maladaptive and pathological is called an epileptic seizure and your brain has for the most part stopping spaces to prevent that kind of propagation of large amounts of coordinated spontaneous electrical oscillations because the The brain is such a conductive device that once you get it going you have to be careful because it can start to drive out of control, so we think these checks and balances that were in place even though you can artificially stimulate it for a while.

After a while, the brain says you have to back off for a while because this is getting a little out of hand. You pause the breath and then you restart again and you get the benefit and then you pause the breath so that You have to do it a little more intimately, now you have to read what we call the supplemental materials to that document. You have to go. It's like the fine print of a legal document. If you dig into it, you can see that that was the case, but it wasn't necessarily evident, so that was really the data on acoustic stimulation and now, with this closed-loop acoustic stimulation that we have, it seems to provide these nice benefits, some People will probably wonder what's up with these noise machines?

What about white noise? Etc. I've had a look at this and so far I think that for white noise machines the data is equivocal. There was a review article of a recent study. I think he looked at about 37 different studies he could have. This was wrong and what they found was that there was no strong, reliable directional effect of white noise machines on sleep. Some studies showed that it helped sleep. Some studies did not change sleep. Some studies suggested that it may make sleep slightly worse. Just nothing reliable, but maybe it's masking external sound, so I think one of the positive studies in that scenario was a study that was done in New York City and it was in a region where there was a lot of noise pollution and external noise. .

I might as well imagine it's New York City and sure enough, that's where they got some really nice benefits from the white noise machine, so I think you're right, it depends on the context. There was a recent interesting study that came out of uh eaman's group of students at uh, the University of Texas at San Antonio and they didn't use white noise, they used pink noise now, what's the difference? Pink noise has a little less of what we call power or intensity in the higher frequency ranges of the sound spectrum and is more enriched in the slower domain of that power spectrum, which one could argue is a little better suited for sleep and I think this study may have been a nap study or I may be wrong but anyway what they found was that they increased the total sleep time, I think it was About 30 minutes with the pink noise did not change the amount of deep sleep, but they did improve the amount of stage two non-restorative sleep, which we've talked about before and will do in later episodes, which is beneficial for things like learning. in memory, including motor skills, and increased the amount of REM sleep to a much more modest degree, but those changes were significant, so I'm not trying to rule out noise machines in thismoment and I have no affiliation with any company or anything in that space. um, I don't want to throw the baby out with the bathwater.

I just think that right now we don't have enough evidence, but as you and I know as scientists, the absence of evidence is not evidence of absence just because it doesn't exist doesn't mean that I don't think it's still a potential root for this kind of machines, what about the stipulated kinesthetic tool protocols? You know, body position is something that has an interesting relationship with the propensity to fall asleep based on brain cooling. which we talked about in another episode, but what about manipulating body movement? um uh, yeah, what's something in that domain? It sounds strange at first, yes it does, but I said it, I still want to know, get on social media. just be nice, be friendly.

I would say that if you look back in the annals of human history from the beginning, you will see mentions of a child being rocked in a manger or rocked in a cradle, often the parents will take their small baby and you, quote, rock them to they fall asleep and we, as adults, sometimes get into a hammock and, if they rock you, what happens is that you will fall, since it is that prototypical image of someone with their hat over their face and in a hammock. and they fell asleep, so it was very clear that something was going on in this space and then a group from the University of Geneva, led by another fantastic sleep scientist, Sophie Schwarz, did an epic study which again is one of those studies.

I probably once again wished I had, this is what they did, they took a bed frame and then hung it from the ceiling with chains. Now stay with me, I'm not going to go into, you know, there's no hot candle wax applied here. Don't worry, I'll keep it PG again and then the next thing they did was attach a swivel arm to that bed on the side of the bed and that arm would start just pushing the bed laterally from the left. right, left, right and they started rocking the bed in a very controlled way, but here and I should ask Sophie exactly why they made this decision, they weren't rotating the bed at this kind of about one Hertz, which is what what have we done. with electrical stimulation or acoustic stimulation they did it at 25 Herz, which is much slower still, it almost never swings, you know, once every four seconds, it is a very slow pause and, indeed, what they found in the first series of studies, they did a nap study. 90 minute nap study when you did this rocking motion versus when the bed was still, they increased the speed at which people fell asleep, they increased the amount of deep sleep, and they increased the amount of those sleep spindle oscillations that we described, they weren't satisfied, so they said well, what happens during a night of sleep, they did it, then during a night of sleep, they replicated the same findings and now they got a memory benefit.

Now the memory benefit you could argue was modest, it was a 10% memory improvement benefit when I woke up from sleep relative to the already possible benefit that sleep naturally provides when you're not rocking the bed, but thinking well. 10% if I was, let's say, a student and I got, you know, a B and someone, the professor said Look by the way there's something you can do and we can increase your grade by 10% and you can get to an A or an A plus depending on the grading system you would take. You would make a 10% profit. Absolutely, you would be GPA increasing so it's not necessarily trivial well, I too am positively surprised at how important this is, but then what condition is it for you sleep researchers?

They know it's an improvement on, say, deep sleep or rapid eye movement from the Moon. sleep has to translate into some daytime benefit to really excite them, but here's why I think it's great, it's always great to have a high threshold for excitement, but one of the things that could be argued is that you know. There are a limited number of tests that can be performed in a daytime laboratory. I think I agree with the fact that sleep is the foundation of mental health, physical health and performance, so an improvement in you know is a statistically significant improvement.

In deep sleep or REM sleep, it seems to me that that has to be good for something that we may not know what that something is to test in the laboratory, but it could be that the threshold for improving, say, neurotransmitter production of the intestinal microbiome is, you know. .1% improvement in depth so we don't know I made it up so don't quote that statistic to anyone but I really admire the extreme thresholds of what excites you well no your point is very good because one could argue based on what I just said about studying exercise with Ronda Patrick.

I just reverted my own threshold logic. I told you that well, exercise was able to overcome some of the deficits that occur by form of sleep deprivation for your blood sugar, but don't assume that that necessarily means it overcomes the detriments it will have for your hormonal health, You know, your thermoregulatory ability, your cardiovascular disease, your brain function, so I just said, look just, you know one thing, it doesn't mean you've tested all the things and now I'm saying okay, if you don't show that that thing improved. , so it's not functional, but Matt, by your own logic, I said that, but you didn't evaluate a lot of the other things, so even if it didn't improve memory, like you said, it's the basis of everything related to health , you should evaluate them all before coming to a yes-and-so conclusion. which test failed, so you're absolutely right to point that out, so what was interesting after that data came to light in humans, which is usually the other way round, they started looking at animal models and you mentioned the vestibular system, this ability for us to understand movement and there are many mechanisms for that.

They watched mice and started swinging again and sure enough, the mice. they fell asleep faster, but then they found a variety of mice that didn't have the lateral vestibular sensation mechanism and they rocked them the same way, zero change in their sleep because you can imagine, well, it's important to understand the mechanism. This is where when "You're rocking, it's not just vestibular stimulation, maybe that rocking modestly changes friction, which changes temperature, you could think of all sorts of wacky reasons, this was a very clear manipulation of the system." lateral vestibular and if that's not the case you don't get the benefit, so it clearly has something to do with the vestibular system.

Can I guess why that is? Yeah, I interrupted, but in case that's right? , by chance, I already talked earlier about the um, the It is necessary to lose the sense of posture in relation to gravity to fall asleep You have to enter into this lack of proper receptive awareness to fall asleep The proper reception is the. knowledge of where the limbs are in relation to the body. and the body in relation to other surfaces and gravity, yes, and this is something that can be achieved in these, you know, flotation tanks and things like that, and other ways. of going to outer space, but, the cheaper version, the cheaper version, so could it be? that swinging at that very slow frequency um is tapping into the vestibular system in a way that that properly receptive feedback about body position somehow um uh starts to disappear and because I'm intrigued by this idea that you have to lose awareness of You have the proper body position and receptive awareness to fall asleep, and perhaps you have previously described a protocol for taking a mental walk to fall asleep.

I feel like these things are starting to converge on some themes here. central communication pathway which could be the absence of I think it's entirely possible that somehow right now we think that these two things are associated and that as you gradually fall asleep you will lose your own receptive sensation, okay, but just the fact Just because two things are associated doesn't necessarily mean they're causal, but your suggestion here is a very elegant way of testing that hypothesis, which is that maybe if you could show that the symmetry of proprioception is compromised when you start performing a sort of kinesthetic stimulation or lateral movement, that's a very powerful demonstration that it's not just like that here with the mouse study, they lacked lateral vestibular sensation and you lost the benefit of sleep, but maybe there's a step down, that It's that when you lose that vestibular stimulation, you lose the benefit. that's really increasing sleep, which is the change in proper reception, so this is the first step in a chain of command and you've missed the final common transaction of that ingredient called better sleep and those, I would say, are probably the four current bastions of sleep augmentation will hopefully describe to listeners the range of where sleep type 3.0 and sleep enhancement 3.0 are headed and also describe how we can move down the strata from high friction, low friction to no friction, um, and also in terms of cost where you can have high cost, low cost, low cost, I mean a hot bath or shower costs pennies on the dollar, especially if you take a cold shower. in the morning and save on your heating bill so you can take a slightly longer hot shower. at night and then you get zero difference. um, that's just my way of saying that you take a cold shower in the morning, it feels great when you get out.

How about some ways to improve rapid eye movements? Sleep beyond what you have covered so far. I think there are probably two emerging data sets that have intrigued me, one of which we've been working on a little bit and that's Thermal, what I don't mention is that you don't just need to get warm to wake up. which you do, but you also need to warm up to REM sleep, but not too much if you take an organism or a human being and take off the sheets and clothing so they're basically almost natural if you warm the body up to what we call the neutral point of Thermon, so it tends to be and this sounds extreme and you don't have to do this because you're under the covers and that makes a big difference, but if you heat the room to about 30°C, which is close to the surface ambient level of your skin, something that can get your body's core temperature going again because I told you that when you're in that deep sleep, it activates your Middle Zone, your Core Zone. body temperature drops and drops significantly and to wake up you have to warm up, but on the way to warming up you also have to reach Thermon neutrality so that you have REM sleep, if I keep you too cold, I can reduce the amount of REM sleep if I make you too hot, but I can decrease the amount of REM sleep, so it's a Goldilocks phenomenon, not too little, not too much, just the right amount.

If I keep you there in terms of your thermal and network neutrality, I can increase your sleep RAM. That's Fishlyn, they run at different high temperatures, they have different pairing situations, so you need a Clos loop system again, but it's something I'm really interested in because almost every method I've described and you're smart to learn this. Everyone is pointing to deep non-RM sleep, but in the first episode we talked about how every stage of sleep is important and in later episodes I'll tell you exactly why REM sleep is so critical, so how can we boost it?

That's one way it was starting to work. explore it, but I think nothing is solid, but the other one is some of the medications, the newer sleep medications that have come out on the market and, um, again, I think I mentioned that I took the assignment and I think maybe rightly so about of the classic sleep medications, yes If you look at the scientific data, if you can avoid them, it's probably better to do so, things like environment, etc., we call them Z drugs because they all start with their kind of generic names that start with a zed, you know, um ambian, for example, um. it has uh it has a zed at the beginning for its generic name, but I don't want to go into naming any necessarily, yeah, but for the environment, the interesting thing about those medications again is that they're in a class of medications that we call the sedative hypnotics, so again, sedation, not sleep, and there's also been some great work again by D and his dying colleagues, if I were to show you that that electrical signature of your deep sleep looks like those drugs increase the amount of electricity. activity in that slower deep sleep range, except once you go all the way to the left to the slowest of those slow brain movies, which happen to be the type of waves that are most beneficial for most related brain and body functions with the health you get.

This big dent in the brain's electrical wave activity is almost like these medications taking a bite out of thatarea of ​​electrical activity and, of course, there are problems with daytime sleepiness and some safety-related problems that have not necessarily been causal. You know, I gave a scientific view of those drugs in the book and, um, it's not like it's an anti-m drug like I said and some of the new drugs are very interesting. REM Sleep there's a new class of sleep medications called Doras and it means lowercase d or s and it means Jewish orexin receptor antagonists, oh my gosh, a mouthful that sounds like a word salad to anyone who's not a neuroscientist, orexin, which is part of that.

A set of words is a chemical in the brain and it became prominent with the noopsy study and what we, like the Royal Wii people like Emanuel Mano and others, at Stanford, what they discovered was that noptic patients have a deficit in this. The chemical orexin and receptors are also called hypocretin and has a role in both wakefulness and feeding and eating-related behaviors. Hypocretin was probably more related to it because it was discovered around the same time, um, two different groups. Yes, exactly beautiful, two different groups named it differently, but noopsy, as some people may know, is a sleep disorder condition and one of the symptoms is called excessive daytime sleepiness, where you have inappropriate invasions of sleep during the day when you want to be awake.

Because? Well, it turns out that this chemical acts like a finger on the light switch of all the devices in your brain that turn on to force you to wake up, it reaches the is released from a central part of your brain called the hypothalamus and is released in the brainstem to activate what we call the ascending arousal system or the reticular ascending arousal system of the brain and when it turns on it's like the light switch that indicates that waking brain activity is turned on, so what was happening was that this Up, up, it didn't strain your waking finger during the day, so almost instead of a switch, which is what you want, it was more like a dimmer switch and you know when you get to that dimmer switch point right in the middle where it flashes. it's on it's off it's on it's off that's almost the state that the narcoleptic brain was in because they had an orexin deficiency so that was the previous story on nopy so why is it relevant to The insomnia?

Well, people realized that the problem with Epsy is that they are asleep during the day when they want to be awake, but the opposite problem happens with insomnia patients: they want to be asleep at night but they are awake, so why Why don't we selectively develop a drug that goes after this finger? turn on the light switch to wake up, but now we are going to lock it at night, so we put the switch back to the off position, turn off the brain lights and eliminate the problem of insomnia, which is excessive wakefulness due to night, which is one of its problems but therefore when you eliminate that indirectly, what comes in its place is this thing called more naturalistic sleep and that is why it is now more preferred as a primary medication.

It's still not necessarily well known by doctors or very well prescribed, it's not. Unfortunately, insurance is very well covered here in the United States, making it a very expensive option right now. Unfortunately, healthcare providers will choose not to, so the interesting thing about that drug is that it's mixed in terms of studies, but it seems pretty reliable. to greatly improve sleep, but unlike those classic sleeping pills that artificially seem to increase deep sleep, although they are not sedative, these medications can improve almost all aspects of sleep, including REM sleep, which Those classic sleeping pills They didn't do that, we don't know yet, but one of the things that these Dora medications do is block the erex, taking the light switch off the on position and turning it off when you turn it off, can actually allow activation or stimulation of something called melanin concentrates hormone or MCH in the brain and that when activated can stimulate another chemical called acetylcholine in the brain, which is a neurotransmitter yes There is a neurotransmitter in the brain that seems to be responsible almost exclusively for this thing called REM sleep or predominantly , I should say, from REM sleep, is useful Coline.

This was discovered back in the 1970s by one of my former mentors. Alan Hobson at Harvard and what this drug may be doing is indirectly increasing the amounts of acetal choline in the brain, particularly in a region of the brain called basil forbrain, which is a region that regulates REM sleep and that's why that increases in REM are obtained. Sleep and people also report dreaming a little more on those medications, so thermal manipulation that gets you into thermally neutral zones helps increase REM sleep, but there are also some medications that weren't necessarily designed to improve sleep.

REM selectively, but there is evidence that it does. Do it, so if you ask me where we are with REM, it's certainly more lacking in methods than non-REM deep sleep, but we're starting to find some now given what you just told us about the role of ACL choline in movement. fast eyepiece. sleep, what about taking pre-acetylcholine cursors? I mean, there are certainly quite a few of them, yes, you know, even over-the-counter supplements like Alpha GPC, and then of course there are choline donors and things like that that can increase. uh, the energetic transmission col, um, is that it gets into problems, um, you know, if you do that globally, you may increase arousal and have problems falling asleep because some of those choleric agents are activated, so that one of the problems, the second, is that you can stop doing it.

Because you will have to take them before bed, Brute Force REM sleep may come sooner and therefore may come at the cost of deep non-REM sleep, so you would have to get some sort of timed release. capsule that you can do, you can cover these capsules, you can get a timed release and you'll want to take it before you go to bed and then maybe after about four or five hours you'll want to get it going because now it's in, so it's a little bit, it becomes a bit complicated, yes, this is one of the reasons why personally, this is just my experience.

I'm not a fan of supplements that tap into the serotonergic system for sleep because serotonin certainly plays an important role in sleep, but every time I've taken something you know 5htp or something like that to try to improve sleep, I find that I fall asleep. and then I wake up in a very deep sleep and then I wake up very alert and I have problems with the later phases of sleep and I think that's because yes, serotonin is involved in sleeping, but it is involved in sleep at one point very specific, since you call it like a symphony or ballet of different stages of sleep and how they evolve and intertwine with each other throughout the night, so I think there are things that can be used pharmacologically or through supplements to improve sleep. sleep in general.

I like to think of that as the kind of thing that shifts away from the entire sleep process, yeah, rather than trying to tap into one specific neurotransmitter within the ballet of sleep exactly. Yes, I like that way of thinking and you have to be careful because free lunches are often rare in biology. Truly, you know that nature has optimized our system so exquisitely that when you start trying to get the system for one. Let us keep in mind that it may have the cost of something else and that is why whenever we do this type of development of technologies for sleep we are very cautious not to simply say if we improve what we are aiming for but the first call for attention in medicine It's not whether this medication will help you, but first of all, are there any downsides in terms of whether this medication will harm you and then you need to understand the cost-benefit ratio between those two things?

Yeah, just one more anecdote, uh, that is. Based on what you said today there is more enthusiasm around peptides, the use of peptides, there are um and I don't currently use any, but I did do a brief trial with the occasional use of celine, which is a secretagogue, which is a growth hormone. True, SEC promotes the secretion of growth hormone, not the growth hormone itself. I didn't take it many times and I was following my sleep and what I noticed is that it put me in a bit of a hypnotic state. The dreams were very intense but very deep.

Sleep, but according to my sleep tracker I only ran this for maybe three nights. According to my sleep tracker, it completely eliminated all of my rapid eye movements, at least as measured by the sleep tracker, but the amount of deep sleep from slow wave sleep just kind of expanded massively so that can't be Well that can't be good I mean, I know you don't want to mess with that cocktail ratio that we described in the first episode, let's assume that it has emerged as the right one, you know, Da. The Vinci Code of Sleep Stage Recipes and there may be a time and place where you want to overindex one of those things for whatever reason, but to do it consistently and permanently, I would say again if you think about your space. life. that you know something that you know that 2.6 million years of evolution have not understood you are most likely wrong I agree um um and certainly later in this series we will touch on some of the over the counter supplements and other things that one that I can do to increase sleep and they seem to have some benefit because those things exist, but in the meantime, thank you for giving us this amazing arc of describing basic hygiene and sleep regularity.

Light and dark temperature. Get out of bed when you can. No sleep alcohol food caffeine cannabis unconventional protocols and let's call them advanced protocols electrical protocol brain stimulation in other words thermal manipulation kinesthetic auditory stimulation and then these rapid eye movements that enhance um drugs and so on um Matt uh, I can't thank you enough, this has been packed with practical tools and considerations and I love that you've brought us to the forefront of what's happening now. I think it's wonderful to talk about the history of a field and what was discovered. It is wonderful. to talk about the present, but it's wonderful that you've set our eyes a little on the future of what technology holds for sleep enhancement and monitoring, so once again, thank you, you're welcome if people don't already has done.

I've watched or listened to episode one, I highly recommend it, and of course we'll be back soon with episode three, which will go into all the actual science and protocols surrounding naps and caffeine and some other interesting things that I know impact the people's health. daily life and that they can move on if they want immediately and by moving on I mean sleep, thanks again. Delight can't wait for the next recording. Thank you for joining me on today's episode with Dr. Matthew Walker to learn more about Dr. Walker's life. Do your research and for more information about his book and his social media, check out the links in the subheadings of our show notes.

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