The World’s No.1 Sleep Expert: The 6 Sleep Hacks You NEED! Matthew Walker

When you have trouble falling a

sleep

in the middle of the night and are wide awake in the last hour before bed, try this experiment. I am convinced, Matthew Walker, neuroscientist, best-selling author and one of the most important researchers in the

world

. in the science of

sleep

it will blow your mind there is a global epidemic of sleep loss shaped by this thing called the modern

world

what society wants is for you to be producing or consuming in fact the CEO of Netflix his statement was that we must commit war against sleep, we have this mentality in business, less sleep equals more productivity, that is simply not true, lack of sleep costs most nations around 411 billion dollars, their rates of obesity, diseases cardiovascular, mental health conditions, all of these things increase if that wasn't bad enough.

OMG, if you don't get enough sleep then 60% of all the weight you lose will come from lean muscle mass and not fat, not muscle, how would you redesign society to help us sleep better? So first I would like Caffeine is a miracle boost with no apparent cost. Was I wrong or wrong? Caffeine will hurt your sleep in three ways that most people don't know about, so if you have a cup of coffee at midday, what happens is before we get into this. The episode just wanted to thank you first and foremost for being part of this community.

The team here at Diver CEO is now almost 30 people and that is literally because you watch, subscribe, leave comments and like the videos. The show has been able to grow and it's the greatest honor of my life to sit here with these incredible people and just selfishly ask them questions that I'm pondering or worrying about in my life, but this is just the beginning of this day. This year we have big plans to scale this program to all corners of the world and diversify our selection of guests and that is enabled by you through one simple thing that you do, which is watch, so if there is anything you can do to help this program and to help us continue doing what we do, just hit the subscribe button if you like this show if you like what we do here if you watch these episodes, just hit the subscribe button to let the world get to work.

Go ahead, I've spent a lot of time trying to sit down with you on this podcast. I'm very, very happy to spend some time with you today and that's because your work is now globally recognized and it's very, very important work. but as is the case with some of the recent episodes of this podcast, I wanted to start by asking you from your point of view what it is that you do and why it is so important to you that you do it well, first of all, thank you very much for having me here and having this conversation it's an incredible privilege to sit with you.

Why do I do what I do and why do I think it is important? Sleep, I would say, is the most effective thing you can do to restore your brain and body health and I don't say that lightly, not that I'm discounting exercise or diet, those two things are absolutely critical, but if it took you as an individual and I deprived you of exercise for a day, I would deprive you of food for a day, I deprived you of water for a day or I deprived you of sleep for a day 24 hours and I had to map your brain and body deficiencies, it's not even a competition that one night of lost sleep in relation to those other things overshadows the only thing I can do.

What you lose is oxygen. If I deprive you of oxygen, you're going to disappear a little faster than you would with lack of sleep, so sleep, I think it's the elixir of life, it's your life support system and as best we can I mean, I would say it's Mother Nature's best effort yet to achieve immortality and in that sense, that's why when I look at all the studies and all the data, I find it so compelling and part of the reason why Which I think is me. I have tried desperately and I have not done a good job, but I have tried to offer some public mission of reuniting Humanity with the sleep that it is so deprived of because it seems like there is a global epidemic of sleep loss if you look at it.

Faced with the numbers, people are struggling so desperately with their sleep, so we have all this knowledge, this incredible knowledge of sleep and how important it is, and it's a perfect storm colliding with this huge sleep depression in modern society and for that reason I felt like But what can I do to try to help offer this voice and this science? I am nothing more than a scientist and I stand on the shoulders of all my colleagues and all these giants in the field. I'm just a researcher, so that's a bit. a little bit about I guess who I am, but more about why I do it and why I think it's important if I were to try to define your kind of thing, unless I hate doing this because it requires the application of some kind of narrow label if I had to do it.

Try to define what your title is in your own words, what would it be? So I'm just a neuroscience professor of brain sciences at the University of California Berkeley, uh, I'm not a doctor, just FYI, for all the things we're going to talk about in this conversation, so I'm just a Ph.D., just a PhD, yes, you know, that's incredibly humble of you, but I would argue that you are, without a doubt, the leading voice of the authorial scientific commentator when it comes to it. To the topic of sleep and my question is: where did that start?

Where did that start in your life on your life's journey? When did the dream become what occurred to me or happened to me? I have to say when I was doing my PhD, I was studying people with dementia and we were trying to understand what different type of dementia they had very early in the course of their illness and we were looking at patterns of brain wave activity, so I was putting electrodes all over the brain. head. and I was measuring them and I was trying to differentially diagnose them from the beginning and I wasn't getting any good data, it's miserable, nothing was Landing and one day I went home for the weekend and with all my journals printed and go to my doctor's residence and having this kind of igloo of newspapers around me that I would sit and read on the weekends, um, and probably tell you all about my social life on the weekends, if that's what I was doing, but um, so.

I was reading these diaries and it occurred to me that some of these dementias were eating away at the sleep centers of the brain and others would leave them intact and at that moment I realized that I was measuring my patience at the wrong time. measuring them when they are awake should measure them when they are asleep. I started doing it and got amazing results and at that moment I wanted to ask the question. I wonder if sleep problems aren't simply a symptom of dementia. I wonder if it is a potential cause of dementia and at that point I started thinking well, so what is this thing called sleep? and what I learned is that some of the greatest Minds of the last 100 years had tried to answer a very simple question: why? we sleep and you know, 30 years ago, in fact, the rude answer was that we sleep to cure drowsiness, which doesn't tell you anything about, you know, it's like saying "as to cure hunger." Well, no, that is not the correct answer now, 30 years later, we have had to change the question and now we have to ask: is there any physiological system in your body?

Is there any operation of your mind that does not improve wonderfully when you sleep or that does not demonstrably deteriorate when you do not get enough sleep? And the answer seems to be someone else so my journey into sleep science really was an accident, but at that moment when I started reading about sleep I completely fell in love with the subject and it's a love story that has lasted me over 20 years. years. I think it is the most seductive topic in all of science. I'm biased of course and will never study anything different. I know that now I will study it until the end of my career and until the end of my life.

Wow! I've never heard anyone tell me on this podcast that they would study the same topic for the rest of their life, and you're a young man. You have a long way to go, in fact, no matter how much you've been sleeping. Very nice of you to say yes, I would like to move quickly towards the foothills of middle age, but no, I am very lucky in what I do to have found it or to have found me, do you know if I won everything? of the world's money tomorrow really, really, I wouldn't do anything different, um, I'm very lucky, well, I'll probably start trying to fly business class or first class, that would be nice, but other than that, um, I wouldn't nothing different and I am very aware of that because it sounds very privileged and I know a lot of people put up with what they do for a living rather than enjoying what they do for a living and I know how lucky I am so I don't want to be dismissive . of people in that sense, I just know how much I love what I do, you asked a question now, which is, um, you raised a question that a lot of people have tried to answer, you gave the answer 30 years ago about, do you know why?

We slept um and I realized when you said that. I never asked myself that question. I have never asked myself why I sleep. I mean, I know what happens when I sleep, but do I know why my body? I can't just find another way Why can't my body stay awake for 24 hours? I know that some animals sleep half their brain and then the other half. That doesn't happen. Whatever it is, why do we sleep? It's disconcerting. question because when you think about it from an evolutionary perspective there is no point in sleeping it is completely idiotic because when you sleep first you are not finding a mate you are not reproducing you are not looking for food not caring for your young and worst of all you are now vulnerable to predation for any of those reasons, but especially all of them, since the collective dream should have been strongly selected during the course of evolution, but at best we can say that the dream evolved with life itself on this planet and has made its way heroically at every step of the evolutionary path and what that has told us is that sleep must be essential at the most basic of biological levels and we now understand that Mother Nature did not make a spectacular mistake with this thing called sleep, sleep, for example , will replenish the weaponry in your immune arsenal and make you a more immune sensitive individual, so your immune system will be stronger when you wake up.

We also know that it regulates your blood sugar levels, it controls your appetite hormones it also regulates your sex hormones testosterone estrogen sleeping up inside the brain will fix memories and help you learn and remember sleep will reduce anxiety it will reduce your emotional difficulties and traumas sleep it will actually clean out the toxic Alzheimer's proteins that build up in the brain, you know, the list is endless, these are all the reasons why we

need

to sleep, but why can't I do what those animals do where half of Does your brain fall asleep after your brain stays awake? the fact that we live in tribes, so essentially, even though we are, you know, there may be 10 people in the tribe, where all 10 of us in the tribe can rest at different times and cover each other's backs or God, yeah.

There are actually two very illuminating questions nested there: the first is this notion of what you're describing, which is what we call unihemispheric sleep, which is just a fancy way of saying that you can sleep with half your brain and the other half fully awake now there are only a few species that can do this um for example aquatic mammals dolphins are a great example we can put electrodes on their heads and you can see that half of their brain will be fast asleep it will be in the deep. In deep, non-remote sleep, the other half of the brain will be frantically awake, and part of the reason is that they

need

to maintain aquatic mobility.

You know they need to keep surfacing for emergencies. Otherwise, you know it won't be a good option. As a result, we also know that birds or even many species of birds will have unihemispheric sleep and you can actually see this. There are some great YouTube videos online where they will film half of the side of the bird's face and the eye. closed and what it means is that the other half of the brain because the brain is actually the left half controls the right side the right side controls the left side so the left side is now fast asleep which is the right eye closed and then you pan around and suddenly the other eye is wide awake and clearly looking around.

This is obviously not for the water surface to gain air. This is for a different reason. What happens is that in a flock a group of birds will land. on a branch now all the people in the middle can sleep with both halves of their brain can sleep with both halves or just half all the people in the middle can sleep with both halves the unlucky girl or boy Who lands on the other's end extreme, it will actually sleep with half its brain, so half the flock, the whole flock has one eye at 180 degrees, in a sort of semi-panoramic view, the otherbird at the other end.

If you have the other half of the brain asleep with the other eye awake, giving the other 180 degree protective vision and therefore the entire tribe has a 360 degree assessment, you would now think of the oven that once that those boys or girls at the end have done their job. Duty, they move towards the middle and fall asleep with both halves. No, that's not what happens. What they will do after a while is they will get up, turn 180 degrees, sit down and switch the other sides. brain to be clear about the complexity of wiring and architecture that has to happen during half of the brain to be deeply asleep and the other half to be fully awake is astronomically hot.

I mean, it's incredibly difficult to create that wiring. What that tells me is that if sleep were expendable, if it were negotiable, then Mother Nature would have found a different way. so we can get all these benefits for the brain and the body and not go through all the evolutionary problems of figuring out this sophisticated half-brain sleep wiring in other words, you just can't escape sleep, you have to sleep, but your second question I think it's even more fascinating who we are as a tribe because we are kind of a tribe. Now there's something else we call your chronotype.

Are you a morning and evening type or somewhere in between? And by the way, you don't get to Decide it's not your choice You know that notion from those ambitious Type A people who say that everyone has to be awake at five in the morning. You know you go to the gym, you work out for an hour and you're at your desk. at 6 am um you don't have a choice if you're a night type you're a night type it's coded we know right now there are at least 22 different genes that dictate what you're a morning type evening type or somewhere in between and it's about a third of the population is divided why it is a division why we are well distributed in our chronotypes exactly for the reason that you described because when we are in a tribe, if we all sleep at the same time, we are all vulnerable for eight hours, but if you inserted some variability genetics in when people want to sleep, you would have the morning types who maybe go to bed at 9:00 p.m. m. and they wake up, say, at 5:00 a.m. m. and then you have all the extreme night types who go to bed at 2am. m. and they wake up maybe at 11 or noon so that everyone gets eight hours of sleep, but the whole tribe, the core of this group of homo sapiens, is only vulnerable for maybe only two or three hours, so it's a smart solution that Mother Nature came up with the idea that everyone gets there for eight hours, but as a species you're only going to be vulnerable for two or three hours at most when everyone, at least as a collective, is there. sleeping absolute genius I used to think it was a bunch of nonsense that this Chrono type thing, um I was actually on this podcast where I found out about its existence and then I went to YouTube to find out more and your video came up if you are explaining.

It's because I thought my partner had thought me through He goes to bed very early He wakes up very early I go to bed late I wake up late Um, I'm going to ask you this question actually because I've asked myself this in that situation where I'm sleeping in bed with a couple who have a different chronotype. Yes, it may have an impact on my sleep due to the way our sleep cycles work and REM sleep in stage one deep sleep etc, if she wakes up when I do. I'm entering REM sleep. She wakes up at 5 a.m. m., but at 5 a.m. m. because I went to bed later, my REM sleep has just started, that has a pretty significant impact on me, if she wakes you up, yes, she's waiting if she wakes me up. so it's not trivial and in the same way, if you wake her up while you're lying in bed at the beginning of the dream, it's very difficult, one of the things couples will cite if they break up first is usually about a third.

Of them will actually cite difficulties or problems sleeping as a cause of their breakup or at least as a contributing factor to that breakup. A third yes, it is one of at least one of the factors when you look at it and when you double click to say "okay", so what is this kind of tension during sleep between the two of you about? One of those things is a chronotype mismatch and you can see this when you meet people. I think you know this on dating profiles, now someone. He was telling me that people will even say that I'm a morning or evening type, like you're saying from the beginning that this is part of my identity and, FYI, keep in mind that maybe it's been a problem for them in the In the past, this is why I often talk about the notion of what is called a dream divorce to avoid a real one.

Now it's not for everyone. A sleep divorce is where you sleep in separate places and when we've surveyed people, they both use it. from the UK Sleep Council and also the National Sleep Foundation here in the US, the data is roughly the same: one in four people will say they sleep in different places with their partner, so almost a quarter of people in a relationship will sleep in different places we think that's potentially an underestimate because if you survey people anonymously, a third of them will report that they woke up in at least a different place the next morning and part of the reason why What is a taboo is because people think well if we don't sleep together then we don't sleep together, exactly the opposite is true that when a couple sleeps well we know that sexual hormones improve, testosterone, estrogen in men and, at least , an ice hormone in women, we also know. that your desire to be intimate with your partner increases what we found is that for one hour of extra sleep, if a woman sleeps one more hour, her libido desire to be intimate with her partner increases by 14 percent now to give her something context, FDA drugs to improve or increase libido in women, drugs like violisi, here clinical drugs will increase it by about 24 and that is a pharmacological agent, but here just the added non-pharmacological benefit of an hour of sleep extra will get you more than 50 percent of the way there, so I want to eliminate that notion of stigma that if you don't sleep together, you don't sleep, it's usually the opposite.

I would say that part of the challenge is that if we look at all the objective measures, if I measure your sleep and your wife's sleep, if when you sleep separately versus when you sleep together, it is very likely that objectively you both sleep worse when you sleep together, that is Sin However, what science tells us is interesting is that when you survey people and say how satisfied you are with your sleep, which is a subjective measure, people will say, "I'm actually more satisfied with my sleep when I'm with my sleep." couple than when I'm there." I'm sleeping alone so there's a mismatch here, objectively your sleep is better, but subjectively you still prefer it and of course it's natural, you know there's safety, there's safety in sleeping together, there's this kind of connection that we give you, you can get closer.

If you want, be honest with yourself and your partner and you can start by saying: look, this isn't forever. I just want to say: let's do an experiment for a week, 10 days, try it and see how it works. he says, it doesn't need to be permanent because what you really miss are the endings of sleep, for the most part you two are unaware for most of the experience of sleeping together, it's actually getting into bed instead of kissing or a hug or sort of waking up together in the morning and kind of like now obviously when you have a mismatched chronotype it can also be a challenge so you can still have a sleep divorce but you can set up a system in which they will do it. come in and you'll say goodnight and lie in bed and give each other a kiss and a hug and then retire to a separate place and you can repeat the same process, so I don't want to believe in that.

The goal of a dream divorce, but people can certainly explore, there's something called a halfway house called the Scandinavian method, which sounds a lot more salacious than it actually is, it's just that you buy two beds and you put them side by side. of the other. in the same room and therefore the amount of physical interruption, um, the interruption that occurs through the sheets and movement decreases, but that doesn't solve everything, sometimes there is snoring, sometimes there is sleepy talking, Those things are not avoided with the Scandinavian method. When you think about where society is, I was going to ask you, you know, you said you wanted to do the work that you're doing now for the rest of your life, so do you think that the work that you're doing now is going to become more and more important and relevant, that is, the problem will worsen or become less significant and less relevant depending on the trajectory of societies.

You see, you know, I'm mixed. I think when I wrote the book I started. I wrote a book called Why We Sleep probably around 2014 or 15 and at the time sleep was the neglected stepsister in the health conversation that day. You know, we were talking a lot about diet and exercise, which was wonderful, but there was no voice of sleep and I was very sad about that because I could see a lot of illness and suffering that was coming so clearly from lack of sleep, but it was not in the public buffet menu for the consumption of knowledge and for It was part of the motivation for trying to write the book, so I would say now, and this is not because of me or the book or anything like that, but sleep is more of a conversation today than six or seven years ago.

A while ago, I think I would say that yes, there is a greater awareness of the dream, but with that awareness that I want, I think the pragmatic meaning can still be questioned. Just because we're talking about it more doesn't mean people aren't still doing it. sleep what they need or they can't sleep what they need and those two things are different one is that you are healthy and you can generate the sleep you need but you don't give yourself the opportunity or life should say sometimes because sometimes it is not your choice life does not give you the opportunity to sleep and if only you had the opportunity you could sleep that is one version the second version is no I am giving myself the right opportunity to sleep but because I am anxious or due to other problems I cannot generate sleep.

I suffer from insomnia and sleeping problems, so those two things I don't see have changed since you know. I think this public movement, this growing movement of conversation about sleep, emerged. on the table, so in that sense I'm more of a pessimist than an optimist and I think it's only going to get worse if you look at the rates of insomnia, for example, they're only increasing, the rates of anxiety disorders are only increasing. and those two things are closely intertwined, so I think I wish my mission would die down in the next few years because society began to sleep wonderfully well.

I don't think that's going to be the case, so I guess I've got my job. trimmed for me um to try to help people sleep better um is that right we're getting worse at sleeping. I think modernity is making it much more difficult for us to sleep. Modernity. I think when you think about that, we often think. about sleep as a biological process and it largely is, but it also has an environmental as well as a biological meaning when you said: do you know how you slept last night? Think about all the external factors that changed it.

Well, it had to be. I got up at this time I had to catch a flight this time my partner went to bed at this time and she woke up at this time there was a noise that happened now I'm sleeping in a hotel room you know there are countless externalities and those externalities They are determined by this thing called the modern world and in the modern world, if I could really be cynical and I'm not somebody, I'm very optimistic and I'm not cynical at all, but you could argue from a capitalist point of view. that society does not want you to sleep because what society wants from a capitalist point of view is for you to be producing or consuming and when you are sleeping you are not producing or consuming and that is why there is I think that in many ways society and the modern world have conspired intentionally or not, conspiratorially or not, to diminish and attempt to diminish sleep.

In fact, I think the CEO of Netflix several years ago and I'm sure the YouTube comments will correct me if I'm wrong here, but I think his single statement was that we're deciding to wage war on sleep, that was his goal and I was surprised that you know that we are going to go to war against sleep. take you out of your dream, so there are a lot of ways that I think society doesn't help us. Light is another good example. We are a society deprived of darkness in this modern era because we are exposed to the light and we are not giving ourselves the right. temperature signals, you know, we go to an office where it's, you know, 20 degrees to 70 degrees Celsius, whatever is stable, then we come home and regulate our temperature at home so that it's the same as what we take on board , probably too much caffeine in this. day and age, although in reality I aman advocate for drinking coffee and I can also explain why, but anxiety, like I said, is a big problem, all of these things impede and the classic obstacles to sleep any of us get the recommended daily amount of sleep as a percentage, you know ?

It seems that about a third of most modern civilizations fail to get the recommended seven to nine hours of sleep a night, about a third, about 30 35 33 do, and that has geographic variations. In some countries it is worse, in some countries it is better. I'm thinking about the UK versus the US or you know Japan or whatever, yeah, and actually, let me give numbers to the three countries that you've described here in the In the US, the average amount of sleep people get is of six hours and 29 minutes. In the UK it's not much better. 6 hours and 49 minutes.

Japan was the worst, six hours and 22 minutes. Now, to be clear, that is the average. What it means is that there is still a large proportion of that bell-shaped distribution of people receiving even less than that amount. Now there are some countries that actually sleep much better than that. I think let me take Mexico, for example. It is doing very well if you look at Mexico City. People are actually sleeping and not far from eight hours, so there is variability and we can try to understand why, which by the way brings me back as I think about it. comment about whether my work will be done not because I'm a scientist and I have a Big Sleep Center at UC Berkeley, but the work that I do as, hopefully, a public sleep advocate, why I don't think it's I'm going to change that soon is because governments aren't really doing much about it and I've tried the best I can and if there's any government that listens to this and wants to work with me, I'd be happy to do that.

I don't remember and maybe you can, but any major government of a first world nation that has had a public health campaign regarding sleep and it surprises me because those same governments have had Public Health campaigns regarding you know, eating , smoking, drunk driving, drunk driving, safe risk behaviors. sex loneliness loneliness Mental health suicide where is sleep in that equation? It is a fundamental ingredient and, in fact, almost all the things that I have just described have an intimate relationship with sleep, I mean suicide, especially we, we are beginning to do a lot of work on this, although it has been difficult to get funding, but what we found is that lack of sleep is a precursor to suicide, that sleep disruption appears to predict both suicidal ideation, in other words, suicidal thinking, suicide planning, and, tragically, suicide completion , so if we were to try to get governments to create a public health campaign to pull this Archimedean lever to sleep better, there are so many other health benefits, you know, sleep is the rising tide, all the other boats in the cheers, it's almost like, um, it's like a mixing deck in a studio that you know on those sound stages where you've seen it and then there's that button all the way down, the white button sort of like that when you move it up on instead of all the other dials like red yellow orange green dots, they all move up at the same time, there is also a kind of mess, there is like a ring to govern them all, the dream of which is that Archimedes lever, so if governments could just execute that, the health benefits would be manifold in terms of its consequences, it begs the question, you know, if today I made you president, prime minister, anywhere in the world and you had to do, you know just a few things To really solve the epidemic of lack of sleep, there you will diagnose it, what would those be?

Things would be if you were in charge, how would you redesign society to help us sleep better? Gosh, that's a really good question and I've thought about this a lot, almost the other way around, which is, why are we fighting for it? sleep and there is no single answer, there are so many different reasons and that is why it is actually a very difficult problem to solve. It would go through a descending level of steps, so first it would start at the government level and we would get those public health campaigns. In order, I would go to the professional level next because we have this mentality in business that you know sleep is for the soft Among Us, that less sleep equals more productivity and that's just not true and I can give you all the evidence.

So we have to get rid of this kind of sexist attitude about sleep in the workplace where we were, where we had the badge of honor of lack of sleep on our arms. We need to get companies to really start embracing the dream and I can guarantee you and I can deliver. all the evidence of why if as a company, as a CEO, you start prioritizing the sleep of your employees, you will be much better off as a company, you will be more product-based and you will be more profitable and the dream that generates income is the best way of physiologically injected venture capital that you could want, and in fact, the Rand corporation, which is an independent survey corporation, what they found is that on a national level, lack of sleep costs most nations about two percent of its GDP, so here in the United States. that figure was $411 billion of lost profits caused by lack of sleep in the UK, it was over $50 billion in Japan, it was over $120 billion.

If I could solve the sleep loss crisis in the workplace, maybe I could double the healthcare benefit for many of those countries or I could cut the educational deficit in those countries in half, so the next level up What I would go for would be business, then the next step down would be medicine, medicine is a classic demonstration, here we have young doctors or here in the United States they have doctors. residency programs where people work 20 to 30 hour shifts, so the mentality of the futility of getting enough sleep is already instilled in doctors in numerous countries and I think it was maybe eight different countries where we looked at the medical curricula and we asked how many hours of education doctors get about sleep and the strange thing is you know often doctors you'll go and have an appointment and they'll say, okay, you know how you're eating and you know what's going on with the bathroom, how is it? you go to the bathroom and then you know how you sleep, like sleep is one of these barometers of universal health, but what we found is that most doctors will only get an hour to an hour and a half of sleep education during all his training in medical school. which surprises me because that's a third of patients who live, but they only get about 90 minutes of education, so it's no wonder their doctors aren't treating their sleep problems by thinking about their sleep problems by understanding themselves, It's not their fault and anyway, they are sleep deprived when they are being trained, ironically, by the way the doctors.

Young doctors who have worked a 30-hour shift, when they finish that 30-hour shift and get back in their car, are 168 times more likely to get into a car accident due to their lack of sleep and back into the emergency room from where they were working, but now as a patient, I mean this paradox, the irony just boggles my mind, so then I go to the medicine level and then I would do it. I go to education because they don't teach us about sleep in schools and I never had one of those special classes, you know, I had sex education classes, drug classes, no one came and told me about the benefits of sleep, why?

Aren't we doing that? Then it would pass to the family because there are prejudices in families with sleep. It's this notion of parents of teenagers and these teenagers, by the way, it's not their fault that they have a change in their chronotype in their circadian rhythm. rhythm that when they go through puberty, when they go through adolescence, they move quickly in time, so that when they were eight or nine years old they went to bed, you know, more or less early in the evening, but now, like teenagers, they seem to be stubborn and stay up staying up until midnight 1am and not going to bed it's not their fault because they have a biologically wired change in the tendency of when they want to wake up and when they want to sleep why am I mentioning this guy of poor management in the home because parents go to the teenagers' room on the weekends, you know, open the curtains, take off the blankets and say you're wasting the day?

I know this, and what they are probably doing in the first place is trying to pay off a debt that we have saddled them with during the week because of this relentless model of early school start times, which I will return to, but within the home. If you ask parents of teenagers what percentage of parents think their teenagers get enough sleep and about 70 of them will say yes, my teenager gets enough sleep. When you look at the data, only about 15 of teenagers actually get enough sleep. I need, then, what happens is a transmission of sleep neglect between parents and children.

They are saying that you are lazy, that you are lazy. So what will happen in 15 or 20 years? Now that the teenager has a teenage son, what do they do? They come back. in the room they open the curtains, they say you're wasting the day because that's what they were told so we have to break that too and finally we have to get to the individual and we have to solve the individual's sleep problems so it's a very long answer and I'm desperately sorry for a very important question about what I would do if I were free for a day, but I hope that gives you an idea of ​​the depth I think we need to go to.

I've tried to think a lot about the question, it's not particularly well executed. I don't think I was very eloquent there, but I hope that gives the impression. It sounded perfectly eloquent to me. It sounded like a Manifesto, so hopefully there are people. Listening to the governments, which I'm sure there are because you know I hear about it sometimes, which is quite strange, but I'm sure they will get back to you very quickly. At the company level, as a CEO, CFO, or employer, whatever, there are some companies that are encouraging their team members to get a good night's sleep.

Is there any data that shows effectiveness? That is data that we have and it is bidirectional. of when you increase sleep and also the detriment when you don't allow sleep, so a great example was NASA in the 1980s, they were considering using naps in the astronaut program because when you're awake and you're orbiting the Earth, In In reality, you will be cycling the Earth, you know, very quickly and you will be able to see, depending on the orbit, maybe 10 to 15 sunrises every 24 hours, which sounds incredible and remarkable, but believe me, in terms of your dream, it is very disturbing.

They were looking at how to use naps strategically to improve performance because the weakest link in any space mission and we have done some work with NASA is the human being themselves and now they can cause catastrophic failures if you make a mistake at work and you are here on Earth in the ground you know it's probably not trivial to make a mistake when you're in space it can be a big problem so they were looking at that and what they found was that these naps lasting anywhere from 20 minutes to an hour could increase productivity in these different tasks in approximately 34 and increase overall alertness by more than 50 percent and, in fact, the data was so powerful that it ended up being transmitted to all ground workers on the ground that NASA would begin working on it. it was what was called NASA naps, it was a NASA nap culture, now NASA is not desperately compassionate in any way, it's a great organization, but they just like companies like Google or Facebook, they understand the pounds and the cents, you know, the dollars and cents version. of productivity, so they will invest in anything that creates productivity and in some of those companies, you know, I did some work at Google during a gap year and there, on their campus, they will have these nap pods and they will have what They are called rooms. where you can go and take a nap, so think back to 20 years ago, you would never imagine a company paying you to sleep at work, if you were caught sleeping at work you would probably be fired now that companies are incentivizing it, not because They are thinking with compassion or empathy about the health or well-being of their individuals, it is because they understand that this implies marked productivity, so NASA is a good example, when you give sleep, you get something in return, but I can go back the other way. of that why.

We believe that lack of sleep does not equal increased productivity for at least five reasons. First, when you do the survey and we can also do these studies in the laboratory. When you get little sleep, employees will choose less challenging problems, so ifGive them a variety of work problems, they will just check email, listen to phone messages, not delve into project work. Secondly, of the problems they take on in their work, they will produce fewer creative solutions and after all, creativity and ingenuity are supposed to be the two engines that drive companies in terms of productivity in their income.

Third, that interesting finding that we've discovered is that when sleep-deprived employees start working in teams, they'll slack off, they won't. they do their job, they will let other people do their job, it's what we call social loafing, so they take advantage of other people's hard work, which will not create a good atmosphere in your company. Believe me, the fourth thing we found is that employees who don't sleep well are more deviant and more likely to modify data in spreadsheets, they are more likely to falsely claim money for a refund that was inappropriate, the last thing is that lack of sleep will rise to the top of the list. business chain, what we found is that the more or less sleep a business leader has had from one night to the next, the more or less charismatic the employees will be who will rate that business leader from one day to the next even though the employees themselves do not know nothing about how sleepy that CEO has been sleeping, it's obvious how charismatic that CEO is, so you can add all these things up and it's no wonder you know that if you don't sleep, you lose in the case of business. in that sense, that's why I can make a non-trivial argument for companies, by the way, the other thing that is enormously expensive for companies and when I go and talk to companies about why they should value sleep if If they want to hear when you convert it into the cost of the business and how much it's fleecing them in terms of their profits, then they start paying attention.

Employees who don't sleep well will take on average about 11 more sick days throughout the year compared to those who are well. you put people to sleep, so you're basically just paying people extra for 11 days of work that they will never give you when you don't put them to sleep. Second, healthcare resource utilization increases by about 80 percent, so the cost to you and the company here. in the US where your company pays for your healthcare or the government cost, for example in the UK, it is astronomical and also what we call comorbid diseases, your rates of obesity, diabetes, cardiovascular diseases, conditions mental health, all these things increase.

As employees who sleep poorly continue to get less and less asleep, I haven't seen any strong cases that lead me to think that companies should encourage a sleep-deprived mentality, quite the opposite, so I hope that's an answer to your question. question, we can analyze it bi-directionally, when we give you sleep back, do you get productivity? Yeah, when you take away sleep, things implode quickly, yeah, and it's very expensive for your business, at that point of naps, and you know, Google Sleep Pods had naps and things like that. A point in my life where I learned about REM sleep and the importance of deep REM sleep and that happens a little later on, you know, look at me for 90 minutes trying to tell a sleep

expert

, well, I love it, but You see what I mean, this is my monkey brain, so I didn't understand the topic very well, still, to be honest, I don't understand it, but in the first one it takes me a significant amount of time to get to Deep.

Sleeping into REM sleep, how long on average would you say it takes for some? You know, yeah, so you'll probably go into a light sleep in the first 10 to 15 minutes and then you'll fall into a deep sleep and you'll stay there for about 30 to 40 minutes and then you'll start to get up again and you'll pop up and have a brief period of REM sleep and then you will complete the cycle from non-rem to REM after about 90 minutes and come back down. back to non-rem and REM, so on average for humans it's 90 minutes, so I figured the nap doesn't really do anything because I figured it takes me so long to get into REM sleep and deep sleep that it does.

I do. I have 15 minutes 20 minutes to take a nap it's just a waste of time right, was I wrong or was I right, understandably you were wrong, it's okay I'm happy because I've always rejected naps because I thought they didn't matter. Because it takes me a long time to get to a restorative state anyway, we've done a lot of different studies with naps, ourselves and other colleagues as well, and what we've found is that naps can have some fantastic benefits, they can improve cardiovascular health and reduce blood. pressure, they can improve your learning and memory skills, they can reset the emotional north of your magnetic compass in a good way, where you can reduce negative emotions and increase positive emotions, then naps are certainly a good thing, but with a big caveat : I'll go back to um, yeah, you're right in the sense that to have a full sleep cycle and go into REM sleep you would probably have to take that nap for about 90 minutes and in fact in many cities where we do that we'll use a 90 minute long nap so the brain can go through all those different stages of sleep, but it's not necessary and I wouldn't suggest that you do what we found is that different stages of sleep work differently. functions for the brain at different times of the night, there are actually four separate stages, stages one through four, that increase the depth of sleep, so stages three and four are those really deep stages of non-rem sleep, stages one and two, that it is the lightest form of non-rem sleep. -rem and then you have rapid eye movement sleep or what we consider dreamy sleep and people sometimes ask me how can I get more REM sleep or how can I get deeper sleep.

I could answer them: why do you want to? to get more REM sleep and your answer is what's not good? and it turns out that there is nothing good, everything is good, you know, maybe with the exception of that light stage of non-REM sleep which is superficial sleep and Usually we don't like to see a lot of that, but stages two of non-rem sleep, three and four, they all have their different functions that we have discovered and REM sleep has its functions, so you need them all, you can't. Change any of them, but for naptime, what we found is that you can get good benefits for things like your learning and your memory, and you can even reduce some level of anxiety up to about 20 minutes.

In fact, you can take a nap. I think the study In one of the studies, they reduced the duration of the nap to about nine minutes and there were still some basic improvements in your kind of overall level of alertness and reaction time, for example, if you're an athlete, that's not trivial, so, then, The reason I would say be careful with naps is because of two main types of suggestions: the first is to try not to nap for more than 20 minutes because once the 20 minutes pass it really starts to descend into those deeper stages of no-rem.

You sleep and if you wake up after about 45 or 60 minutes it is not a problem. I'm not suggesting you shouldn't or can't. I'm just saying be aware because when you come out of that deep sleep and that's not normally how you wake up from that deep sleep, you'll normally wake up from the lighter stages of sleep or REM sleep, it's rare that we wake up from deep sleep, but If you take a nap and stay asleep for about 40 minutes you will probably fall into a deep sleep and at that point, if you wake up and the alarm goes off, you will feel almost miserable and worse than before the nap because you have what is called sleep inertia. sleep, which is essentially a sleep hangover where the brain is still returning to that deep sleep state and it can be almost an hour before you feel like you're back up to operating temperature and highway speed, so I I'd say stick with it.

If you take it to 20 minutes and don't suffer too much from that inertia, you still get some nice benefits. Also, don't fall asleep too late in the afternoon. Also, the final part is if you have trouble sleeping at night if you are someone who has insomnia or difficulty sleeping not taking naps during the day is the worst thing you can do because when we are awake during the day we accumulate a chemical that causes drowsiness. in our brain, it's called adenosine and the longer we're awake, the more adenosine builds up, the more denosine builds up, the more and more sleepy we get and when we sleep, the brain has a chance to get rid of all that adenosine, all that sleepiness and somewhere between seven and nine hours after a full night's sleep. the brain has evacuated all of that sleepiness chemical from that adenosine, so we should then wake up and feel refreshed and restored and not need caffeine to function.

Why is that relevant to naps? Well, it's relevant to naps because when you take a nap, it's basically like a pressure valve in a kitchen: you're just releasing some of that healthy sleepiness that you've been building up and therefore if you're having trouble sleeping at night and then you take a nap during the day, it's terrible because we're taking away all that healthy weight of sleepiness that we've been trying to pile on your shoulders to give you the best chance of getting a good night's sleep. That's why I would tell you that if you suffer from insomnia, don't take a nap. during the day too, even if you don't have trouble sleeping at night, try not to take a nap after 3 p.m. m. in the afternoon or 2 p.m. m., taking a nap in the late afternoon or early evening, is a bit like having a snack before your main meal just kills your appetite and hunger for sleep, so try not to do that, but naps for the most part if you don't have trouble sleeping are wonderful things, just keep in mind the 20 minute idea you mentioned there about caffeine. a theme that I have modeled over and over again on this show because, as I told maybe three or four of my guests, I now feel like caffeine is a miracle drug that has no apparent cost, but when I think about things like anxiety and I know states of superficial sleep.

I've always thought that maybe caffeine is playing a role in the fact that you said you're pro caffeine, you're a caffeine drinker yourself, so I'm not a caffeine drinker, but I'm Pro Coffee, oh it's okay, and I'll tell you why I'm very attentive to my writing between caffeine and coffee and, to your point, it's another sneaky, would you know it's a miracle drug with no cost in biology and medicine. There's almost no free lunch, um, and that's true when it comes to caffeine and sleep, so maybe I'll give you an explanation about caffeine and how it affects your sleep, but then go back to what seems like an oxymoronic. statement for me, that's why I'm still Pro.

Coffee and caffeine will harm your sleep and probably in at least three ways, some of which most people don't know about. The first problem is the duration of its action, so caffeine has what we call a half-life of about five to six hours, in other words, after about five to six hours, half of that caffeine is still in its system, what that means is that caffeine has a quarter life of between 10 and 12 hours, so if you have a cup of coffee at noon at noon, a quarter of that caffeine is still in your brain at midnight, so having a cup of coffee at noon is really hyperbole, probably, or it's a little bit hyperbolic, but it's almost the equivalent of having a coffee at noon as the equivalent of talking yourself into going to bed, and right before You turn off the light, you drink a quarter cup of coffee and hope you get a good night's sleep, but that's probably not going to happen, so that's the first thing to keep in mind. is that the moment of caffeine the second is that caffeine is a stimulant now everyone knows this, everyone knows that caffeine can make you more alert and more awake by the way, how does it do that?

It goes back to adenosine, which is the chemical that we use. talked about the drowsiness chemical, it's no coincidence that those two things sound the same at the end of the name caffeine and adenosine. Caffeine will actually quickly enter your brain and attach to adenosine receptors, the welcome sites in your brain, and it has very acute effects. elbows and it will push the adenosine out of those receptors and hijack those receptors. Now, at this point, you might be thinking, wait a second if you're holding on to those drowsiness chemical receptors, shouldn't caffeine make you sleepier and the answer is? no, because what it does is it just sticks to the receptor and essentially inactivates it, so it masks the receptor.

What caffeine then does is rush to your brain. You get all this sleepiness at 9:00 p.m. m. or at 10 p.m. m., you have an espresso. because you are trying to move forward and finish the report or you know the presentation of your type ofpresentation for your new company and that caffeine that builds up in it attaches to the adenosine receptors and blocks the adenosine signal, so now your brain was thinking I'm starting to get tired, it's 10 p.m. m., but now all of a sudden that signal gets blocked and caffeine is like pressing the mute button on your TV remote, it just silences the drowsy signal, so now you're like, well, no.

You are no longer sleepy and here is the danger that, although the caffeine is in your system and is fixed in the receptors, the adenosine is still there, in fact it does not disappear, if anything, during the course of the caffeine in your system . It continues to build up and build up and now, when the caffeine is finally metabolized and excreted out of your system, not only do you return to the drowsiness you had many hours before, but all the adenosine drowsiness that has been building up during that time in In the middle, you get hit with this huge wave of drowsiness and that's what we call the caffeine crash, so one of the problems is kind of caffeine in terms of how it works at the time, another problem is that it creates anxiety as well. than you said and anxiety is probably one of the biggest enemies of sleep it is one of the main reasons underlying insomnia it is a physiological state of anxiety in which the fight or flight branch of the nervous system is in overdrive that is what caffeine will do , you need to do the The opposite of you falling asleep that's why you can have what we call the tired but wired phenomenon where you say I'm so desperately tired I'm so tired but I'm so wired that I can't fall asleep it's because you're nervous the system is too amplified the caffeine will trigger that amplification and at that point if you are struggling to fall asleep because you have too much caffeine on board it is what we call anxiogenic so now you start to worry and the last thing you have to do when your head hits the pillow to sleep well is to worry because when you start worrying you start ruminating and when you ruminate you catastrophize and when you catastrophize you're dead in the water for the next two hours when it comes to We sleep because we have the feeling that you know that things in the darkness of the night are much bigger than in the light of day and we begin to worry.

You know, in this modern era we are constantly in reception and we very rarely do it. Unfortunately, the only time we normally do a reflection is when we turn off the light and our head hits the pillow and that's the last time you want to reflect, so that's the second one. The problem with caffeine is it's anxiogenic and it only makes you He comes back almost like Woody Allen's neurotic from the dream world. The final part about caffeine is that it's very good at blocking deep sleep, so we've done several of these studies where I'll give people a standard dose of caffeine, let's say 100 150 milligrams 200 milligrams, which is probably a cup and a half of good strong coffee and then we will put him to bed and watch the amount of deep sleep and it will be eliminated. your deep sleep by 15 to 30 percent now, to put that in context, reduce your deep sleep at 30.

You'd probably have to age yourself about 40 years to get zero or you could do it every night with an espresso with dinner and that It's one of the problems that people will tell me, look, I'm one of those people that I can have two espressos with dinner and I fall asleep well and I stay asleep so there's no harm, there's no harm, good not necessarily because even if you fall asleep and you you fall asleep you are not aware of the lack of deep sleep you are not getting because of the caffeine and now you wake up the next day and think well.

I don't remember having any difficulties conciliating. Asleep, I don't remember waking up, but now I drink two or three cups of coffee the next morning instead of my standard cup of coffee because I don't feel refreshed or recovered when I sleep because I was lacking the necessary amount. of deep sleep and deep sleep, what does that do? It robs us of the lack of deep sleep, so the lack of deep sleep deep sleep is essential to regulate the cardiovascular system, it is the time when we replenish the immune system, it also regulates the metabolic system, so it controls hormones such as insulin that will regulate your blood sugar level and you will deregulate your blood sugar level without enough deep sleep up in the brain deep sleep will strengthen, consolidate and secure new memories in your brain it will prevent those memories from being forgotten the Deep sleep is also the time when we cleanse the brain of metabolic toxins, particularly toxins that are linked to Alzheimer's disease, so lack of deep sleep is not trivial in that sense, but I don't want to be too puritanical. here. and this is where I'm going to change the title melody.

I'm not here to tell anyone how to live their life. I have no right to tell anyone how to live life. I'm just a scientist, all I want to try and do. It's gifting you with the science and knowledge of sleep so you can make an informed decision, and after all, the same goes for alcohol and sleep. You know that life must be lived to a certain extent. You know nobody wants to be the healthiest guy in the cemetery. I don't want to be like that too. I want to live life only in moderation. The reason I don't drink caffeine is not because it's so purely technical.

I want to be the example of good. sleep I love the smell of freshly ground coffee in the morning and it's a great ritual it's just that I've messed up my genetics and I'm one of these slow caffeine metabolizers so you can do these genetic kits online and they'll tell you are you? a slow metabolizer or a fast metabolizer, so that's the variability, that's why some people say look, I'm pretty immune to caffeine, others will say no, I'm not. Why do I prefer coffee now? I was actually pretty anti-caffeine and anti-coffee when the book first came out just by looking at the studies, but now the data is immensely compelling.

The health benefits associated with coffee are undeniable, study after study, and we can put them all together in this big study we call a meta-analysis and it's surprisingly clear that drinking coffee is a good thing for your health from a health standpoint. There are two things to say about this: the first is that it has nothing to do with caffeine and many people have rightly challenged me to say so. Look, you say how problematic sleep can be when you drink too much caffeine, but yet coffee is associated with many of the same health benefits that sleep is associated with, but coffee is supposed to harm your sleep.

How do you reconcile those two Matt Walker and the answer is very simple antioxidants because it turns out that the coffee bean contains a huge dose of antioxidants, things like other things like coffee style has, but it has a ton of incredible antioxidants, probably the The most powerful of them in terms of coffee bean is something called chlorogenic acid, don't worry, it's not chlorine, it's not chloride, it's not bleach. Chlorogenic acid is very different and what has happened in the modern world is that we have and struggle so much with our diet because we don't. We don't eat enough whole foods, etc., so what has happened is that the coffee bean has now been asked to carry the herculean weight of all our antioxidant needs on its shoulders and where most people get the Most of its antioxidants are through the consumption of coffee, that is why coffee is associated with so many health benefits, this is not the case with caffeine, if we look at the studies with decaffeinated coffee, we obtain very similar health benefits again, it's not the caffeine, it's the coffee itself, so the bottom line here is to drink coffee, but I would.

Let's say the dose and the timing creates the poison, so try to limit yourself to about two cups of coffee, three cups of coffee at most because, by the way, if you look at the health benefits from the way one dose is, It is not a dose response, we are at a linear level. The more and more coffee you drink, the healthier and healthier you become. It peaks around two or three and then starts going down in the opposite direction for many reasons we can talk about so dose and timing makes the poison when it comes to coffee so you drink decaf, so I drink decaf, so I will drink coffee black because I love the smell and I enjoy the taste, but I drink decaf.

I would love to have a caffeinated coffee too because I know I'm sure it would be interesting because I work out every day and I work out every morning, and a lot of the health coaches that I talk to and health professionals say that definitely you should take a caffeine shot and increase your training. and in fact, the data on this is also quite clear: you are lifting weights, for example, in the gym and your metabolic activity is stronger when you have taken previous doses of caffeine, but it is also stronger when you sleep, but exactly, and that's the problem. and I would say that sleep is much more beneficial to your health and if you're trying to exercise or you're trying to be an athlete or realize a dream, it will outperform caffeine in five ways until Tuesday.

I mean, sleep is probably the best legal way to improve performance. drug that we know not enough athletes abuse, as you know the show is now sponsored by Airbnb. I can't count how many times Airbnb has saved me when I travel the world, whether you know recently when I went to the jungle in Bali or whether it's when I'm staying here in the UK or going to do business in the US, but I can also Think about the many times I've stayed at an Airbnb host's home and sat there wondering, could my home be an Airbnb too, and if it could be, how much could I earn?

Turns out you could be sitting on an Airbnb goldmine without even knowing it—maybe you have a spare room in your house that your friends stay in from time to time. At some point you could use Airbnb in that space and make a significant amount of money instead of leaving it empty. extra money to cover a few bills or for something a little more fun, your house may be worth a little more than you think and you can find the answer to that question by visiting airbnb.co.uk. of continuous stereotypes that I've always wondered if it was wrong or right or whatever, now I have the opportunity to ask you about this sleep medication culture, so I have some friends who may have been prescribed I don't know sleep. medications but I also have a lot of friends who use what they call something natural they always use the word natural something natural so they are like natural sleeping pills yeah what is your perspective on this culture where we humans take sleeping pills to get them? getting sleepy and falling asleep at night, usually when people ask me that question personally.

The first thing I ask them is why they think they can't sleep and try to reverse engineer the question from there before I even start thinking about putting band-aids on the wounds. First I want to ask what is causing the infection because we can keep bandaging it all we want, but if it keeps oozing it probably won't go away anytime soon. Is there any problem continuing to sell? is a problem right now, we don't normally advocate sleeping pills as the first line defense agent against or for insomnia as a treatment, in fact, in 2016, the American cult and again, this is me just describing the science, This is me describing the science is not prescriptive in terms of medicine because I'm not a doctor, but in 2016 the American College of Physicians had a panel of

expert

s that looked at all the literature on classic sleeping pills and what they suggested was that sleeping pills They should not sleep It will no longer be the first-line treatment for insomnia, it has to be cognitive behavioral therapy for insomnia or we call it cbti, which is a psychological intervention that we can talk about, but their recommendation was that they found that I think that its wording was small and of questionable clinical significance in In terms of the benefits of sleeping pills, there is now a time and place in clinical medicine for sleeping pills, but usually as an adjunct in combination with cognitive therapy. behavioral are not recommended for long-term use, but are usually recommended for weeks of short-term use, most people have been taking these classic sleeping pills for months, if not years, and that's a problem because those sleeping pills are in a class of medications that we call sedative hypnotics and sedation is not sleep for a subset of some people, there are some of these quote unquote sleep supplements that may benefit, but overall the studies are very clear , none of them are effective and when you think about it, it makes sense if there was some cheap sleep supplement that you could buy on Amazon that was the shangri-lar of good sleep that was this miracle sleep drug don't you think that a pharmaceutical company I would have patented it 20 years ago and I would be earningbillions of dollars with it?

That alone tells you everything you need to know about yourself. Learn about these natural sleep supplements, cognitive behavioral therapy for insomnia, although it seems to be the kind of first line of defense prescribed against lack of sleep in so many conditions, what exactly is that therapy aiming to do what, to What good is it for someone cool? question in some ways the title is trying to suggest what it does, but maybe not particularly well, so it focuses on the cognitive aspects and the behavioral aspects, so for the cognitive aspects when we do cognitive behavioral therapy Working with the patient, I will try to focus on thoughts, beliefs and ideas about the dream.

Do you have anxiety in the bedroom? Most of them have it. I can't sleep because I can't sleep, so every time I walk into the bedroom, my bed is the enemy and I look. In the bedroom I look at the bed and I just know that that means I'm going to have a bad night's sleep, so what happened is that at that point your dream is controlling you and you've lost all confidence in your ability to sleep. and we have to correct that, so one of the things we do in cognitive behavioral therapy is reduce that anxiety and we say, look, everyone has a bad night's sleep, even a couple of nights of bad sleep, so done, I'll tell you.

I also don't sleep perfectly well all the time. I have had at least two very severe attacks of insomnia in my life. We all had a bad night's sleep. That doesn't mean that tomorrow you will wake up with depression or Alzheimer's disease, don't worry, you won't get cancer, you know, just because you had a bad night's sleep, so we started to change people's mistaken beliefs about sleep. and we try to get them to stop being catastrophic about this idea of ​​I don't sleep, so that's the cognitive aspect. We began to reduce his anxiety around the bed and in the bedroom.

We started trying to build trust. We begin to lower your expectations about. Do you know what is reasonable? Sleep well at this time. four or five hours of sleep and we can do better, but don't start thinking that you need to get eight hours of sleep right away, let's deal with it, that's just because it's going to stress you out, it's just going to make things better. worse, of course, okay, you know? When you're having trouble sleeping in the middle of the night and you're wide awake, you're lying in bed and you're thinking, "Oh my God, I've got five hours left before I'm done." going to work is the last thing you know it's a bit like trying to remember someone's name the more you try the more you push them away so you would say and that's what I do in that situation it's 2 in the morning you have to get up at seven, there's a flight you're going to get on, so, yeah, what should you do?

Because from what I was reading in chapter 14, I was hearing that maybe I should get out of bed or not just sit there. and reflect, you know, until the early hours of the morning, or I stay in bed and do something. What is done? The prototypical recommendation is that after about 30 minutes a week you should get out of bed and just go to a different room and do something like read a book or listen to a podcast. Don't eat because then it trains your brain to wake up and do that. , don't stop working or get in front of a computer screen, you know, I said, listen to a podcast, sure, you know, just make sure your phone is on, you know? you don't start scrolling more than that, but you can do relaxing things, stretch, meditate, the reason is that if you start spending a lot of time awake in your bed, your brain is an incredibly associative device and very quickly it will start to learn. that this thing called your bed is the place where I am always awake and therefore you start to learn through this repeated loop of behavior that I will always be wide awake in bed and that we need to break that association and that is why we say get up out of bed after about 30 minutes because you're just training your brain to think that this thing called my bed is the place where I never sleep and we want to break that and go back to bed only when I'm sleepy. and there is no time limit for that and little by little it is much better because you will relearn the association that your bed, just like when you were young, is guaranteed that your bed is this place where you will always be asleep, the problem with that is a lot people I don't want you to know it's the middle of the night, it's dark, it's cold, no, I'm just not getting out of bed, so what's your other, what else do you have in your toolbox?

Matt, um, at that time I. I would say okay, that's reasonable, the first thing I would suggest is meditation. You know, I'm a very well-known scientist and when I was researching the book that was, I thought this all sounds kind of fascinating and you know, uh. I live and work in Berkeley, California, which is kind of like you know freedom of speech, you know the flower power movement, San Francisco flowers and you have businesses. I thought this is it, you know, holding hands and singing, pass by ours, this is not for me. This meditation stuff could not escape the force of the data, it was immensely powerful regarding sleep and its benefits on insomnia and sleep, so I started meditating and now I meditate for 10 minutes before going to bed every night and I have I've been doing that for about four years now so I would say even if it's in the middle of the night and if I wake up in the middle of the night I'll start trying to walk through a meditation, are you referring to listening to podcasts etc. ? etc You know, do something else to stimulate the brain.

When I go to bed, I have to have something playing. I say I have to do it. It shouldn't be so definitive. I like to have something playing some kind of sound or noise, whatever and to my partner's dismay, my favorite content is podcasts or documentaries about serial killers or just something that will really take over my brain and focus me, so that something like that has to be really interesting to me so I can focus on it. Her partner is the complete opposite again, she likes silence, why do I listen to serial killers? It's different for different people's constitutions, yeah, yeah, and public psychologies, uh, and you know I can pathologize you or you if you wanted to, but I would say.

That's what's fundamentally happening here with meditation and I'll come back to an alternative as well, but the reason why some meditation apps have also started doing what's called Sleep Stories, which in some ways is what you're doing. a version. your podcast is Hawks, when we were kids, you know a lot of parents would just read a book to the child, you know children's books, good night books because you would read to the child until they fell asleep and for some reason we as we we become adults. We think we no longer benefit from having a story read to us to help us sleep.

No, it's not true, we benefit greatly. In fact, the meditation company's calm, you know, was saved by the introduction of sleep stories into the app they were making. pretty good as a meditation app, but then they started making sleep stories and it became a unicorn company. In terms of valuation, it was over $1 billion and it was behind the stories about sleep and what they realized was that people were themselves. -medicate their insomnia through meditation, so they stuck with that and then they found out that these stories about sleep were great and now you have wonderful people that you've interviewed on the show, so what are you doing and what do those do? stories about dreams and what meditation does is the same thing, that is, it distracts you from yourself because when you have trouble sleeping or you wake up in the middle of the night, what you don't want to be doing is focusing on what you what you what did I do today what didn't I do today what did I do wrong oh my god what do I have left to do tomorrow and at that point things are just a mess you're Wide Awake what all the things we just discussed do is they distract you and at that point you start to allow sleep to come back naturally, that's why one of the other suggestions is to take a mental walk to By the way, don't count sheep, that doesn't work if a colleague of mine at UC Berkeley did the study, it actually takes longer. time to fall asleep if you are counting sheep.

What Dr. Allison Harvey found was that if you just close your eyes and think about a walk you take often, let's say it's a walk with the dog, and you think about it in detail in High Fidelity, so I close my eyes, I walk out the door, turn left, go down the stairs and then I leave. To go up the street, I take the first left, past that pine tree, that's the level of detail if you just walk that mental path. I'm sure people fall asleep in about 50 times less time, half the time it takes. This is what stories about dreams have. and also my documentaries about serial killers or podcasts about serial killers that I listen to in exact details.

I've even heard stories about peaceful dreams before and the attention to detail in the kind of descriptive nature of what they say is so evident that I'll say things like the window sill, cold and wet, saw the raindrops like they were hitting against him one by one by one and that sounds very similar to my serial killer documentaries when I hear the serial killer coming through the window, yeah, yeah, in during the night um and I was wondering why the descriptive nature of the detail is important for making us drowsy and because it prevents, I mean, you have limited bandwidth in terms of cognitive ability, right? and if you are consumed and saturate your bandwidth with that.

At a detailed level, it is very difficult for any of these other things called our worries and anxieties to start entering our mind. The other thing I would point out, by the way, is if you are, if none of these things work for you, if fiction the notion of serial murder doesn't work for you if meditation doesn't work for you if taking a mind walk doesn't work for you this is the last suggestion I have if you are lying awake first by the way, if you are struggling with sleep, remove all the clock faces from your room.

One of the best tips I can give you is to know what time of night it is, it's not a favor, so knowing now that it's 3:23 in the morning and I'm still struggling to fall. asleep and then I look at the clock again and now it's 403 AM. m. and I'm still awake and now it's 4 27 and I have to wake up at 6 30 am. m. knowing that there's no use in removing all the clock faces from your bedroom is a gift, but going back to the final suggestion, if you don't want to get out of bed, if you don't want to listen to a podcast, the last thing I would say is just accept. and say look, it's okay tonight.

It's not my night it's not the worst thing in the world and instead of trying to sleep all I'm going to do here is lie in bed and I'm just going to rest because wouldn't it be wonderful if someone came to see me? You, in the middle of your work day, you're just stressed out and someone said, by the way, just go into this room, there's a bed here, just lie down and rest for an hour, wouldn't that be wonderful? You only get a good rest for one hour just rest there and I would say if you can't sleep just lie in bed stop worrying about sleeping and not being able to get it stop worrying about the next day just lie there and enjoy a good rest and So what usually happens is that after you start thinking, well, I'm going to rest, the next thing you know the alarm goes off at 6:30 because you finally stop trying and fall asleep, so of course, You know, one of the things drags on.

I'm also wondering if this is a bug. Sometimes I thought I could go from Monday to Friday and sacrifice my sleep. This was specifically when I was really at the peak of running big. business Etc um and then on the weekend I'll make up for it, so I thought I could go Monday to Friday. I'll sleep maybe sometimes two hours a night, three hours a night, whatever, then on Saturday, you know, just you know, sleep 11 hours and I'll make up for it, yeah, that's a good strategy, the lovely laugh at the end of your sentence which I think probably tells you the answer you know, unfortunately, sleeping doesn't work. so, it would be nice if I slept, it's not like the bank, in other words, you can't accumulate debt like you did during the week and then expect to try to pay it off on the weekend, so, for example, let me.

Do an extreme version of that experiment. Let me take you tonight. I'm going to deprive you of sleep for an entire night, let's say you'll get eight hours of sleep, and tomorrow night I'll give you all the recovery sleep you need. you want as much as you want and then the next night you can have all the recovery sleep you want and even on the third night you will sleep more that first night of recovery after a night of absolutely no sleep you will sleep longer, but all night long. those three or four nights of catch-up sleep you'll get back all the sleep you lost, not even close, you might only get back to sleep about four, four and a half of the eight hours you lost, inIn other words, at that stage you're four or three and a half hours overdraft on your dream bank account, you went into debt and you only paid about 50 percent of it, so what happens to you during the week is you're accumulating this debt that you know , maybe 10 hours. you should switch and you only sleep about six hours a night for five nights a week and then you fall asleep and try to sleep maybe 10 or 11 hours, that's just an extra two or three hours, so a total of that is just Four to six, you know, hours of recovered sleep relative to the 10 hours of debt, so what happens is next week you now carry four hours of your debt and then the next weekend you try to sleep it back, but you still have four. hours lost, so now you have eight hours of net debt;

In other words, what develops is compound interest on a loan that just starts to escalate precipitously over weeks, years, and over a lifetime, and then what happens in terms of health outcomes. so let's say I did that for a couple of years let's say I kept that pattern of, you know, deprive myself of sleep during the week maybe catch up on Saturday, yeah, deprive myself again the next week catch up on Sunday, deprive myself next week and You followed that pattern for several years, what the health implications would be so you can describe them in the short, medium and long term.

The first thing I would say is that the elastic band of lack of sleep will stretch only so far before breaking the pattern in the short term. Probably the most immediate short-term consequence is that you will be involved in a driving-related accident. Drowsiness related accident because drowsiness related accidents are not trivial and they make up a large proportion of the accidents on our roads in terms of human error driving when let's say it came out of the gene pool, okay, so what happens is that when you're asleep you're behind the wheel and you start having what we call microdreams where your eyelid partially closes and now you don't realize it, you're not aware of it at all and in fact it seems like parts of your brain are almost falling asleep , like you're having this micro sleep and now it lasts about a second or two if you're on the highway and you're traveling at 70 miles an hour and you have a two second micro sleep, that's enough time for you to swerve out of one lane. the next if you're on a two-lane side street, you know, where there's oncoming traffic. in the other direction and you're traveling at 40 miles per hour and you swerve halfway into that lane which is oncoming traffic, in other words, if you have a micro sleep at 60 or 70 miles per hour in that point there is a two- A one ton missile is traveling at 60 miles per hour and no one is in control and that may be the last micro dream you will ever have in your life, obviously all the other things you have mentioned would be implications, like a drop in performance, a kind of memory relations, libido. everything decreases, so I wouldn't have as much sex.

I would like all of those things midterm, midterm, then you're going to escalate those things to a state of greater illness, so, for example, if I were to take an individual and, um, people have If we perform These studies, not us, but if you limit them to, say, four or five hours of sleep for a week, your blood sugar levels are altered so significantly that your doctor at the end of that week would classify you as pre- diabetic, then you could almost argue that in the short term, not the medium term, you know, if you're a man and I limit you to four or five hours of sleep, a young, healthy man, for a week, I'll lower your testosterone levels. to that of someone who is 10 years older than you so that they can age you by a decade with just little sleep for a week we see equivalent deficiencies in female reproductive health in estrogen, luteinizing hormone, and follicle-stimulating hormone. um so in both men and women, your blood pressure will start to rise, your systolic blood pressure in particular. increase your heart rate in terms of your rate of contraction, in other words, the speed of your heart begins to increase progression towards obesity diabetes cardiovascular disease mental health problems anxiety depression suicidal tendencies all of these things immune compromise infection all of those things are Now we know that it will be in the medium term, all of those things have a longer term history, which is what is called premature mortality, so using that optimal point of sleep of seven to nine hours you can argue that there are a simple truth based on the data.

The shorter your sleep, the shorter your life. Short sleep will predict mortality from all causes. That's backed by data that's backed by data. Now there's an interesting change there, which is that once you go about 9 or 10 hours, your mortality risk doesn't. it just keeps going down and down and it will reconnect as if sleeping too much is a bad thing and we can explain why that is also the case and why it is probably not as simple as that, but the ultimate long term consequence. "I would say it's Alzheimer's disease. You know, the two most feared diseases in developed countries are cancer and Alzheimer's disease.

Both have links to lack of sleep, many of them causal, and this relationship between sleep and Alzheimer's is where we really do it." I would probably say almost 50% of the work I do at my sleep center focuses on sleep and Alzheimer's disease and the data is amazing. I would say that at this stage lack of sleep seems to be one of the most important lifestyle choices. factors that can develop or dictate the development of Alzheimer's disease later in life, that is a lifestyle factor, there are other genetic factors, but certainly now we know that it is not just that lack of sleep predicts a greater amount of Alzheimer's pathology in the brain, for example, people.

Those who on average sleep six hours or less have a much higher amount of amyloid: beta amyloid, which is the toxic and sticky protein linked to Alzheimer's disease, and another protein called Tau protein, these are the two proteins to blame for Alzheimer's disease. Alzheimer's. Both increase less. and less sleep than you have now, that's just associative, we also know for a fact that two sleep disorders, insomnia and sleep apnea, intense snoring, both are associated with a markedly increased risk of Alzheimer's disease. Alzheimer's disease later in life, that's just associative. does not prove causality, but now we have causal evidence in both animal models and human models, if I deprive a human being of sleep for a single night or even deprive you of deep sleep for a single night the next day, we can see a immediate increase in these proteins related to Alzheimer's disease that circulate in the bloodstream circulating in what we call cerebrospinal fluid that bathes the brain and using special brain scans we can even measure it within the brain itself, so these are causal manipulations, not They are associative. manipulate this thing called sleep and the consequence is that I manipulate the proteins of Alzheimer's disease, that is the correlation that goes with the causality, so the question is, well, the mechanism, what is it about sleep when you get it that reduces the risk of Alzheimer's disease, in other words, when I don't understand, why would the risk of Alzheimer's increase?

This is an amazing discovery made by a scientist named Macon Nedergaard from the University of Rochester here in the United States and he found three things, by first studying mice and rats, he discovered that the brain has a cleaning system now we didn't used to think that your brain had a cleansing system your body had one and everyone knows what it's called it's called the lymphatic system um we didn't think the brain had one but she discovered that the brain has one it's called the glymphatic system, which is named after the glial cells that make it up. .

The second thing he discovered is that that cleaning system within the brain is not always activated with a high volume of flow during the 24-hour period, but specifically during sleep and particularly during deep non-rem sleep, when that type of The sewage system went into overdrive and washed away all this debris that accumulated during the day and the last thing it discovered and that's why it's linked to Alzheimer's disease is that two of the metabolic byproducts that accumulate during the day in our brain are beta amyloid and the Tau protein, the two bad actors in Alzheimer's disease.

In other words, what he discovered is a "good night's clean sleep" system that sleep is a cleansing power for the brain. and if you don't sleep every night, you know it doesn't mean you're going to have Alzheimer's next week, it doesn't mean you're going to have Alzheimer's, you know, a year from now, but night after night, once Plus, it's like compound interest on a loan and that's why we now believe, through this causal mechanism, that lack of sleep is a risk factor for Alzheimer's disease. A lot of people will tell me, "Look, there are people in society who claim that you know, I didn't need much sleep, who didn't sleep much, you know, Margaret Thatcher has often quoted me, she's quoted me on that, you know, um, Ronald Reagan. apparently it was another one who slept little.

I don't think it's a coincidence that both Thatcher and Reagan died of the unfortunate Alzheimer's disease. I am convinced that sleep is important. I understand how I can do it. the things that in modern society get in the way of the dream. I've touched on some of them vaguely, but some of the big, obvious things are the things that you would suggest, doing very practical things that we could do right away to improve ourselves. our chances of having that healthy, deep sleep that we need to be optimal. In all aspects of our health and performance, I think there are probably five standard tips that we can apply, what we call a type of sleep hygiene, and then I'll move on to that. maybe some unconventional tips that we've touched on and we've talked about a lot of these, the first thing I would recommend people do and that's why when some people say what's up with this new sleep supplement or you know it's £40 a pop this bottle of these, the new natural sleep medicine, so I'm I'm going to try it.

I would say try these tried and true things first before spending your money on supplements. The first thing is to go to bed regularly and wake up at the same time, regardless of whether it is during the week or during the day. On the weekend your brain expects regularity, it thrives best in conditions of regularity, when you give it regularity you can improve the quantity and quantity of your sleep. The second thing is to get some darkness at night, like I said, we don't have enough darkness at night. modern world and that's why the trick I would offer and I don't use it.

I don't like the word hack but the suggestion would be in the last hour before bed. Try this experiment for everyone listening over the next week. Attenuate half the volume. lights or turn off half the lights or even three-quarters of the lights in your house in the last hour before bed all the lights in every room in every room you know turn off almost all the lights now I'm not suggesting don't be safe and you walk in the dark in the last hour, that's not what everyone says, it's just dimmed, you know, turn off half the lights, you will be surprised by the dream that will make you feel the darkness and it is also an amazing behavioral trigger to let you know . your brain that it's time to sleep that darkness surrounds me that's the second tip is the darkness the third tip is the temperature most people sleep in a bedroom ambient temperature that is too high and you should aim for a bedroom temperature about 18 18 and a half degree Celsius about 65 to 68 degrees Fahrenheit, yeah I'm probably messing up the math on that, but you need to cool down now you can wear thick socks, you can have a hot water bottle, that's fine, but the environment It needs to be cold because you need to lower your body's core temperature and your brain's temperature by about one degree Celsius to fall asleep and stay asleep, and that's why you'll always find it easier to fall asleep in a room that's too cold. that too hot, so make sure the cold of your room makes it dark as a cave, the fourth question would be more or less what we have or the fourth suggestion would be Go out and we have talked about this, the 30 minute rule, you know, get up, do something different or meditate you know, don't stay up in bed for too long, so the last two things that we've talked about, well, we've talked about caffeine, we haven't talked about alcohol, but let me say like the kind of headline alcohol is.

It is not a sleep aid for many people.use as a sleep aid not your friend again alcohol is a sedative so it knocks you out the second is that it fragments your sleep so you wake up your dream is plagued with all these little awakenings most of them you don't remember because they are too short, but they cause miserable, poor quality sleep, and the last thing is that alcohol is very good at blocking REM sleep or the sleep of your dreams, which we know is also essential for many other functions. Alcohol is not your friend, that's the kind of final advice, again, you know, whenever you're with friends, have a glass of red wine, just know, okay, my sleep won't be very good, thank you , I'm kidding, you know I'm not.

Yeah, it's just that you know how to live life too, of course, I'm not saying that I was. I was thinking about the other kinds of behavioral things we do that hurt our sleep. We also talked about coffee before to avoid those weird things people drink. after dessert in the evening, so yeah, I never understood that because it's an old tradition, but the other thing obviously that the modern generation is even more susceptible to is having a quick tick on your social media account or something like that . I thought you know there are a lot of different products that try to help with the light that comes from these screens and I think it's the cause of what's keeping us awake, but there's a little button called Dark Mode on my iPad and there's also one called shift. at night. if I just put that on Bob, your uncle and I can continue with my screen time true or false partially true oh well, then I can put that on night mode in dark mode and then I can continue using my iPad partially true, then It turns out that the Blue light from screens has an impact on sleep, so there's a big study out of Harvard Medical School by some colleagues there and they showed that reading for an hour on an iPad right before bed is compared to just reading a book in dim light, first of all, delayed the time at which people fell asleep, so it took them much longer to fall asleep.

Second, it reduced the total amount of sleep they got. Third, a sleep-related hormone called melatonin decreased. It delayed the release of that melatonin. and it reduced the amount of melatonin and ultimately reduced the amount of rapid eye movement sleep, so the point of melatonin was significantly significant, so it delayed release by about 90 minutes to two hours in all individuals, in other words , your brain. It is not like that, what melatonin does is a hormone of Darkness or the vampire hormone simply because it is not, because it makes you want to bite to be next because it tells your brain that it is night, that it is Darkness. and, therefore, your brain.

You need the melatonin signal to know when it's dark, in other words you need to know through melatonin when it's time to fall asleep and when you're bathed in electric light at night and especially when you're turning blue. The light from these devices tricks your brain into thinking it is still daytime and when there is light emitted through your retina that reaches your brain, it tells a part of your brain to stop melatonin and your brain will not release melatonin. So what was it? What happens with this iPad reading is that you are artificially telling the brain that it is still daytime and that the melatonin brakes were still closed, so the melatonin didn't start to be released until much later and, by the way, What was also interesting about the study is that when they stopped reading on the iPad, the pattern of sleep disruption continued for several days afterwards - in other words, it was almost like a drug that had a washout period which was a blast radius. .

Now there's been some great work done by a wonderful sleep scientist in Australia Michael Grazarar and he added to this story and said it's not just the blue light from these devices, the main function of these devices is that they are sleep capture devices. Pay attention, just like you said. I'm going to have a little Tic Toc. before going to bed they are in the attention economy and the only thing they care about is capturing your attention for the current currency and they make a lot of money with it, what that attention does is stimulate your brain and when your brain is stimulated it is very difficult to you. falling asleep and that creates what we call sleep procrastination, where you're lying in bed and you could be really sleepy and you could fall asleep right now, but then you check social media and they think, oh, I'll just shoot that last one. email and then I'll order that last thing on Amazon, you know, and then you get a text from your friend and you start texting him and then you look up and now it's an hour later and you have a deficient hour of sleep, so the activation of your cerebral cortex by these devices is perhaps the most damaging aspect regarding your sleep.

Now here again, I don't want to be pointing fingers at, you know, the genius. of technology is out of the bottle and will not appear again anytime soon. There's nothing I'm going to say as a sleep researcher that's going to change. I don't take my phone to my room. I leave it outside. I don't see the kitchen until the morning, but many people see it and it's true, but there is another rule that I stole from another friend named Michael Grandner who is here in the United States at the University of Tucson in Arizona. He has this.

Great rule when it comes to technology and it's this: if you really must take your phone into your room, you can only use it standing up and what you'll find is that after about six or seven minutes of standing up you think I'm just going to do it. I'll just sit on the bed and at that point, as soon as your butt hits the bed, you're done, you'll have to put the phone away. I think that's a great rule of thumb if you need to use technology. in the bedroom, I'm going to apply that the other thing I wanted to ask was about sleep and weight loss.

I've had a lot of health experts on this podcast recently, but none of them really talked to me about the role sleep or sleep plays. Deprivation plays on the prowl. Is there a relationship? It's probably one of the most well-defined relationships that we know of in all of sleep science and it's at least a three-part story, so the first emerging evidence came in terms of hormones, so there's what we know. Call it appetite regulating hormones and the two main ones of concern here are something called leptin and ghrelin. Now leptin, when released, will signal to your brain that you are satisfied with your food, you are satiated, and you are no longer hungry.

Lin does the opposite when ghrelin is released, he says no, you're not satisfied with your food, you're not satisfied, you still want to eat more, you're still hungry and some of the first studies that started just limited people's sleep to six or five hours or four hours and what they found was that, first that signal appeared that says no, you're satisfied with your food, you don't want to eat anymore, you're full, that satiety signal decreased by 18 percent if that wasn't enough bad ghrelin, which is the hunger hormone that increased by 28 percent. Overall hunger levels increased by about 26 percent, so it's almost like a double jeopardy in the first place to be punished twice for the same crime of not getting enough sleep once.

By losing the signal that I am full, I no longer want to eat more and once again, because of this, I am not much hungrier and I am only going to overeat, which is ghrelin, so what that produces is an increased eating profile. So, on average, People who weren't getting enough sleep started eating in those studies between three and four hundred extra calories each sitting due to lack of sleep, so what they discovered is that it's not just about wanting to eat more, but what it is that you want to eat more. you want to eat. you have cravings when you don't sleep well and this is the problem they found is that when you don't sleep well you eat more of everything, but especially you eat more of these heavy, heavy carbs bread pasta pizza the next thing you eat You started eating, you had preference for simple sugary foods, sweets and chocolate, and eventually you started to crave very salty foods and high sodium intake will increase your blood pressure, so that was the first of the three mechanisms, then we did a study where we said that such Maybe it's not just the hormones circulating in the body, the brain is the final arbiter of your food decisions, so what happens in the brain?

So we took a group of perfectly healthy individuals and put them through the experiment twice once when they had slept a full eight hours and once when we deprived them of sleep, the next day we put them inside an MRI scanner and showed them images of many different foods ranging from very healthy to very healthy. unhealthy and some kind of ice cream, and you know, chocolate, pizza and things like that, leafy green salads, nuts, greens and vegetables, and we asked them to rate how much they wanted that food for each item, now we did something a little funky to do. is more ecologically correct, so they weren't just saying "it's okay," they probably think I should probably say "it's healthy," we said we're going to randomly select one of these images, which are these food images that you see and after removing the brain.

Scanner, we'll give you that food and we'll politely ask you to eat it all, to make it a little more realistic, to make the options more, you know as much as we could, so what we found is that when they were sleep deprived , the deep hedonic centers, the emotional centers of the brain, these desire centers, these reward centers, increased their activity in response to these highly desirable, unhealthy foods, so these most basic types of guttural parts of the brain are known as like these reward centers that light up much brighter when you're sleep deprived, worse yet, the impulse control regions in the front of the brain, what we call the prefrontal cortex, would turn off, disconnect, and as a consequence , you lost your impulse control and that's why you start saying: you know, when I'm sleep deprived at the kind of food buffet, no, I'm not going to make salad, I'm just going to say that pizza looks great or that pasta with the cream that I'm going to go into, everything goes, so it's what we call a pattern in terms of brain activity in neuroscience of hedonic eating in which your brain goes into this hedonic desire profile, so now We understood that it is not just hormones. in the body there are also changes in the brain, then it was discovered that there is another chemical in the body that is responsible and this applies to cannabis when people, um, when people, when people you may know have smoked, uh , cannabis, they often say that I am very hungry.

I am very hungry. It is no coincidence because cannabis will stimulate the appetite. We all now have natural cannabis compounds in our brains and bodies. They are called endocannabinoids. The meaning of Endo comes from within, while Cannabis comes from without when you classify it. From smoking it or consuming edibles, endocannabinoids do a lot of things for the brain and the body, but one of the things they do is control appetite and hunger, and what we found is that when it comes to sleep-deprived people, these endocannabinoids natural ones are triggered. More than 20 percent increases people's appetite, so these three ways lead you to stop hacking.

You know, when lack of sleep occurs. When sleep gets shorter, your waist usually starts to expand and now we understand the reasons if that wasn't bad enough. What we found is that, let's say you're trying to be very careful and you're trying to diet and you're trying to lose weight, if you don't get enough sleep, then 60% of all the weight you lose. It will come from lean muscle mass, oh God, and not from fat, not from muscle. I know exactly. In other words, when you're on a diet but don't sleep well, you lose what you want to keep, which is muscle, and you keep what you want to lose, just fat.

So again, I'm not convinced it's an ideal situation. My last question for you, in fact, was about the whole topic that we talked about. What, in your opinion, is the most interesting thing we've missed? What you think is most relevant. or interesting or meaningful or encourages people or puts them on the end of their chair when you talk about it. I think the only other area that fascinates people even more than sleeping is dreaming hmm, so dreaming beyond the stage it comes from. It is mainly called rapid eye movements, they put dreamy sleep. REM sleep provides a set of physiological benefits and, uh, but now we've discovered that dreaming even beyond that provides benefits and provides at least two benefits: the first is creativity. during deep sleep, you cement individual memories, you take memories and you shift them from a short-term storage repository to a long-term storage repository and you strengthen the circuitry of those memories so that you have future-proof information, but those areindividual memories, what we discovered is that sleep is much smarter than you ever thought possible: it is during REM sleep and particularly during dreams that we take all the individual pieces of information that we have been learning and begin to interconnect them and associate them with our entire back catalog of stored information and therefore what you dream about is that one of the functions of the dream dream is to weave and associate new memories so that you wake up the next day and sleep after the dream with a revised mental network of associations and those are able to guess solutions. problems that were previously impenetrable, so think about dreaming, since it is almost like an information alchemy in which you begin to merge things that normally should not go together, but when they do they cause marked advances in your thinking, in your productivity, in your wits, and that's the way you go.

You sleep with the pieces of the puzzle but you wake up with the puzzle complete and I would say that is the difference between knowledge which is remembering the individual pieces and wisdom which is knowing what it means when you put them together, that is one of the functions of Dreaming is the reason by the way, you have never been told to stay awake for a problem, yes, the other function of dreaming that we know of is that dreaming provides a form of emotional first aid that we have. We've done a lot of work and we came up with a theory called Dreaming as Night Therapy and what we discovered is that when we go into sleep, we particularly rely on your neurochemical profile and your physiological anatomy of the brain, that is, the dreaming brain.

It will take difficult painful experiences, sometimes traumatic experiences, and essentially remove the bitter emotional peel from the informational orange, so let's take a step back, what makes a memory emotional, what makes a memory emotional, is that in the moment of the experience, that experience triggered a strong visceral reaction and that visceral reaction is useful to the brain and it wraps that experience in this cloak of what we call emotion, signals it and prioritizes it in the brain, so now you have created a memory of an emotional event in other words. you've created an emotional memory, but what sleep does is take that useful emotional memory and detoxify the emotion from the memory, it removes the bitter emotional peel from the informational orange that it is almost and that's why we call it night therapy. that the next day you come back and now you feel better about those experiences so you have a memory of an emotional event but it is no longer emotional in itself you do not regurgitate that same visceral reaction that you had at the time of learning so the brain has done this elegant trick of eliminating the emotion of memory, so that's the second benefit, um, is that it provides it's not time that heals all wounds, it's time during sleep and particularly during sleep that provides emotional convalescence.

It's funny because there's a stereotype that we should never go to bed angry at each other, as a result you'll wake up a lot less angry Matt, we have a closing tradition on this podcast where the last guest asks a question for the next guest without know who it's going to be. ask her about the question that our previous guest left you, obviously, they didn't know who they were leaving it for, but it's very. I love these questions when they challenge, what is the most important way in which you are a contradiction my goodness I am a contradiction in many ways I think I am a contradiction in the sense that within my profession with this field of dream I feel very comfortable I'm reluctant to say confident but I'm very comfortable going on stage, you know, giving a TED talk in front of a couple thousand people and my heart rate will be very stable.

I probably don't feel more like myself on stage alone in front of thousands of people than I do. at any other time in my life is where I feel the most myself but I'm still a contradiction because off stage I'm very insecure I'm very introverted I'm very shy um I don't like being the center of attention And so, I've often struggled with those two things, but the more people that I've talked to now are in the public sphere and the more in this kind of public intellectual sphere that you start to meet, you know very famous people and you meet musicians and what you learn is that they are very similar. , they say they become this version of themselves on stage and then when they're off stage they're radically different people, but that's who I am. a contradiction in that sense I feel very comfortable and very confident on stage in front of thousands of people and for many people speaking in public is one of the most anxiety-inducing things you can ask of anyone, but for me the heart rate is probably in he you know.

Mid 40s, very relaxing for me, but then they put me in a small room with a couple of people, my heart rate is probably through the roof and I've become very introverted, so I'm a contradiction in that sense. Yes, Matthew, thank you. Thank you for taking the time today. I've wanted to talk to you for many years and you never let anyone down, so that's very kind of you to say. It's exceptionally important work and, as you said at the beginning of this conversation, we often neglect the medicinal properties of a good night's sleep. for things like diet, medications, or exercise, anything else except your voice and the passion behind it. has led a charge in society that is waking us up, no pun intended, with the virtues, the power and the importance of having a good night's sleep, but in a nice way, in a way that I find really empowering and actionable, and that's the most important thing, so thank you for that, Matthew, thank you and thank you for saying the last part, especially me.

I don't think I can claim that from the beginning. I think I'm doing much better as I go. I'm a little better as a public communicator and less puritanical and dictatorial in my dream message. I think he did a terrible job of getting it out there. I'm learning and I'm being more sensitive, but it's always a pleasure to hear people's comments. about what I'm not doing well because I would love to do it better and better if I could, but thank you for saying those kind words and thank you again for inviting me to give me this opportunity to speak.

I will now anoint you as a sleep ambassador from this moment on, thank you very much again Stephen, thank you very much, short words from one of our sponsors. I must say that I have been on a long journey with this brand because when I started my business in new territories When we first moved the social chain to New York City, the first place we went was to work, we moved four of the members of our team to New York City and built the business from there. I have to say there is something magical about weworks.

I've spent the last two or three weeks in Los Angeles on a small job and when you walk in the front door every day it's almost like that feeling of community, that feeling of magical excitement, camaraderie is tangible and you don't get it when You work at home, you don't feel it as often when you're sitting on your bed in front of your laptop. There's something about getting out there and dedicating yourself to a small job that makes me feel a sense of entrepreneurship, creativity, construction, and form. that we worked to design both, both in the way that they offer subscriptions so that you can work, you know, on demand, but also that the flexibility of the contracts means that it is the perfect place for companies to scale their companies and, if haven't done it yet, check where you work and want, you can go to we dot Co slash CEO where you can try your local wework for a day with 50 off, just download the wework On Demand app and use the code diary at the end the purchase, you know, I never Normally choose the chocolate-flavored heels.

My favorites are the banana flavored ones. I love the salted caramel flavor, but recently I think I partly blame Jack on my team, who is obsessed with chocolate-flavored cures. I started drinking the chocolate flavored heels for the first time. time and I absolutely love them, my life means I sometimes ignore my diet and it's funny, that's part of the reason why I've had a lot of guests on this podcast recently who talk about diet and health and that kind of stuff because I'm Trying to make an active effort to get healthier and lose a little bit of weight too, but to get healthier and the role that he's going to play in my life means that in those moments that I can sometimes reach for, you know?

Junk food, having a nutritionally complete option, high in fiber, incredibly high in protein, that has all the vitamins and minerals that my body needs at my fingertips and that I can consume on the go, is where it has always been a factor. change for me foreign