Sleep Expert Matthew Walker: Do THIS to Sleep Through The Night And Never Wake Up Tired Again

Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:01):
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(00:25):
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Speaker 2 (00:45):
We estimate that approximately eighty percent of people who have
sleep amnia are undiagnosed.

Speaker 1 (00:51):
That's crazy. Please welcome Maria.

Speaker 2 (00:55):
What is good sleep and should we just use the
metric of quanta? The range is somewhere between seven to
nine hours. Once you start to get less, the shorter
your sleep, the shorter your life. When sleep is abundant,
all of a sudden, your appetite hormones are rebalanced, so
you naturally stop eating as much as you wanted to

(01:17):
the weight starts to come off you, and you're simply
sleeping the weight off yourself.

Speaker 1 (01:22):
It sounds like you're saying that sleep is that number
one domino that then naturally helps all of the others.

Speaker 2 (01:29):
If you are not sleeping in harmony with your natural
biological sort of rhythm, then your sleep quantity and quality
is worse. Regularity maybe as if not more important than quantity.
And I would say to anyone listening, if you're going
to do anything with this podcast, just do this one thing.

Speaker 1 (01:48):
The number one health and wellness podcast, jayd. Hey, everyone,
welcome back to On Purpose, the place you to become
the happier, healthier, and more healed three of the most
important priorities in our lives. Today's guest is someone that
I've been wanting to speak to for a long long

(02:10):
time about a subject that I believe is critical to
our health, happiness, and healing. Today I get to speak
to Matthew Walker, a sleep expert, scientist, author, podcast host,
and professor of neuroscience at UC Berkeley. Translated in forty
different languages, his best selling book Why We Sleep explores

(02:32):
the goal to reunite humanity with sleep Matthew's work has
shaped public understanding of how a simple thing likes sleep,
impacts memory, aging and disease prevention. Please welcome to On Purpose,
Matthew Walker. Matt it's great to have you.

Speaker 2 (02:48):
Here, Jay, that absolute pleasure to be here. Thank you
so much for having me and giving me the opportunity
to speak the voice of sleep.

Speaker 1 (02:57):
I love it. I love it. Matthew. Let's dive straight
in because there's so much to decipher with you, and
I want to start by asking you how much sleep
do we actually need?

Speaker 2 (03:08):
Yeah, it's an interesting question, and there is definitely a range,
you know, I think there is, and perhaps even populated
by idiots like me that there was this magical eight
hour number that was you know, necessary and get anything
less and there's doom and gloom. The range is somewhere
between seven to nine hours for the average adult. And
what we certainly know is that once you start to

(03:29):
get less than seven hours of sleep, we can measure
impermit in both your brain performance as well as your
body metrics. So there is a range. But in some
ways it's also a question of what is good sleep
and should we just use the metric of quantity and
we absolutely should because using that sweet spot of seven

(03:51):
to nine hours, it looks as though the shorter your sleep,
the shorter your life. Short sleep predicts all cause mortality,
so duration total man is necessary. But if you actually
look at the science, what is good sleep can be
really answered by a four part equation that in my mind,
there are really sort of four macros of good sleep

(04:12):
three macros of food, fat, protein, carbohydrate for sleep four
macros and you can remember it by the acronym QQRT,
and it stands for quantity, quality, regularity, and timing. So quantity,
you're absolutely right, somewhere between seven and nine is that fit.
Quality is about the continuity of your sleep. Is your

(04:34):
sleep fragmented and littered with all of these awakenings and
you're awake for a lot of the night, that's not
good quality of sleep. So you could be in bed
for nine and a half hours and still get seven
hours of sleep, but you're spending two and a half
hours of time awake. That's not good quality of sleep.
Then we can speak about regularity going to bed at

(04:56):
the same time, waking up at the same time. It
sounds very benign. Well, do I really have to worry
about regularity. There's a great study and they looked at
regularity and quantity. Both of them predicted all cause mortality.
So if you're very regular and you get that seven
to nine hours of sleep, you have the lowest mortality risk.
But then because they had these two measures in the

(05:18):
same individuals, they put them in the same statistical analysis
and did the sort of Coke Pepsi challenge between the two.
What they found is that regularity beat out quantity in
terms of predicting your mortality, meaning regularity maybe as if
not more important than quantity. Now you've got to get both.

(05:39):
But so QQR quantity quality regularity timing. Timing sounds like regularity,
and you think, well, what's the difference. Timing is about
your Krono type? Are you a morning type, evening type,
or a neutral. And it turns out, by the way,
that if you're a night out, it's not your fault.
It is genetically a large genetically determined There are at

(06:01):
least twenty two different genes that dictate whether you want
to be a morning person or an evening person. So
you don't get the choice. It's gifted to you at birth.
And what we find is that if you are not
sleeping in harmony with your natural biological sort of rhythm,
then your sleep quantity and quality is worse. So let's

(06:22):
just say we take someone who goes to bed at
ten pm and wakes up at six am. Well, if
you're a slight morning type, that's actually quite ideal for you.
But if you're an evening type who likes to go
to bed at two am and maybe wake up at
ten am, then it's the same eight hour window that
they're getting. But if the night our two am to

(06:44):
ten am is forced to sleep from ten pm to
six am still eight hours, the quality of their sleep
that they get will no word be as sufficient as
the morning type. So some people will come to our
sleep center and say, I have terrible sleep onset insomnia.
I get into bed and I'm awake for the first

(07:04):
two hours, and then I fall asleep, and we do
a CRONA type assessment, which is morning type evening type.
And by the way, people can do this online very quickly.
Right now. You can just type into Google m e
Q test me EQ. It stands for Morning this Evening
this questionnaire and it fits very well with your genetics.

(07:25):
Takes about three minutes when we do this type of
assessment with them, what we realize is that they don't
have insomnia. They're a night owl, but they're trying to
sleep like a morning type. And so when you sleep
sort of against your natural biological predilection, your sleep is
not going to be as good as it could be

(07:47):
if you move yourself closer to your natural, innate biological tendency.
Does that make sense? So those to me would be yeah, yeah,
can you shift your sleep?

Speaker 1 (07:58):
If people want to have Someone said Matt, that made
so much sense. I've been a night on my whole life,
but I just feel like I should be trying to
sleep early and wake up earlier. It would be better
for my partner, would be better for my lifestyle, would
better for my kids. Whatever it is. Can you shift
your type?

Speaker 2 (08:16):
It's a really good question. I get asked that a
lot because in some ways, what I'm talking about is
the ideal world, and drum roll, none of us live
in the ideal world. We live in this thing called
the real world. So you know, stop your fancy sleep
science and tell me just you know, can that change?
There was a study done in by a group in
Australia and they took I think it was about eleven

(08:38):
different things that you had to do as a night
owl to see if they could drag you back so
you felt more capable of going to sleep earlier. And
it was things like, as soon as you wake up,
eat a large breakfast, gon't get daylight first thing, exercise
before midday, do not nap, take an earlier lunch, don't

(08:59):
nap again in the afternoon. In the afternoon, start to
get as much darkness as you can, meaning put shades
on if you're going to go outside in the evening,
make sure that you eat at least three hours before
you expect to go to bed, and then try to
push your sort of alarm clock the next morning by
about one to two hours. And they collected all of

(09:20):
these different sort of regiments and sure enough they were
able to drag people back by a little bit over
one hour, which sounds great, but the problem is these
were extreme night owls who would prefer to go to
sleep at maybe let's say one thirty am. That means
they're still having to go to bed biologically at twelve
thirty am. It's not the nine to thirty PM or

(09:42):
the ten PM that you would prefer. And imagine trying
to capitulate and adhere to that regiment for the rest
of your life. So there is some wiggle room. It
seems that you can sort of manipulate. But in truth,
I think what we have to try and do as
best we can is to say, how can I align

(10:04):
myself better with my biology. When you fight biology, you
normally lose, and the way you know you've lost is
disease and sickness. And that's what we see with night
owls who are sort of trying to sleep against their tendency.
That said, though, is there a way that you can
I mean, hack isn't the right word, but there are

(10:24):
ways that you can try to help yourself. So think
about what you do in the morning that takes time.
So is it that you sort of, you know, make
the coffee, you put the coffee and the coffee pot,
You get your clothes ready for work, you pack your
bag for the gym after work. All of these things
you can do ahead of time the night before. To
take that fifteen minutes of added time the next morning

(10:47):
and say, allow yourself to sleep a little bit later,
see at least getting closer to your natural tendency. Then
go to the front end of sleep and say, what
is it that I do in the last fifteen minutes
before I go to bed? Well, I usually sort of
maybe I take a shower, maybe I change for bed,
Maybe you know, I brush my teeth, maybe some people
take their makeup off, whatever it is, Set an alarm

(11:09):
two hours before bed, do all of those things, and
then right before you go to bed, when that alarm
goes off, the to bed alarm, all you do is
get up and you go straight to bed. So you've
saved yourself fifteen minutes on the front end, So you
can go to bed fifteen minutes sort of later, and
you can wake up fifteen minutes later, but you're not
necessarily having to go to work any later. So does

(11:33):
that make some sense? So you can try to short
sort of thin slice some of that a little bit.

Speaker 1 (11:38):
Yeah, absolutely. If you're someone who's waking up tired regularly,
Like right now, someone's listening and they're just like Jane Matt,
I wake up every day and I'm just tired. Yeah,
and I'm trying to get the right amount of sleep,
but I'm still figuring it out. Where do I start?
What would you encourage them to look.

Speaker 2 (11:54):
At so I think the first thing, let's go back
to the four principles. Are you getting a concert seven
to nine hours of time at least in bed? Next,
are you trying to assess your sleep and say, am
I waking up a lot throughout the night? I would
say that's one of the first places I would go to.
If yeah, if the If you're not feeling restored and

(12:16):
refreshed by your sleep the next day and you're getting
four hours of sleep at night, then it's obvious it's
just not the right quantity. But if you're being good
and you're spending sufficient time in bed but still feeling
unrefreshed and restored, we have to ask are you waking
up a lot throughout the night? If you are, let's
figure out why is it that you are, for example,

(12:37):
snoring a lot throughout the night, and you have undiagnosed
sleep app near and you can just download an app
on your phone. I have no association with them. It's
called snare lab, So snare Lab and you download it.
It records your breathing. You place the phone next to
you on your bed. Then in the morning it shows
you a Richter shock sort of scale throughout the night.

(12:59):
And it quantifies your snoring into quiet, moderate, loud, and epic.
And the frightening thing is you can then tap anywhere
throughout the night and you can hear yourself snoring in
a way that we don't. So the next thing is,
let's make sure that you don't have an undiagnosed sleep disorder.
Then I would say, is it a case that you're
maybe over consuming on caffeine during the day. Some people

(13:24):
will feel completely comfortable having an espresso with dinner and
they say, I fall asleep and I stay asleep. So
I'm one of those. And it is genetically determined who
can metabolize caffeine quickly and it has no effect. We've
done studies and unfortunately, even if you do fall asleep
and stay asleep, that caffeine can prevent you from going
into the deepest stages of what we call deep non

(13:46):
rapidi movement sleep. That's where you get a lot of
restoration sensation from. So maybe we need to ask how
much caffeine are you taking, the dose and the timing
make the poison. Try to cut yourself off after about
three cups and try to stay away from caffeine at
least ten to twelve hours before you expect to go
to bed. The final thing I would probably say is

(14:07):
are you also using anything in the evening to help
you fall asleep? And the principal thing I'm talking about
here is alcohol. It's probably the most misunderstood sleep aid
that there is out there. It's actually not a sleep aid,
and it will fragment your sleep and block you from
getting rapid eye movement sleep. So what we would do
is we would march you through a set of environment

(14:29):
or behavioral things. What are you doing in terms of
your bed timing, are you spending a lot of time awake?
And also the things that you're taking into your body alcohol, caffeine, etc.
The final thing I would say is stress and anxiety
if there is one outside of skeletal pain. The principal
reason that we as a society seem not to be

(14:51):
sleeping is this role that acts of anxiety. Because, and
you've spoken so eloquently about this, in this modern era,
we are con instantly on reception. Very rarely do we
do reflection. And the only time now in the modern
world when we do reflection is when our head hits
the pillow, and that's the last time that we need

(15:12):
to do reflection, because at that point the rolodex of
anxiety starts worrying. At that point you start to ruminate.
When we ruminate, we catastrophize, and then everything feels twice
as bad in the dark of night than it does
in the light of day. And at that point we're
dead in the water for the next two hours. So
the final thing I would say is, let's speak about

(15:33):
your mental state. So does that give you a sense
of sight? The pinwheel diagnostics that we would go.

Speaker 1 (15:38):
Through, we love it. I love it. I love the acronym.
I love how simple and formulaic it is for us
to be able to actually measure what's going wrong, and
I can. I'm fortunate and very grateful and knock onward,
sleep very very well and generally always have. But whenever
I have had disturbances in my sl I can easily

(16:01):
pinpoint it to something you've said. And that shows me
how great the model is. Because as someone who is
lucky and fortunate enough to have great sleep, when I
have been disrupted, it's always been related either to caffeine,
to stress and anxiety. I can easily draw the parallels
because it's such a rare occurrence, and so I can
see why and when I want to dive into each

(16:22):
of those, let's start with sleep apnea, because I think
that's something a lot of us don't actually know enough about,
and so I love the fact that people can use
the apps or lab as you mentioned, how many people
actually struggling with sleep apnea don't even know about it?
And what is actually happening if you have sleep apnea?

Speaker 2 (16:41):
Yeah, two great questions. So right now, we estimate that
approximately eighty percent of people who have sleep apnia are undiagnosed.

Speaker 1 (16:49):
That's crazy, which, if you look.

Speaker 2 (16:51):
At the numbers, is going to be a non trivial
proportion of the population. And the reason it's so dangerous
is because when you have sleep apna, essentially what's happening
is that your airway is either partially becoming obstructed or
like a straw, it's collapsing flat entirely. Now, if it
starts to become obstructed, so let's say you're sleeping on

(17:15):
your back and the airway flaps in that airway are
starting to give weight to gravity, then you'll start to
get a partial blocking, a partial what we call occlusion
of the airway. And that's what you hear. When you
hear the sound, that's the sort of the flapping of
the partial occlusion. And then when you stop breathing entirely,

(17:35):
at that point, the airway has completely collapsed, the straw
has gone flat, and after about fifteen or twenty seconds,
your brain stem registers the alarming buildup of carbon dioxide
in your blood because at that point you are slowly asphyxiating,
and it sends a wake up trigger up to your cortex,
and then all of a sudden you hear and you gasp,

(17:58):
and you're awake. So imagine now we have a way
that we measure these sort of occlusions and these partial collapses,
and it's called the a HI score. And don't worry
about this stands a fort the apnea hypot nea index.
Suffice it to say that we look to see how
many events like this are you having per hour of sleep,

(18:20):
And if you were to have very mild sleep at
near you may be having five, ten, fifteen of these events.
That's considered mild. Some people could have eighty of them perhaps,
But let's just say you have mild sleep at near
ten of these events an hour, and you're in bed
for eight hours. So imagine the following scenario with undiagnosed
mild sleep apna. What if I were to say tonight,

(18:42):
I'm going to come into your bedroom, Jay, and every
hour I'm going to throckle you, strangle you to the
point where you actually stop breathing. And I'm going to
do that ten times every hour for every one of
the eight hours. So I'm going to do that eighty
times throughout the night. Do you think you're going to
feel restored and refresh by a sleep the next poem?
And the answer is no. But that's what Now that's hyperbolic,

(19:05):
of course, but in some ways that's what we're facing
even with the mildest version of undiagnosed sleep apnea. That's
why sleep apnea untreated is associated with a very significant
increase in all cause mortality as well as increases immortality
related to diabetes, to cardiovascular disease, as well as certain

(19:25):
forms of cancer. So I think for me, it's the
case of it's not only going to erode the quantity
of your life, meaning your lifespan, it will certainly shorten
your health span. That's what most of us are worried about,
not really our lifespan, it's our health span. None of
us want to live with disease or sickness. I certainly
don't want to. And I remember there was a patient

(19:47):
that we work with with sleep apnea, and after they
were treated, they were saying, well, before that, I just
thought this was me at fifty seven years old. I
just thought I would deteriorated with age. And I realized
there was some one in there that wasn't the way
I felt. And when you treated me with sleep apnea,
it was almost as though someone cognitively had wiped a

(20:10):
fogged glass clear and finally I could see again. And
so that's why I think so many people can benefit
by way of just simply doing taking this app seeing
whether you snore. Also, you can do something called the
stop bang questionnaire so stop all in caps, dash B

(20:32):
A NG, and you can do it also online, and
it's a very quick questionnaire, probably about two minutes, and
it will evaluate your risk likelihood of having sleep apnar
one of those two. If you fear that you have
sleep apnea, or if you know that your partner has
sleep apnre please go and get it seen to. It's
a laughing about you know. We think, well, they sound

(20:55):
like a chainsaw, they wake the neighbors up. It's almost
this thing of sort of humor. Trust me, when it
comes to your health and your wellness, it is anything
but a funny story when it comes to undiagnosed sleep
at MEA.

Speaker 1 (21:07):
Yeah, thank you so much for giving sense practical tips
as to how we can check as well. And I
hope everyone is listening and watching. Please go do that
because the fact that eighty percent of people may not
have a clue and that could be the secret behind
better sleep is crazy to me that we haven't uncovered
it for eighty percent of people.

Speaker 2 (21:27):
That's huge, and so many downstream consequences happen when they
get treated that they are typically overweight, they usually have
high levels of blood sugar, of blood glucose, they typically
have hypertension, high blood pressure. And what's nice is that
when you were to say, okay, we've got to have
you reducing your food intake, we need to stop you

(21:48):
from eating sugar, we need to get you to the gym,
all of those things of herculean in their challenge. And
people often in that state of being overweight, hypertensive, high glycemic,
they just find it so hard to change. But if
you treat them with sleep apnea. When sleep is abundant
in good quantity and quality, which it will be when

(22:09):
you treat them, all of a sudden, your appetite hormones
are rebalanced, so you naturally stop eating as much as
you want it to. The weight starts to come off you,
and you're simply sleeping the weight off yourself. It's a
largely painless equation. You don't crave those sugary sort of
high sugar sort of immediate hit foods, so your blood

(22:32):
sugar comes back into control, and you're more motivated to
be physically active, meaning that your cardiovascular health. So I
sometimes think of sleep. You know, if you've seen one
of those fancy music studios where they've got all of
the dials on the mixing deck and you can move
any one of them. But sleep, to me, is that
one dial all the way at the far left that

(22:53):
if you move it, all of those other dials just
kind of move up. It's the tide that floats all
of our other health. And so if you get that
one straight, so many things, as a manifolds like an
archimedes lever, will consequently change downstream for the better. You
don't even have to do anything. You just have to
start sleeping better.

Speaker 1 (23:13):
Let's take a short break to hear from our sponsors,
and let's get back to our episode. It sounds like
you're saying that sleep is that number one domino that
then naturally helps all of the others. Yeah, and I've
had everything that you just said. I for the past
six weeks have been in LA which is rare in

(23:34):
terms of I havn't traveled, I haven't jumped on a plane.
I've been in one place. And because of that, I've
been able to really dial in on everything from sleep,
working out, eating right because I've had no reason to
have an error because I've been at home. And you know,
when you travel, you maybe whatever right, you eat something
that wasn't a hotel and whatever it maybe. I've been

(23:54):
here for six weeks, been on a phenomenal schedule. Last
week I was only gone for like four hours away,
took a three hour flight to a three hour flight back.
I was gone for like four to six hours in total,
and I landed back at four am, which is rare
for me. I don't do that. I usually sleep by
nine point thirty pm. I'm a morning person for sure,

(24:14):
and I got back at four am. I tried to
get some sleep. I probably got up at eight am
because that's all I could sleep at that time. I
got in a workout, but I had to tell my
trainer to lower my level of workout because I was
more tired than I've felt for a long time, and
I actually felt weaker. So I've been feeling really strong
across the last six weeks, but I felt weaker. I

(24:35):
was like, I don't think I can lift that much today.
I'm not feeling up to it. On top of that,
all my sugar cravings went through the roof that day. Interesting, Yeah,
And I know, and you notice it so significantly when
you're at the other end where you're like, oh wait,
I haven't needed refined sugar for like weeks on end now,
but this one day, all I'm craving is fats and
sugars and that's that's all I'm after. And I did

(24:58):
give in, and I was okay about it. But but
it's so interesting to feel it that abruptly and that
extremely Yeah, and you're so right. I wanted the sugars,
I wanted the facts I wanted. I couldn't I couldn't
work out as well. All of it makes a difference.

Speaker 2 (25:13):
And in some ways what's great now is the science
is compelling in terms of the mechanism, such that, firstly,
there are two appetite regulating hormones that called leptin and grellin. Now,
Leptin is an appetite hormone that when it's released, it says, Okay,
you're satisfied with your food, you don't want to eat more,
you're satiated. Grellin is the opposite. It says you're not satisfied,

(25:36):
you're still hungry, you need to eat more. And what
we find is that when we start to sort of
thin slice people's sleep, and it doesn't take very much,
you can sort of get maybe six hours of sleep
for five nights, or five hours of sleep for four nights,
all of a sudden, the hormone leptin, which says you're satisfied,
you're good, you don't need to eat anymore, that starts

(25:58):
to decrease at one point. Well, it usually takes about
four nights of somewhere between four to five hours of
sleep reduction to already see those changes and see appetite
behavior changes as a consequence. So it doesn't take very
much and then if that wasn't bad enough, grellin the
hormone that says, oh no, no, you're still hungry, please please

(26:20):
eat more, that goes up. So in some ways it's
double jeopardy that you're getting punished twice for the same
crime of insufficient sleep, once by switching off the signal
of I'm full, I don't need to eat, and once
again by I'm hungry and I need to eat more.
Then what we have also found is that we have
inside of us what we call endocannabinoids. So people have

(26:44):
heard of sort of cannabis the way that most people
have heard about it is an exogenous sort of you know,
intake of cannabis. But we have naturally occurring cannabinoids in
our system called endocannabinoids. Now, many people will, let's say,
know someone, of course, I'm not gonna judge anyone. We'll
know someone who've said, when when I smoke weed, I

(27:05):
get the munchies, I get hungry. That seems to be
one of the consequences of these cannabinoids. Now, endocannabinoids inside
of us also do the same thing. They can make
us more hungry. When you are underslept, you're naturally occurring cannabinoids,
these endocannabinoids, they also increase, and that drives you to
eat even more in addition to the changes in leptin

(27:28):
and grellin. And then finally, we did a study with
brain imaging where we scan people's brains with and without
good sleep, looking at different food items from highly desirable
to highly healthy. When you are underslept, the rational control
regions of your brain in the frontal cortex they get
shut down, and these more hardonic, deep emotional brain centers

(27:49):
that respond to rewarding pleasurable foods, they started to become
much more reactive, and it set you on this path
of almost obesogenic eating. You crave those sort of you know,
the sugars, the chocolates, the stodgy carbohydrates, and you don't
go towards the leafy greens and the healthy nuts. You
go after the pizza and sort of the salty snacks.

(28:12):
So all of which is to say, you get this
sort of conspiring both within the body and also at
the level of the brain that explains exactly what you
were just describing as a sort of a phenomenon. And
that's why I think this You've always got to be
careful with epidemiological studies where you say, okay, shorter sleep
equals higher body mass index, higher chances of obesity. There

(28:33):
could be many things. But when you experimentally manipulate sleep
and you can unpack the mechanism, then we can entertain
causality for sure.

Speaker 1 (28:41):
So what's you said earlier we should be in three
hours before we go to bed. What's the ideal meal
type three hours before we go to bed, A so
that we don't get hungry just before we go to bed. Yeah,
and B because I also understand that the digestive process
can actually make sleeping much harder.

Speaker 2 (29:02):
Yeah, and so what should we be.

Speaker 1 (29:03):
Trying to digest in those three hours that keeps us
full and doesn't disrupt our sleep.

Speaker 2 (29:08):
Yeah, it's a really good question. And so they're the
sort of the three hours. What we were trying to
do is take those night owls and try to drag
them back in time. But if you're not a night
owl trying to sort of manipulate your sort of sleep timing,
we can then just ask for anyone who's just you know,
in their standard sleep regiment, when should you cut yourself off?

(29:29):
And it's actually a bit of a myth because there
is there's this strong sentiment out there on social media
you need to stop eating maybe three or four hours
before bed. If you look at the data, and I
did this sort of analysis of all literature, if you
eat as close as sixty minutes before bed, it doesn't
seem to hurt your sleep. Now if you sort of
go forty five minutes or thirty minutes, then yes, it

(29:51):
does seem to have an impact blast radius on your sleep. Nevertheless,
that's a very different question than saying, what would be
beneficial to my sleep? I'm phrasing the question as at
what point does it become harmful for your sleep? And
the answer is you can eat up to an hour
before bed and show no harm on your sleep. But

(30:12):
that's very different than saying, but what if you'd stop
eating two hours or two and a half hours, would
that have actually improved your sleep. I think what we're
seeing in the data is that it's very idiosyncratic that
you need to test drive it and you will know
which kind of quote unquote type you are. Some people,
mostly night owls, have a preference to eat late in

(30:34):
the day or early in the evening and very little
in the morning, whereas morning types like to eat sort
of breakfast like a king, lunch like a prince, and
dinner like a pauper. You know, they scale down. I
think it's dependent on your krona type. That said, though,
the two ways that food can disrupt us. First, if
we're eating high sugar content foods at night, it has

(30:59):
a disruptive ima packed and we know this in part
because it could be the not just the activating level
of sort of alertness in the brain that happens with
a sugar hit. It's also that simple sugars are what
we call thermogenic, meaning that when we take on board sugar,
it can just very gently increase our core body temperature

(31:22):
quite quickly. And it turns out temperature is key for sleep.
We need to drop our brain and our body temperature
by about one degree celsius or about two to three
degrees fahrenheit to fall asleep and stay asleep. And it's
the reason you will always find it easier to fall
asleep in a room that's too cold than too hot.
The room that's too cold. It's taking you in the

(31:43):
right direction for good sleep at night. So when you
onboard simple sugars at night, it starts to just moderately
just gently increase your core body temperature, which can disrupt
your sleep. So I would say content, try to aim for.
If you're going to after sort of carbohydrate, make sure
that they're complex carbohydrates that release their energy in a

(32:06):
much slower fashion. Also, try to aim for a protein
based you know, yogurt is fantastic at that point, make
sure it's not, you know, highly sweetened yogurt, because then
you're taking on board sugar unfortunately, So yogurt together with
some kind of slow release carbohydrate is probably a fantastic
approach to food. The second way though, that you can

(32:26):
disrupt yourself above and beyond the macros of food, is
that when you eat too late, particularly spicy food, it
can cause acid reflux. And that reflux is one of
the other reasons that eating too close to bed will
disrupt the quality of your sleep. So try to go
after more of a slow release sort of protein, maybe

(32:47):
a casine based protein, and then aim for if you're
going to go after carbohydrate, just make it a smaller
portion and make it a complex carbohydrate. That's probably the
best recommendation.

Speaker 1 (32:57):
Yeah, No, it's so important to eat about all the
versions of it because I do think sometimes when you hear, oh, yeah,
you can eat up until you know the last hour,
you'll be fine, it's so different to well, how do
I get into performing at my best and feeling at
my best? And when you're already struggling with the quality
of sleep, every minute kind of factor is going to

(33:21):
make a difference. And it's just, yeah, I'm really happy
that you've gone into the detail there of like, you know,
why is it that we're saying three hours or what
does that look like? As I was hearing you speak,
I was just thinking about just how hard it's become
for people to regulate their lives and manage this. I

(33:41):
know in some cultures it's just so natural to eat
really late before you go to bed. How much does
eating a late meal also push back your time of
wanting to go to sleep? Or is there no correlation there?

Speaker 2 (33:55):
No, there actually is a correlation. It's a very astute observation, actually,
which is you can have one type of biological chronotype predilection,
but you can almost violate that biology and override some
of it by creating sort of certain conditions under which
it will distort your natural rhythm. One way that this

(34:18):
rhythm is played out is the release of something called melatonin.
A melatonin is a naturally occurring hormone and it simply
tells your brain and your body when it is darkness,
when it is night, which is to say, melatonin helps
with the timing of our sleep. And there are ways
that you can artificially delay your natural melatonin release. A

(34:41):
good one would be being exposed to too much light
in the evening, too much artificial light, what I would
think of as junk light. There was this concept a
while back of junk DNA. Well, I think there is
something called junk light, and we get too much of
it at night because we are a dark deprived society
in this modern era. But there's other ways that you
can delay your natural biology. And if let's say that

(35:04):
all food was taken away, all electric light was gone,
all internet service was down, and you know, the lights
were out, you would naturally say to me, well, I'm
someone who would probably not get sleepy until midnight. And
then all of a sudden, as I said, no food,
electromagnetic pulse takes out all electricity, everything is gone. All
of a sudden, you probably say, gosh, it's ten point

(35:26):
fifteen pm. How do you feel quite sleepy? And it's
because modernity, through all of its changes, light, social media,
you know, sort of entertainment that were constantly exposed to.
It's dislocated us from our natural sensation of biology. Telling
as it's time to sleep, most of us think that, well,

(35:48):
I'm probably, you know, a midnight to eight am type person.
When if I took you camping in the sierras for
two weeks and we had all of our sort of
fancy technology measuring sleep wake rhythms, and we would actually
find no, you're much closer to a ten twenty to
six thirty am kind of person. But modern sort of

(36:11):
industrial life has come in the way of that and
it is modified op perception. So out to come back
to your elegant insight. There are ways that we can
almost contort our natural biology, one of which is things
like social media, electric light. But another one is that
you can just manipulate things like food timing, and that

(36:33):
food timing will create an activating alertness sensation in the
brain and the body and force you perhaps to go
to bed or feel tired and two hours later than
you naturally would otherwise. So you have the way that
we usually measure someone's natural sort of tendencies is we
bring them into the laboratory and we say say goodbye

(36:53):
to your friends and your family. For the next week,
we take all daylight away, no windows, no nothing, and
we just measure your natural biology when we separate you
from everything that is in the outside world, and that
way we can bring you back to your innate tendencies.
And usually there is quite the mismatch between when we

(37:13):
interview you and say what is your natural rhythm versus
when we measure you what is your biological rhythm? Those
two things are often quite different.

Speaker 1 (37:21):
Yeah, thank you so much. As you were talking, you
mentioned melatonin, and I was thinking about, obviously the rise
in melotonin gummies melatonin supplements I guess you could take
before going to bed, and then you also have sleeping pills.
Walk us through what's in sleeping pills versus melatonin gummies
or the saw and what's your take on both.

Speaker 2 (37:42):
Yeah, it's very interesting, and obviously, just being a scientist
rather than a medical doctor, what I could offer you
is sort of scientifically descriptive advice rather necessarily medically prescriptive advice.
But melatonin has had this meteoric rise in the sleep
supplement world, and now here in America where it's not
regulated by the FDA. You can go into a supermarket

(38:04):
or a grocery store and down there sort of the
health food section, there is this big, sort of purple sector,
and that is the melatonin sector. Melatonin it can be
useful to help regulate your circadian rhythm, and so I
will use it strategically if I'm traveling. If let's say
I go back home to the United Kingdom and I

(38:27):
live just outside of San Francisco, it's eight hours ahead,
so I can use it to try to trick my
brain into thinking, oh, it's nighttime on the first night
I arrive in the UK, when in fact, my melatonin
peak is not going to arrive for at least another
eight hours because I'm still back on California's time. So,
but for the most part, the way people use melatonin

(38:50):
is night after night after night. And if you look
at the studies, melatonin will only increase the speed with
which you fall asleep by about two point two minutes,
and it will only increase the efficiency of your sleep
by about three point seven percent, which isn't that much
more above and beyond placebo and the reason is because

(39:10):
melatonin doesn't participate in the generation of sleep. Melatonin is
a little bit like the starting official at one hundred
meter race. It brings all of the great sleep races
to the line and begins the Great sleep race, but
it doesn't participate in that sleep race. That's a whole
different set of brain chemicals which we'll come onto with
sleeping pills. So that's the reason that melatonin isn't a

(39:33):
particularly effective sleep aid. It's the reason that you will
never see people being prescribed melatonin for insomnia for the
most part, unless they have some kind of circadian rhythm disorder.
So I would say, if you're using melatonin for the
purposes of improving the speed with which you fall asleep
or the generation of sleep, it may be a placebo effect.

(39:55):
And by the way, the placebo effect is the most
reliable effect in all pharmacology. So maybe no, no foul.
The only other caveats I would offer with melotonin first,
because it's not regulated here by the FDA, you don't
know the purity. And there was a great study that's
been replicated and they looked at I think it was
about twenty different vendors of melatonin, and they sampled what

(40:17):
was inside of the pill based on what they said
on the bottle versus what was actually in the pill.
It ranged from about eighty percent less than what it
said to four hundred and sixty percent more than what
it stated on the label. So it's a bit of
a wild west. You don't quite know what you're getting
when you take this need. Yeah, so you've got to,

(40:37):
I would say, be a little bit careful. For the
most part. Melotonin is largely in an at compound anyway,
so we don't need to get sort of, you know,
too phosphorylated about it.

Speaker 1 (40:47):
What's your take on the fact that when we're taking
these I guess artificial supplements of melotonin, that it depletes
our body's ability to make it and regulate it at
the right times that we actually need.

Speaker 2 (41:00):
Yeah, And that's another critical question, and that's one of
the fears that we have. I think the data we
don't have right now to say one way or the other.
But if you think about, let's say a male who's
undergoing a hormone replacement therapy with exogenous testosterone, what we
know is with certain forms of testosterone replacement therapy, after
some period of time, the testes will stop producing their

(41:24):
own testosterone. And even if you were to stop your
exogenous injection of testosterone, your production of testosterone innately never returns.
And the worry is is that the case with melatonin. Now,
there have been a number of case studies that have
looked at melatonin use, let's say, for up to four
or even six weeks of constant use, and when they stop,

(41:48):
melatonin production returns. So it looks as though we don't
have to worry. My worry though, with those data, when
someone has sort of offered them to me, is to say,
but most people in society, they're not using melatonin like that.
They've been using it for years, not six weeks. So
I think I'm still a little bit sort of concerned.

(42:08):
The other thing, or two other things. One is that
the dose that people typically take is what we call
a super physiological dose, meaning it's far higher than anything
your body would naturally release. So people are taking five milligrams,
ten millograms, maybe sometimes even twenty milligrams, whereas what we
would recommend in sleep medicine is somewhere around about one

(42:30):
maybe maximum of three milligrams. So you know, log orders
of magnitude higher. The other thing too to keep in
mind is that melatonin now is being more and more
used in the pediatric setting, so you'll see these melatonin
gummies for kids. And there was some data of gosh
now probably thirty years ago, looking at juvenile mail rats,

(42:53):
meaning that they're going through that sort of adolescent phase,
and they were getting dosed with high amounts of melatonin,
and that high dose of melatonin in the juvenile male
rats actually stunted their sexual development. So it's stunted testicular growth,
and it caused testicular atrophy, meaning shrinking of the testes.
Imagine if I were to go to let's say a

(43:15):
teacher and parent meeting one evening at a school and
get up there and say, I would like you this
evening to start dosing your children with a bioactive hormone.
And it is a hormone that I would like you
to dose your children with every night at maybe five
to ten times their natural release. And also it's a
hormone that may actually disrupt their sexual maturation and development.

(43:40):
Who's with me, you know? And at that point, people
would you know, boo you off the safe rightly? So
now again, I'm being a hyperbolic and we don't know
if there is that concern or not. I'm simply saying
that if we don't know, my sort of suspicion, at
least personally would be I'd probably err on the side
of caution at least stage, particularly because the FDA recently

(44:03):
released data demonstrating that admissions to hospitals for melatonin overdose
have increased by five hundred and three percent in the
past ten years. So there is something going on with melatonin.
I think that we need to be mindful of. Again,
though it's largely an inert compound, so I don't need
to be scam mongering here. Your second part of the

(44:26):
question was sleeping pills. Yeah, and it's a really interesting evolution.
I think we're now at the stage of sleeping pills
three point zero. We sort of web one point h
two point zero three point zero. It's kind of the
same with sleeping pills. We started off with the classic benzodiazepines,
things like valium, and they work to go after an

(44:46):
inhibitary chemical in the brain, neurotransmitter in the brain called GABBA,
which stands for gamma amino butyic acid. Don't worry about
the name. It's simply the red light stop sign for
brain activity. These things like valuum. They would go after
this Gabba system in the brain and they would activate
it and essentially just knock out your cortex. And then

(45:09):
the second generation of sleeping pills came along, the ambient
Lanesta sonatas of this world. They also go after that
Gabba inhibitry and neurotransmitter system in the brain, but they
just sort of tickle the receptor in the brain a
little bit differently, but for the most part they are
doing the same thing. And that's why we call them
the sedative hypnotics, because they are sedating your cortex. Now,

(45:34):
if you take an ambient at full dose, I'm not
going to argue that you're awake, you're clearly not awake,
but to argue that you're in naturalistic sleep. In some ways,
it's an equal fallacy, because if I show you the
electrical signature of your sleep with and without ambient, they're
not the same. And in some ways, ambient will come

(45:55):
in and it will take a bite out of the
deepest of the deep slow waves of deep non rem sleep,
sort of this big dent that you see that happens,
and so again it's not necessarily to say that there
isn't a time and a place for the use of
those medications. Sleep medicine right now does recognize them as

(46:15):
being useful potentially in the short term to start to
begin treatment for insomnia, but they are no longer the
first line recommended treatment. And one of the reasons that
in a book that I wrote where I was sort
of I probably wasn't overly enthusiastic about those WEB two
point zero sleeping pills the ambience less and snartists, and

(46:38):
it was for several reasons. First, because sedation is not sleep,
and when you take those medications you mistake the former
for the latter, but it's not natural sleep. We also
know that those sleeping pills have been associated with higher
risks of mortality in certain forms of cancer. Now those
are associations, we don't know necessarily that that's causal. But

(47:00):
then there was another very interesting study where they looked
at how sleep helps your learning in your memory. And
one of the incredible things about sleep is that it
will take recently learned memories and that memory circuit in
the brain. Sleep will strengthen the synapses so that you
come back the next day, and that memory is almost
like hitting the save button on those memories. Wow, you

(47:22):
cement it into the architecture of the brain. And they
did a study where they dosed animals after learning amaze
or different types of learning, and they could measure the
strength of the memory circuit, and then they gave them
natural sleep, and sure enough, the next day sleep it
almost double the strength of the memory. Then they did
a version where they dosed the animals with a body

(47:44):
appropriate amount of ambient and those animals slept longer. And
you would think, well, if sleep is helping the memories
and strengthening that memory circuit, sleeping longer should lead to
an even greater strengthening of the memory. Unfortunately, ambient had
unwired them memory and it actually reduced the strength of
the memory by fifty five zero. So to me, that's

(48:05):
just a demonstration that perhaps the quality of sleep is
not a naturalistic quality of sleep, and it may not
therefore be transacting the natural functions that sleep typically provides
light learning and memory. There is a newer class of medications, though,
are out on the market, and I think the evidence

(48:27):
right now is still early, but so far, I actually
think that they look really quite effective. And again I
think people had taken my stance to be I'm very
anti pharmacology in general. I'm not. I'm very pro pharmacology
if the pharmacology is good and not necessarily causing you harm.
And these new class of medications they are called the

(48:50):
Dora's Drugs and it's do r A small s and
it's a class of drugs and there are currently three
FDA approved. The first one was called bell Somra and
to play on sort of beautiful sleep, and the actual
chemical name is suborexin. These medications do something really much
more elegant the ambience and the lenestsis said, that's just

(49:13):
a sedative hit to the cortex. These new class of
medications the doors they go after awake promoting chemical called erexin.
You can think of a rexin like the wakefulness volume
button and when it's turned up, we're wide awake. And
these medications they come in and they act like an
additional set of chemical fingers and they just go after

(49:35):
the volume button of wakefulness of a rexin and they
just dial it down and then they step back and
they allow the antithesis of wakefulness to come in its place,
which is this thing called naturalistic sleep. And so I
think right now I'm probably more bullish on those medications. Again,
a lot of water to pass under the bridge before

(49:56):
we understand them, but so far I think that there
are much more elegant, nuanced way of manipulating sleep. The
other thing I would be remiss to mention is there
is an alternative to these medications in general, and it's
called cognitive behavioral therapy for insomnia or CBTI for short.
It is just as effective as sleeping pills in the
short term. But what's nice is that when you stop

(50:18):
working with your therapist after maybe six or eight sessions,
not only do you with a sleeping pill like ambium.
When you stop, you typically go back to the bad
sleep that you are having, or you actually have rebound
insomnia where your sleep is even worse. But with a therapist,
they're giving you the tools and techniques. It's sort of
the difference between let's say, you know, giving a woman

(50:41):
or a man of fish versus teaching them how to fish.
This way, you actually understand how to manipulate your sleep.
They give you the tools and then you can continue
to sleep better for years later, even after you've stopped
utilizing the therapy unlike medications. So I would just say
that that's a little bit about both melotonin, the sort
of the emergence of these new flavors of sleep medications,

(51:03):
and then an alternative should people wish for that.

Speaker 1 (51:05):
Yeah, it's it's so worrying because I think we've got
so used to treating our brain and our mind like technology,
and this desire to just switch it on and off.
Power our power down, power on, power off. It's almost
like you don't ever really stop to think what's happening
in order for that to happen. And I know I

(51:27):
didn't for a long time where I grew up and
you just pop a more paracetamoor from where we're from,
but I go from you know, in the US, and
you've got a headache, Just take this, it's gone. You know,
you can't sleep. Take this. You fall asleep, and you're
not really recognizing what's happening at a chemical level and
how many consequences there are and what's what's actually happening
beneath the scenes. And I think it's so easy to

(51:50):
forget because it's giving you the instant thing that you
want in that moment, but the kind of circuitry that
it's kicking off or closing down as far more long
term consequences that, like you said, we're not even aware of.
It's sad and hard and difficult that wanting to get
these natural things to happen that we are naturally wired

(52:14):
to do. Right. These chemicals are being naturally produced, and
there are natural things we can do to boost those
chemicals within ourselves that hopefully get us to go to sleep,
as you talked about, like seeing light first thing in
the morning, like you know, being outdoor more, reducing blue
light in the evening, reducing exposure to junk light as
you called it, in the evening. I've definitely seen that

(52:35):
one make a big difference. I'm someone who generally loves light.
I really like being in bright places, and my wife's
the opposite. She knows she's very much like wants to
follow the sun, and so when it's dark, she'll be like,
all the lights have to be off in the house.
And recently when we've been watching our shows, we've been
watching our shows in total darkness apart from the screen obviously,
and it's so natural for both of us to just

(52:58):
feel tired earlier, Yeah, and we'll be like, all right,
time to go to bed, and we don't have our
screen in our bedroom, and so we'll finish watching whatever
we're watching, and we've sometimes we're both even like you
can tell we're just falling asleep while watching. We figure
it out, turn it off and go to our bed
and we're out to sleep. And just simply completely making

(53:20):
it dark in the evening has had a huge, huge impact.

Speaker 2 (53:22):
On Honestly, I love that you bring this up. And
I would say to anyone listening, if you're going to
do anything with this podcast in terms of an actionable event,
just do this one thing for the next week. If
you get the opportunity, just do me this favor. Set
it to bed alarm one hour before you would normally
go to bed, and when that alarm goes off, shut

(53:45):
down fifty percent, if not seventy five percent of all
of the lights in your home. And then see how
soperific that will make you feel, how sleepy that you
will make you feel. It's really quite striking. Then don't
just stop there. Do what I would call the off
on off version of the experiment. So baseline, you're coming in,

(54:07):
you're normally leaving the lights on blazing. Now we go
into the on version of the experiment, the intervention, which
is darkness one hour before bed, and then after that
one week, go back to doing what you used to do.
Keep all of the lights blazing for right up until
you go to bed. And don't just ask the question

(54:27):
did my sleep get any better when I did the
manipulation of one hour before bed switched the lights off?
Ask the question did my sleep go back to being
actually worse when I returned to keeping the lights on?
And so you show by directionality, And when you show
by directionality, it's usually a much more powerful version of
the experiment. But and if honestly you can say to

(54:50):
me it made no difference to my sensation of feeling
drowsy and sleepy or the quality of my sleep, then
no problem at all. Keep doing what you're doing and
it just didn't work for you, that's fine too.

Speaker 1 (55:03):
But first, here's a quick word from the brands that
support the show. All right, thank you to our sponsors.
Now let's dive back in. I love what the advice
you give for people who are struggling with insomnia, For
someone who's waking up they go to sleep for three hours,
but then they're up. They finally put themselves back to
sleep after an hour and a half and they sleep

(55:25):
for maybe another three hours, and then they're back up again.
For that person, what's the most helpful way for them
to be able to fall back asleep in that moment.
So we've talked about the roots of the issues and
the core from the acronym, but what about that person
is just like, I just want to know how to
get back to sleep for another three four hours if
I could, Yeah, what's the quickest way I can do that?

Speaker 2 (55:45):
I would say there are three things to keep in
mind here. When I often hear that description, people will
say I always wake up, but it's about three point
fifteen in the morning or it's four ten, and it
just happens so reliably. My first question to them is,
how do you know it's four o'clock in the morning.
That's your problem. You're looking at the clock and knowing

(56:05):
that it's three point fifteen or four am in the morning.
Does you no favors at all? It's not going to
change the outcome. So the first recommendation is remove all
clock faces from the bedroom. It's okay to if you
really must do. Keep your phone next to your bed,
but keep it out of sight, even though I would
strongly recommend that you keep your phone in the kitchen,

(56:26):
or even better still, a friend of mine recommended recently
just put it in the garage. Put it in your
car in the garage, and that way. The amount of
motivation effort to go and get your phone within the
first ten minutes of the morning is very very high,
meaning you're probably not going to do it. So let's
baby steps. Let's just say crawl, walk, run. First thing
to do. Just make sure you can't see any clock faces,

(56:48):
and if you wake up, resist the urge. Because as
soon as you start doing that night after night, you're
actually training your brain, reinforcing it to wake up at
three pin fifteen in the morning. So we've started that.
The next question is, well, what should you do about it?
You know, don't tell me the fancy, remove the clock,
help me at that point at night, either if you've

(57:10):
woken up or you just can't fall asleep. It works
for both of these. The problem here is that you
have to get your mind off itself because at that
moment when you're awake, you start thinking, okay, I'm awake.
This is now going to just obliterate my day. Tomorrow
I've got that important meeting. I'm now going to be underslept.

(57:32):
At that point, the anxiety starts to begin. Then you
start thinking, oh gosh, I remember now I didn't do
that one thing that I should have done for tomorrow morning,
and then I've got to do that thing for next week,
and I also didn't do that thing last week for
and again at that point, that's going to keep you
awake for the next one or two hours. So your
job to try to get back asleep is to disengage

(57:54):
the mind. How do you do that? I would say
there probably four or five different tools that you can use.
Is meditation. It may be or may not be for you,
but if you look at the data, meditation for sleep
immensely powerful. If meditation is not your thing, just do
something simple like breath work and you can just google
box breathing and anything like that is great. You could

(58:18):
also just do a simple body scan. Start at the
top of the head, move down just and again google
body scan and you can start to train yourself to
do that. The next thing you could do is listen
to a sleep story or just listen to a podcast,
make sure it's on a timed sort of shut off.
But again, all of these things common across all of
them is you're getting your mind off itself. If I'm meditating,

(58:41):
I'm not thinking about my worries. If I'm breathing, I'm
focusing on the breath. If I'm doing some kind of
a relaxation, a body scan, again, I'm just moving through
my body. It's very hard for me to think about
my anxieties. If I'm listening to a sleep story, I'm
engaging in sort of the externality of the story, not
my own in internal worries. And then the final thing

(59:02):
that was done is great study done at you see Berkeley,
not by my group. They found that taking yourself on
a mental walk in hyper detail was wonderful. So let's
say it's a walk that I take with my dog,
and you've got to remember it in high detail. So
I think, okay, I open the drawer, which colored leish
am I going to take? I'll take the blue one,
clip it in with my right hand. With my left hand,

(59:24):
I open the door, take a left down the stairs,
go up. It's at that level of detail, and all
of these things are taking your mind off itself because
at that time of night, sleep is a little bit
like trying to remember someone's name. Sleep is not something
that you make happen. Sleep is something that happens to you,

(59:44):
And like trying to remember someone's name, the harder you try,
the further you push it away, and it's only when
you stop trying does it return to you absolutely, and
that's the same way with sleeping. Normally, if you engage
in some of these methods and tools, the next thing
that you remember is your alarm going off in the morning. Why,
because you took your mind off itself. If that doesn't

(01:00:07):
work and you are consistently waking up and spending long
amounts of time in bed awake, then we may have
to implement one of the methods in cognitive behavioral therapy
for insomnia, which is something called bed time restructuring. It
used to be called sleep restriction therapy, and for reasons,
obviously you can think it's not the best name. Where

(01:00:30):
you come to me and say, look, I'm having real
problems getting enough sleep. My say, great, we're going to
do sleep restriction therapy and you say no, no, wait, wait
a second, you didn't hear me, I can't get enough sleep,
and you're saying you're going to restrict my sleep. It's
actually not sleep restriction, it's time in bed restriction. So
you tell me, Okay, i am in bed for eight
hours and I'm awake for two hours across the night,

(01:00:53):
so I'm only getting six hours of sleep, but I'm
in bed for eight hours. To me, as a sleep scientist,
I then know we've got to constrain the time with
which you are giving your brain the opportunity to sleep,
because your brain has become inefficient. It's like saying, I
go to the gym and I take an hour to
work out, but if you are to actually observe me,

(01:01:15):
I'm actually only working out for about twenty five minutes
because you know, at the end, I finish my you know,
my last strip. Then I do the eleventh rep, which
is I pick up my phone and I start checking
social media, and then I'm talking to people. Utterly inefficient.
But then at some point someone says to me, look, today,
you've only got a maximum of thirty minutes in the gym,
and as soon as your thirteen minutes is up, we

(01:01:35):
kick you out. The first couple of days I'm still
doing what I normally do, and I get through maybe
fifteen percent of my workout because I'm not doing it efficiently.
After a week of doing that, I now realize as
soon as I go into the gym, I put my
phone down and I just go at it real hard,
and I still get my twenty five minutes of workout
in the thirty minutes. It's the same with sleep restriction.

(01:01:57):
You tell me, Okay, I'm in bed for eight hours
and I only get about sort of six hours of sleep. Well,
now I'm going to say I'm going to limit you,
and I'm going to take one hour of sleep away
from you. You wake up at the same time, but
I want you to go to bed consistently one hour later,
maybe even one and a half hours later. You tell
me I go to bed normally at ten pm. I

(01:02:18):
say you are now not allowed to get into bed
until eleven thirty pm. Push through. I don't care. And
then you've got to wake up at the same time.
And after about three or four days of this, your
brain starts to build up. Now, the first couple of nights,
you're still going to be sleeping bad. But then after
a couple of nights. Your brain starts to build up
this starvation, this hunger for sleep. It creates a sleep

(01:02:41):
dead and then after a while, it's like resetting the
Wi Fi button on your router. The brain thinks, gosh,
I don't have the luxury of eight and a half
hours of time in bed. I'm only allowed six and
a half now or seven. And now, all of a sudden,
it becomes incredibly efficient. You stop waking up in the
middle of the night. If you do wake up, you
fall back asleep very quickly, and you end up getting

(01:03:04):
maybe six and three quarter hours of sleep within seven
whereas you used to get six and a half hours
of sleep with eight and a half hours of time
in bed. So it's a quite convoluted method, but I
would say I would use that as the last approach. Firstly,
try to get your mind off itself. If it's still
not working, think about sleep restriction therapy. You can just

(01:03:25):
google it. It's pretty simple.

Speaker 1 (01:03:27):
Great advice. Thank you so much. I love how tactical
and practical you are. Oh, it's so helpful. Like if
there's anyone who's listening to this episode right now, and
you have a friend or a family member who's struggling
with sleep. Please pass this episode on because I've never
heard someone make it that granular as you are. Honestly,
it's so brilliant and it's so helpful because it's so

(01:03:50):
easy to get philosophical about these ideas, and we all
understand how important sleep is and how much we need it.
And you know, I can hear everyone going, yeah, but
what do I do? Really, You've created a map for people,
So thank you so.

Speaker 2 (01:04:02):
Much for you. Well, I think I really it was
very guilty of doing this. You know, when I first
came out a couple of years ago speaking about sleep,
I was speaking all about the science of sleep and
the bad things that happened about sleep. And I think
someone even said my ted talk, which I think was
called they name it sleeps your Superpowers, I mean, should
have really been called sleep or else dot dot dot,
you know, and it did people with insomnia no favors.

(01:04:25):
I understand that now. But I think what I've tried
to do is people have said, Okay, I get it,
sleep is important, but how how do I get it?
And I completely suffered what we call in neurology is
HEMI neglect one half of what I needed to do
as a sort of a public intellectual regarding sleep was missing,

(01:04:45):
which is I was telling everyone how critical it was
and the bad things that happen when you don't get it.
But I wasn't being very helpful because I wasn't telling
anyone how it works and how you know, where is
the user manual for sleep? And that's what I'm now
trying to do. So thank you for saying trying to
do a little bit better. You really had to do
less bad.

Speaker 1 (01:05:03):
Let's just say, yeah, now it's coming across great. I
want to move on to talk about caffeine and coffee.
You spoke earlier. You said we should be having our
last cup of coffee or caffeine at ten to twelve
hours before we go to bed. Yeah, And when I
was listening to that, I was like, I think a
lot of people are not doing that, Like from what

(01:05:23):
at least from the conversations I'm having, I think people
are having it much closer to bed, or they're having
so much that it's affecting their bed. If you had
to tell people just a couple of things about caffeine
or coffee and sleep, what would you want them to know?

Speaker 2 (01:05:39):
I think I would say that. Firstly, caffeine has a
half life for the average adult of five to six hours,
which means that after about five to six hours, fifty
percent of the caffeine is still circulating in your brain.
That means that caffeine has a quarter life of ten
to twelve hours. So if you have a cup of
coffee at noon, twenty five percent of that a quarter

(01:06:01):
of that cup of coffee is still in your brain
at midnight. So I don't think many of us would
get into bed and sort of pour a quarter of
a cup of coffee and then twig it and then
you know, put your head on the pillow. We understand
that that probably doesn't need to good sleep, but in
some ways that's not dissimilar to what you're doing if
you have a cup of coffee at noon. Keep in mind, however,

(01:06:22):
there is variability that some people have a faster capability
to metabolize or at least clear caffeine from the system.
And you can do these genetic tests, and there's an
enzyme called the CYP one a two gene, and that
will dictate the speed of it as sort of a
liver enzyme, a cytochrome enzyme that will speed or slow down,

(01:06:44):
and you will know if you're caffeine sensitive or not.
So firstly, the timing of caffeine can be important. Also
the dose, and that's why we've looked at people. Even
if you just have one weekly sort of drip brewed
cup of coffee in the evening, I'd say it's just
one hundred milligrams of caffeine. It will not necessarily prevent

(01:07:07):
you from falling asleep as efficiently, but it will increase
the chances with which you wake up, and if you
wake up, it will increase the duration with which it
takes you to fall back asleep. And if it doesn't
do that, it can also reduce down the depth of
your deep sleep. And we know, for example, that it's
during that deep sleep when your brain has a cleansing

(01:07:28):
system that washes away things like the Alzheimer's proteins, amyloid
and tau protein. So you really would prefer not to
try to degrade the quality of your deep sleep, considering
all that it does for your brain and your body.
But in some ways that's what many of us are
inadvertently doing if we have caffeine too late in the day.

(01:07:50):
I would say, though that I've probably changed my tune
a little bit on coffee. I would say, drink coffee,
but the dose and the timing make the poison. Try to,
as I said, cut yourself off after about three cups
of coffee, and try to cut yourself off at least
ten hours, you know, as a rule of thumb before bed.
The reason I reverted back in some ways to say

(01:08:13):
coffee is not necessarily a bad thing to drink. If
you look at the relationship between drinking coffee and the
health benefits, they are non negotiably astronomically impressive. Drinking coffee
seems to be a very good thing. Now again, it's
dose dependent. Once you get past about four cups of coffee,

(01:08:34):
then it goes in the opposite direction. It's not a
good thing. And if you look at that list, and
it is quite a list of health benefits and disease
de risking that drinking coffee provides, and you compare that
to all of the health benefits that sleep provides, it's
a remarkable overlap. So people were saying to me, how
do you square that circle, because that doesn't make any sense. Well,

(01:08:57):
if you look at the data, the reason that drinking
coffee is beneficial is because the coffee bean itself contains
a whopping dose of antioxidants, and because in the Western
world we're so deficient in our dietary intake of antioxidants,
this one thing, the coffee bean, has been asked to

(01:09:18):
carry the herculean weight of all of our antioxidant needs.
And therefore that's why drinking coffee has such a health
predictive signal in the literature. Case in point, if you
look at decaffeinated coffee has almost the same health benefits.
So it's not the caffeine, it's the antioxidants in the
coffee bean itself. So again, with all of these things

(01:09:41):
with alcohol and caffeine, I am just a scientist. I
have no right to tell anyone how to live their life,
and I don't want to be the healthiest person in
the graveyard either. Life is to be lived for good
you know, jouir de vive for goodness sake, live a
little bit. All I simply want to do is in
empower you with the scientific evidence and then you can

(01:10:03):
make an informed choice as to how you want to
live your life. But does that help a little bit
in terms of navigating caffeine?

Speaker 1 (01:10:09):
And yeah, absolutely huge and The other thing you mentioned
at this point of the the acronym is alcohol, and
you were talking about how just the negative effects of
alcohol in terms of that disruption of our sleep. If
there were a couple of things you wanted people to
know about alcohol and sleep, what would they be.

Speaker 2 (01:10:28):
Yeah, there, I think I probably haven't changed my tune
and I don't see any upside in terms of alcohol
for health or certainly for sleep. Alcohol is probably the
most misunderstood sleep aid that there is out there. Unfortunately,
it's not an aid at all. Alcohol will hurt your
sleep in at least one of three different ways. The

(01:10:50):
first thing is that alcohol is also in the class
of drugs that we call the sedatives. And again, when
you have a couple of sort of nightcaps in the evening,
you say it helps me fall asleep. Alcohol is simply
helping you lose consciousness more quickly. It's not really putting
you into natural sleep. The second thing is that alcohol

(01:11:12):
will fragment your sleep in the first half of the night.
And the reason that it does that is that alcohol
will activate the fight or flight branch of the nervous system. Now,
in the first half of the night, that's when we
get most of our deep sleep, and when we go
into deep sleep, we shift from the fight or flight
branch of the nervous system over to what we call

(01:11:32):
the parasympathetic nervous system, which is this quiescent nervous branch. Now,
alcohol will crank you back over to the fight or
flight sympathetic nervous system, which then makes your sleep, the
depth of your sleep far more shallow, so you don't
get as much deep sleep. You wake up more frequently,
But those awakenings are so brief that you never commit

(01:11:55):
them to memory, so you never think alcohol is harming
my sleep by fragmenting it, sort of littering it with
all of these awakenings, so your deep sleep suffers, your
sleep is fragmented. Then, finally, alcohol is very potent at
blocking your dream sleep or your rapid eye movement. Sleep
and dream sleep is critical for things like emotional and

(01:12:15):
mental health. It's essential for creativity. It's also important for
hormonal health. It's during rem sleep when we release our
peak levels of testosterone in both men and women, and
alcohol will sort of short change you of that rem sleep.
So on all of those counts, you know, I just
can't say in good conscience. Even a glass of wine

(01:12:37):
with dinner, you know, is that okay, we can see
the blest radius. It is in some ways both a
dose and also time dependent process, such that if you have,
let's say, a glass of wine with lunch versus a
glass of wine with dinner, the glass of wine with
lunch will have less of a damaging impact on your
sleep at night. So the completely politically incorrect thing that

(01:13:00):
I would never say on a podcast would be go
to the pub in the morning and the alcohol is
out your system in the evening and no harm, no foult.
But no, of course I would never suggest something like that.
But yeah, what are you doing tomorrow morning?

Speaker 1 (01:13:13):
Now, before we dive into the next moment, let's hear
from our sponsors and back to our episode. Like you said,
I think it's so easy for human just ideas that
become prevalent in human society that we just take as
being normal, or habits and practices that become normalized over

(01:13:36):
a certain period of time, and we just start operating
like it's normal, it's okay, it's accepted, and not really
realizing what's going on. And I'm also of the spirit
of we should enjoy life and appreciate life and everything else.
But I think to really appreciate life, it means to
know what works for you and what doesn't, and what
helps you and what doesn't, Yeah, and to really recognize

(01:13:58):
the value of the impact of that, because I think
it's really easy to be like, oh, yeah, well, you know,
let's just see how things go, and then all of
a sudden you hear about a family member or a
friend who gets a diagnosis, and then that's when it
kind of really hits you. And I've had that far
too often, where I've had friends and family members at
young ages diagnosed with things and it's consistent with a habit.

(01:14:20):
And by the way, sometimes someone gets something and it's
got nothing to do with their habits and it's bad
luck and it's you know, everything else. And both of
those are positions to be compassionate and empathetic. But I
think when it comes to ourselves, I look at it
and go, I would like it to not be my
own fault. If it happens from something beyond me, great, Yeah,
But if I can avoid it by taking responsibility and

(01:14:44):
accountability for my health, then that's probably a good play
and a good way to live. Yeah.

Speaker 2 (01:14:48):
I like the way that you're thinking. They're in the
sense that so many of us see sleep as a
cost to our lives. Yes, and instead, I think what
we have to realize is think of sleep like an
investment in tomorrow, not a cost of what I get
for today. And you're right when you look at some
of the mentality of you know, I'll sleep when I'm dead.

(01:15:11):
I mean, firstly, what we know from the data is
that if we adopt that mentality, you will be both
dead sooner and the quality of your life will be
significantly worse as a consequence. But also if you look
at the data between short sleep and cardiovascular disease, if
you look at short sleep and certain forms of cancer,
not all forms of cancer, short sleep and dementia risk.

(01:15:35):
Imagine if you were to say, in twenty years time,
when you're at the hospital and you've just lost a
third of your heart function because you've had a massive
cronary blockage, if I were to at that point say
I could wave a magic wand right now in the
hospital at your bedside, and if only you could go

(01:15:57):
back twenty years and start investing in your instead of
maybe adopting what some not all people, but some have
this sort of almost this it's almost like a sleep
machismo attitude. I think in certain sectors of the workplace
we've got this competitive undersleeping, you know, mentality, the sleep
braggadoccio notion. But I know no one who twenty years

(01:16:19):
later in a hospital wouldn't say, if I could go
back and remove all of this cardiovascular consequence that you've
just had by way of this heart attack, if only
you'd gone back and started just to try to invest
even just five or six days a week in consistent
good sleep, would you do it? Most people at that
point would say absolutely, I wish I could take it back.

(01:16:43):
But it's so hard for us to prospect into the
future and do back casting. Many of us just can't
do forecasting at all very well in terms of our health.
So what do we do? We burn the candle at
both ends. Also, I think it's not anyone's fault regarding
this global sleep loss epidemic, and this it is a

(01:17:03):
consistent sort of sleep neglect, because firstly, I think society
is conspiring against us to get sufficient sleep, because sleep
has this image problem. We think of people who get
sufficient sleep as slothful, as lazy, that sleep. Whoever the
pr agent for sleep has been, we probably should have
fired them long ago, because I'm going to try and

(01:17:24):
bush back at least. But also from a perspective of
someone who doesn't know anything about sleep, I would just think, well,
my body's at rest, my mind is dormant. How much
danger is there really in losing one hour of sleep
or even two hours of sleep? Surely there's not much danger.
It can even actually change your very nucleic alphabet. So

(01:17:47):
I'll tell you about a fascinating study that impressed upon
me the importance. They took perfectly healthy individuals and they
limited them to six hours of sleeper night for one week.
By the way, six hours of sleep a night for
one week is actually what many people are getting in society.
At least a third of the population seemed to be
getting six hours or less during the week. So it

(01:18:08):
was a very sort of ecologically relevant experiment. And then
they measured the change in their gene activity profile relative
to when those same individuals were getting a full eight
hour night of sleep, and there were two key findings. First,
a sizeable and significant seven hundred and eleven genes were
distorted in their activity, caused by that six hours a

(01:18:32):
night of sleep. If that wasn't impressible enough, the second
was that about half of those genes were increased in
their activity, the other half were decreased. Now, the genes
that were increased in their activity were genes that were
associated with biological stress and cardiovascular disease, genes that were
associated with the promotion of tumors, and genes that were

(01:18:54):
associated with long term chronic inflammation within the body, whereas
though genes that were actually switched off or turned down
were genes associated with your immune system. And so to me,
what that demonstrated was that there's no aspect of our
wellness that can retreat at the sign of sleep deprivation

(01:19:15):
and get away unscathed. That it's almost like a broken
water pipe in your home. That sleep loss will leak
down into every knock and cranny of your physiology and
even tamper with the very DNA alphabet that spells out
your daily health narrative. And so why if you didn't
know that evidence, why would you think that sleep is

(01:19:38):
so necessarily important. If I, just as a late public person,
would be thinking, well, my mind's dorm up, my body
gets a bit of a rest. Well. I can rest
when I'm watching Netflix. My body gets plenty enough for
rest there, so I don't need my sleep. But if
you think about it, sleep is the most idiotic of
all evolutionary creations. You know, finding a mate, You're not reproducing,

(01:19:59):
you're not caring for you're young, you're not foraging for food,
and worse, you're vulnerable to predation. Sleep should have been
strongly selected against during the course of evolution if it
wasn't important. It is absolutely important. It serves a constellation
of different vital functions for brain and body. But if
I didn't know about them, of course I'd neglect my sleep.

(01:20:20):
So I'm simply saying that to both impress the importance
of sleep, but also try to be compassionately sensitive to why.
I understand people neglected not because they're trying to show
how brave and teflong coated they are. It's just because
no one understands sleep. So that's why I've tried to
sort of make it in part A mission for life

(01:20:41):
is sleep has been than the neglected stepsister. In the
health conversation of today, we speak a lot about diet
and exercise, and that's great, and because of people like you.
I think we're speaking so much more about emotional and
mental health, which to me is the fourth pillar of
life and health. Sleep is one of those pillars too, though,
and so hope this helps a little bit.

Speaker 1 (01:21:01):
No, it's brilliant, Matt. I think you are the best
pr agent be Sep could ever ask for. I think
your method of communication, the empathy and compassion that comes
with it, the lack of judgment, and at the same
time waking us up to the reality, which I think
is an important part of the narrative, comes across extremely clearly.

(01:21:21):
And I'm so grateful, and I hope you'll come back
on many many times. I had to depose this question
to extend it. There's so much we didn't even get
to today. But we end every on Purpose episode with
a final five and these have to be answered in
one word or one sentence maximum. But I know I'm
going to break that rule with you already. So the

(01:21:41):
first question is what is the best sleep advice you've
ever heard, received or given regularity?

Speaker 2 (01:21:48):
Digital detox, going to bed at the same time, waking
up at the same time. Do that so many other
things like quantitine quality will fall into place, and then
the second is as much as you can in the
last hour before bed, try to stay off your phone
and in the morning give yourself ten minutes. Why because

(01:22:10):
what we do is we train ourselves. What's the first
thing that most people do when they wake up, They
open their phone, and there's this way the tsunami of
anxiety comes flooding in every day. You are training yourself
when you go to bed at night to expect that
huge wave of anxiety when you wake up. It's what
we call anticipatory anxiety. And most people will have had this.

(01:22:34):
You have an early morning flight and you know you've
got to wake up for it. It's essential. And you
also know that your sleep that night will be so
shallow and so sort of diminutive.

Speaker 1 (01:22:45):
Early.

Speaker 2 (01:22:45):
Well, this is a diet version of that. But every
single day, by way of swiping open on your phone
next to you, just give yourself ten minutes in the morning.
I promise your sleep will be better. So regularity digital detos.

Speaker 1 (01:22:58):
I love it. What's the worst sleep advice you've ever
heard received or given?

Speaker 2 (01:23:04):
That you can make up sleep at the weekend. You
can't accumulate a debt and then hope to fully pay it.
Off at the weekend, and there's some great evidence looking
at all sorts of brain and body metrics that for
the most part, some of them you can kind of
sleep back at the weekend. But for the most part,
when you look at your cardiovascular system, your metabolic system,

(01:23:25):
your immune system, your hormonal system, if you look at
your brain processes, your cognition, your emotional stability or instability,
all of these things do not fully recover by weight
of weekend sleep. So you can't do this binge purge process.
So I would say that the myth of makeup sleep

(01:23:45):
is unfortunately just that that it's not like the bank.

Speaker 1 (01:23:49):
Yeah, so you just have to get into a good
rhythm and a good pattern and invest in it.

Speaker 2 (01:23:53):
It's just I mean, if it was like that, trust me,
you know, mother nature would have figured out a way
to have us short sleeping all the time, because it's
sleep is so deleterious to any organism, and if there
was a way to short change, we would have been
short changing long ago, and it would be baked into
our sort of sleep DNA biology. The fact that it's

(01:24:14):
not that human beings are the only species that will
deliberately deprive themselves of sleep for no apparent good reason
is testament to the fact that you just can't make
it up like that, the system doesn't work like that.

Speaker 1 (01:24:25):
Question number three, how does what does bad sleep do
to your mental health?

Speaker 2 (01:24:30):
Firstly, you become much more emotionally erratic. You become pendulum like,
why is that? Yeah, part of the reason is because
there is a part of your prefrontal cortex right down
in the middle. So my prefrontal cortex sits right above
my eyes. It's the most evolved part of our sort
of hominid brain. It's what makes us human beings. That

(01:24:51):
middle part of the brain acts like almost a brake
pedal on our emotional accelerator regions deep in the brain.
And when we are underslept, that part of the brain
gets shut down. So now we become all emotional gas
pedal and too little regulatory control break as it were,

(01:25:12):
and that's why we become so reactive. We become you know,
it's that I just snapped dot dot dot fill in
the blank when I am underslept. So firstly, our regulation
of our emotions becomes impaired as a consequence. Secondly, the
anxiety centers of the brain can become thirty to forty
percent more reactive when we're not getting sufficient sleep. You

(01:25:36):
can flip that narrative then and say, well, if that's
the bad that happens when I take sleep away, what
is it about sleep when I do get it that
is beneficial? And what we've discovered is that it's rem
sleep or dream sleep that provides a form of almost
overnight therapy. Dream sleep is emotional first aid, and it's

(01:25:57):
during dream sleep that your brain takes those painful, difficult
experiences and acts almost like a nocturnal soothing bomb, and
it just takes the sharp edges off those painful, difficult
experiences so that we come back the next day and
we feel better about them. It's that idea of it's
not time that heals all wounds, it's time during sleep,

(01:26:20):
and specifically dream sleep, that provides emotional convalescence. And there's
a wonderful gosh. I wish i'd come up with this
quote by an American entrepreneur, E. Joseph Cosman, and he
once said that the best bridge between despur and hope
is a good night of sleep. That's exactly what dream
sleep provides.

Speaker 1 (01:26:41):
If you love your family, the best thing you can
do is get a good night's sleep.

Speaker 2 (01:26:46):
When you have had a good night of sleep, I
think we all sense this. You wake up and you
are dressed in a different set of psychological clothes. It's
almost as though sleep provides this sort of emotional winds,
green wipeer benefit and we can see clearly and to me,
that's I think one of the most powerful aspects. Sleep

(01:27:08):
gives me back the rose in the tint of my
worldview glasses every single morning.

Speaker 1 (01:27:14):
I mean, I experienced that all the time. I know
what I can be like if I haven't had a
good night.

Speaker 2 (01:27:19):
Yeah. Yeah, I'll sometimes say that to my much better half,
you know, when I come up, I'll say to her, look,
you know, darling, I am I'm so sorry I didn't
sleep well last night. I am not the best version
of myself. For whatever I do today, whatever idiocy that
I you know, enunciate or behaving, ye, please forgive me
and I will make sure that I will do all

(01:27:41):
the dishes for the next two months.

Speaker 1 (01:27:43):
Yeah. Sleep effects our emotional relationships, intimacy, everything, question number four,
I have something in my mind. I was gonna ask you,
what have you seen as being a surprising connection that's
connected to sleep, something that sleep impacts that surprise you
do something a bit that we might not have heard of.

Speaker 2 (01:28:02):
We've done some cities looking at what I would think
of as more complex pro social behavior, and what we
found is that a lack of sleep will immediately make
someone become more asocial, meaning that they withdraw socially. They
do not wish to have the contact with other people

(01:28:24):
that they typically do. They become therefore more isolated. They
feel more lonely as a consequence, and we know that
there is this epidemic of loneliness happening, we didn't realize
how much a lack of sleep was contributing to that.
Worse still, when you interact with someone who is sleep
deprived and you are well rested having had that interaction

(01:28:48):
with the sleep deprived person, when we ask that person,
do you feel any more or less lonely in this moment,
they rate themselves as now feeling more lonely themselves having
interacted with a sleep deprived individual. In other words, the
loneliness that a lack of sleep creates is contagious and
it is transmitted from one person to the next. The

(01:29:11):
second thing that we looked at was perhaps one of
the most fundamental components of US Homo sapiens, which is
that we help each other. It's what we call pro
social behavior. And I cannot imagine any modern civilization that
has emerged without pro social helping between individuals. It's a

(01:29:34):
fundamental ingredient. We help each other. And what we found
is that when you are underslept, you withdraw your natural
tendency to help other human beings. We observed it at
the level of me helping other people, we observed it
at the level of entire groups helping each other. And

(01:29:55):
we also found it across entire nations. And you think
how you figure that one out. There is a global
experiment that's performed on one point six billion people across
seventy countries twice a year, and it's called daylight Saving Time.
And what we did we looked at the National donation
database across the United States, which is in some ways

(01:30:17):
a measure of selfless giving. I give to charity, I
give to other people. And what we found is that
in the days after the spring daylight savings time, when
we lose one hour of sleep, there was this huge
dent in proactive giving by way of donations to charities,

(01:30:38):
we become more stingy, we've become more self centered. So
I would say that it's this new wave of sleep
science that goes beyond the DNA nucleus that we spoke about.
It goes beyond cells, it goes beyond physiological systems, It
goes beyond entire brain networks, It goes beyond the organism themselves.
It now translates to a lack of sleep impacting our

(01:31:01):
inter relationships and impacting the very fabric of society itself.
That to me has been stunning and quite surprised.

Speaker 1 (01:31:10):
Yeah, that is a surprise. I was not expecting that. Yeah.
Fifth and final question we asked this to every guest
who's ever been on the show. Matt if you could
create one law that everyone in the world had to follow,
what would.

Speaker 2 (01:31:21):
It be self forgiveness?

Speaker 1 (01:31:24):
Why?

Speaker 2 (01:31:25):
Because I think that there is so much ill grace
that is enacted by ourselves on others, because we are
not good with ourselves, that it makes me sad at
some times. And I think so much of what we
react to others is really about a mirror being held

(01:31:47):
up to ourselves and the pain of that that if
we just let go and gave ourselves, self compassion and
self forgiveness, society would be I think demonstratably, which is
to say, demonstrably better as a result in truth, though
that's probably me just holding a mirror up to myself

(01:32:08):
to your.

Speaker 1 (01:32:08):
Question, peerful Matt, thank you so much for your incredible work,
incredible sharing of insights today, and I really hope you
will come back for another episode because I have another
million questions to answer. Thank you so much. I'm so
grateful for your time and energy. I hope everyone has
been listening and watching back at home, at work, whether
you're on a hike, whether you're with your dog, whether

(01:32:30):
you're on driving right now, wherever you are, I hope
that you will find it possible to try some just one,
even if you just try one of Matt's suggestions today.
I really truly believe your life will change, and as
Matt said, it will impact all other areas of our lives.
Please prioritize your sleep and watch how your life changes.

Speaker 2 (01:32:53):
Thank you so much, Matt, Thank you, and can I
just say thank you to you for what you do
for society. You have dedicated you yourself to the wellness
and the health of the rest of humanity. But what
I see as a big differentiator is that you have
a very genuine passion for doing this. You mean it

(01:33:14):
when you say it, thank you, And I think that's why,
in part you've had just this incredible impact on society.
Authenticity is a very rare thing, and as human beings,
were actually very good at identifying it and also identifying
its absence. And one of the reasons that I just
have such admiration for what you do is not just

(01:33:34):
that what you're doing is an incredible service, but the
authentic way that you're doing it, because you genuinely mean it,
is something that I think is a remarkable beauty to behold.
So for all that you do for society, thank you
so much.

Speaker 1 (01:33:49):
Well, thank you, Matt. That's extremely gracious and kind, genuinely
that touch my heart. Thank you so much.

Speaker 2 (01:33:54):
Thank you.

Speaker 1 (01:33:55):
If you love this episode, you'll enjoy my interview with
doctor Daniel Ahman on how to change your life by
changing your brain.

Speaker 3 (01:34:03):
If we want a healthy mind, it actually starts with
a healthy brain.

Speaker 2 (01:34:09):
You know.

Speaker 3 (01:34:09):
I've had the blessing or the curse to scan over
a thousand convicted felons and over one hundred murderers and
their brains are very damaged.

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.css-14f5ked{margin:0;word-break:break-word;display:-webkit-box;-webkit-box-orient:vertical;box-orient:vertical;-webkit-line-clamp:2;overflow:hidden;}Sleep Expert Matthew Walker: Do THIS to Sleep Through The Night And Never Wake Up Tired Again