Arianna Huffington on The Science of Sleep and Success with Lewis Howes

welcome back everyone to the school of greatness podcast very excited about our guest her name is ariana huffington and she's got a new book out called the sleep revolution transforming your life one night at a time make sure to go grab the book right now thank you so much for being here thank you so much for having me i'm really excited we got a chance to do an interview about a year ago i think it was and we only had about 15 minutes so now we have a little more time i'm excited to actually dive in and talk more about the power of sleep but also why you started getting into sleep why it's important to enhance your performance for athletes also for entrepreneurs also for busy moms who say they have no time why it's important for everyone so first off thank you for being here and second off let me get a question out of the way you sold a company huffington post to aol right right and i think that was 315 million is that correct now during the time you were building this company you didn't sleep much from what i remember right the first two years first two years because um we launched the huffington post in 2005 and in april 2007 i collapsed from sleep deprivation and exhaustion and hit my head on my desk and broke my cheekbone in the middle of the day in the in the morning actually not even and and that was the beginning of my starting on this journey of reevaluating my life of looking at what were the things i needed to change in my life and and for me the keystone habit you know that i changed and everything else became easier was sleep i went from four to five hours to eight hours ninety five percent of the time you know i'm a work in progress um and i suddenly sort of started looking around and seeing that i was not alone that millions of people were burnt out yeah and that we are living a culture which is fueled by burnout and it's kind of amazing because the new science now is so conclusive that sleep is a performance enhancer that everything in our lives gets better and our productivity our health our relationships our happiness so why is it so hard for us to actually do something that is free and available to us and i think that's partly because we've created this culture mostly created by you guys not not you personally louise but man you know that's that that basically wears this sleep deprivation like a badge of honor like i'm too busy and too important to sleep or i'll sleep when i'm dead or you snooze you lose you know all these things and basically they're all wrong yeah yeah it's kind of interesting it's kind of like the food industry in a sense where they're they told us to uh you know the breads and grains and milks and all these things were actually good for us but now the science is like well actually that's what's causing all the cancer or making you exhausted it's like the gluten the dairy or whatever uh so it's kind of like we have to re-learn and even if you go further back you know and it's kind of amazing to look at some of the ants in the 1950s by doctors selling cigarettes right of course and you had like literally doctors in white coats mental cigarettes refresh your throat give you cancer but um so yes it's like we often live under false um assumptions modern science has disproven them this has been the golden age of scientific findings around sleep and it's very recent the first scientific sleep center was founded in 1970 at stanford and now there are 2500 sleep centers what's a sleep center basically they all they study different aspects of sleep what happens to the brain at stanford sherry ma started sports and sleep and she was the one who became the pioneer of proving that sleep was a legal performance enhancer without negative side effects yes and so you have um andrei goodalla for example who had such a fantastic year despite his injury can i just see a photo with you and him yes i interviewed him at stanford the golden state warriors mvp absolutely um considers his sleep what got him the mvp uh title right and and he's kind of so disciplined about it i mean i talked to his wife too you know the getting his eight hours no screens or tv in the bedroom temperature at 67 degrees everything dark you know all the things that i include in the book called the tips and techniques of how to get a great night's sleep and he's practicing and when he's on the road uh making sure that he has as many of these things available to him right so that he can actually get the restorative sleep that makes him better on the court what's the science behind um recovering the muscles with whatever it is seven or eight hours of sleep with a cool temperature the blackout you know calming the mind is what's the science behind that what did doctors or scientists say about how it actually enhances the muscles or the heart of the brain or all the things well it enhances everything both the physical body that needs that recovery time in fact the more intensely you work out the more essential the recovery time is for the body but also what happens to the brain because as you know being an athlete yourself winning is not just a function of your muscles it's also a function of your brain and and i talk in the book about how if you miss a shot or you make a mistake which every athlete does in the course of a game if you actually keep replaying that in your head while the game is going on that's a recipe for disaster and if you're sleep deprived you're more likely to dwell on your failures to dwell on your fears and anxieties i mean whether you're an athlete or a busy mom you know you're more likely to be irritable and cranky and um all the things that make life much harder are aggravated when you're sleep deprived yeah it has a lot to do with meditation too you know if when we when we don't meditate and we don't we're not being mindful we are more irritated we're more stressed out we're not recovering we're not we're relaxing the mind and the body i think sleep and meditation go hand in hand i do meditate as well i i do meditate yes and i love my meditation yeah but the thing about sleep is whether you meditate or not whether you work out or not everybody has to sleep right exactly so everybody has a relationship with sleep mm-hmm so the question is how can we make this relationship the best it can be so that every other aspect of our life is enhanced do you feel like um you know in 2000 was 2007 2005 2007 you said you started to realize that you were like crashing and all these things well i didn't actually realize that until i collapsed three o'clock so that's what is so interesting how many years were you kind of living this lifestyle of not paying attention to your sleep well you know it would come and go okay you know i'm i started as a writing the book about how i was brought up by a mother who revered sleep in a one-bedroom apartment in athens greece she wanted to sleep all the time no no not at all she just really she just brought us up believing that if we get enough sleep we're going to be better at school okay and we're going to be happier and in fact she kind of knew that um because we all wanted to maintain her weight or lose weight depending on the time this was a great way to do that she wasn't the scientist but the modern science now validates right that if you want to lose weight sleep more sleep enough you know it's not about more actually what is interesting modern science tells us you cannot oversleep unless you are a narcoleptic or suffering from severe depression if you are just um just going on about your life right your body wakes you up when it's fully recharged you can't oversleep if you oversleep does it hurt you if you get 12 hours of sleep no if you get 12 hours of sleep you're probably making up some sleep deficiency gotcha okay you know once you once you've paid your sleep deficit and you are in a regular routine your body will naturally wake you up gotcha okay um interesting so your mom kind of had this intuition so my mom had that intuition and um and brought us up like that but then when i went to england to get my degree and then to new york i just bought into the prevailing culture which was that driven mindset yes that if you are going to succeed yes then you need to sacrifice sleep and really now for me it's a little bit like choosing to get to your destination in a broken down um truck you know and a gas gasoline car right um instead of a tesla tesla's right so smooth i mean when you are fully recharged it's like there you are in your tesla going for your going to your destination faster more efficiently and also enjoying the journey yeah so that's why i've become such a sleep evangelist and this um crusade that we've launched and the book is one part of it but we're taking the book and the sleep revolution to a hundred colleges to convince millennials of the importance of sleep are you seeing that a lot of millennials are not sleeping that they still have this um pull all nighter mentality like in college you know for finals and tests is it oh absolutely it's not happening it's happening and with huge and dangerous consequences and that's what i wanted i structured the book so you start with the crisis and give people an overview of how dangerous sleep deprivation is how prevalent it is and how it's also at the heart of a lot of mental health issues really like people who are depressed or anxious um at the heart of it is sleep deprivation so they're they're linking the diseases that we're having just a mental emotional mental and the physical obviously um sleep deprivation is directly linked to obesity diabetes hypertension and heart disease even cancer and definitely alzheimer's really because when we i mean when we sleep is the time when our brain washes away you know the toxins that are built during the day interesting is it is it more powerful to have vivid dreams or to not dream at all is there a difference as it matters much more powerful obviously to remember your dreams because it means you're getting enough sleep if you remember them yeah okay if you are sleep deprived you're much less likely to remember your dream i have a whole section on dreams and it's a good dreams are a great source of insights a lot of inventors have come up with their inventions and dreams larry page came up with the idea for google in a dream in a dream wow okay and paul mccartney came up with let it be in a dream all the lyrics were written in the dream interesting so whatever it is you're doing but you're saying if we're not sleeping well then we're not going to have dreams we can remember or maybe there'll be more nightmares and dreams well then they you're much less likely to remember gotcha if you're not sleeping and do we know and maybe maybe we're not aware of this but do we know about why we have nightmares and why we have positive dreams or yeah i mean that basically um dreaming is a time when we either process a lot of the incomplete emotions of the day and are we process our anxieties about the future are there um more insightful dreams that tap into our wisdom so it depends you know it's the whole gamma that's what i love about my sleep time now that you might go to sleep and and i don't know what the movie is going to be but it's so it's a little bit like rekindling the romance with sleep but i wanted first to convince people of why it is important i think we are so data-driven and the science chapter gives you all the data you want to really believe it's important and after you believe it's important and and after we go through the history chapter that shows you why we started devaluing sleep in the first industrial revolution when we thought human beings could be like machines and minimize downtime then you have the second half of the book which is all about how to but the first of the week yes how to maximize your performance how to um maximize your sleep and um there are tons of and tips right resources resources exactly but for me the the key the most important thing if you're going to do one thing it's to turn off all your devices and start with five minutes before you're going to turn off the lights you know just have a little demarcation line between um your day life and your sleep right why is that important to turn off the screens because otherwise what happens that our bodies may be exhausted but our minds remain in a stimulated mode you know blue light stimulates the brain but also beyond the blue light is just that we haven't given our brain some opportunity to power down and that's what wakes people up in the middle of the night and even if they go to sleep because they're physically exhausted their brains wake them up with whatever it is they haven't processed you know the mind chatter yeah so i think what is key is to have a little transition to sleep and it can be a really simple and short transition mine is about 30 minutes now but it can i believe in microscopic steps you know how it is you build habits with very small i'm trying to do this big job don't try to yeah make the big jump just little things that you can stick to and then little by little the kind of person that you become when you are fully recharged becomes like a magnet and you want it all the time i want to be that person i don't like now i don't like myself when i'm the other kind of person when i'm sleep deprived when i'm irritable when i you tell me something and i get upset or you're just slow or whatever maybe oh yes you know you make mistakes you know you you're not as sharp in every possible way is it i mean i've never been drunk and i've never been home before i've never gone that far and um i'm curious is being sleep deprived i've been sleep deprived does it feel like you're hungover in the morning it feels like it feels like you're a hangover and also in terms of your the physical changes the cognitive changes scientists have found that it is actually absolutely equivalent so they have found that if you're up 17 to 19 hours which is not abnormal for a lot of us you're not legally drunk but you're close to being really yes and if you're up um for 24 hours then you are legally drunk really yes okay so maybe i've been drunk by being in another way one of them okay so tell me if it's like obviously we're not perfect and we try to do things right we're all works in progress in progress but let's say it's like you get a chance to have the perfect night's sleep like you get a night that's like i'm gonna follow every hammer that i talk about i'm gonna like set everything up beautifully i'm gonna have flowers on the pillowcases whatever it is right what would be the ideal routine for you in terms of going to bed and then waking up great i love that so i'll give you my routine i'll give you my nightly ritual but what i recommend for everybody watching is to create your own ritual i mean it's almost like i give you a menu and you need to experiment and see what is it that does it for you sure for me it's like 30 minutes before i'm going to go to sleep turning off all my devices and gently escorting them out of the bedroom escorting them out in the morning you put them in their little homes outside the bedroom turning off the lights you know the bright lights making it sort of i just have one nightstand light and one light in the bathroom then having a really really hot wonderful bath really warm bath yeah with epsom salts which are very relaxing and flickering candles but if you guys don't like baths have a shower i don't like best okay i've got one i've never used it yeah you're gonna have a shower yeah and hot is better than coal oh yeah you're you're basically you basically want to slow down your brain and soothe your muscles you know everything is like powering you down i guess when you're going to a hot tub late at night i always feel ready to sleep exactly you feel exactly the hot tub it's exactly perfect if you have a hard time go to a hot tub i don't have a hot tub so i'd do the bath and um and then put on um if you if you sleep naked you sleep naked but if you wear pjs or an um night dress or whatever make sure that you wear clothes for bed i used to sleep in my gym clothes and then your brain gets this confusing messages you know what's going to the gym or are we powering down so even if you're a t-shirt make sure it's not a t-shirt you are to the gym and then in bed i only read physical books i i don't read anything on screens and anybody who is reading the sleep revolution embedded i will consider it a personal victory if you actually fall asleep by reading it read 22 20 pages a night for sleep whatever 10 pages you get drowsy you let the book drop you turn off the light you're asleep so that is incredibly important for those who have children you know that that's how you put your child to bed you don't just drop your child in bed you read to them you read you give them a bath you put them in the pjs you read to them you kind of transition you know it's like the good night moon and you say good night to everything which is really a demarcation line between your day with all its stresses however blessed our lives may be every day has stresses challenges and difficult things and incompletions there's nobody who has any interesting job or is a busy mom who finishes the day and says i did absolutely everything there's always something now that was on my list or i should have done never yeah so you need to somehow tell your brain and your body we did what we did right this day and now the day has come to a close and we need to fully cross the line we need to cross that line not be in bed on the screen thinking about work and then trying to sleep at the same time creating couldn't even cut off i just really i wish i could sort of convey that feeling that i absolutely totally believe now to everybody watching because i promise that if if you do this every aspect of your life will improve if you have any lingering doubt that you're not going to be as productive just try it yeah because it's like getting in the tesla you're going to get to your destination faster right smoother smoother cleaner with the kind of consuming less energy yes yeah and and also the the advantage of kind of energy that is um self-renewing is a little bit like the self-renewing energy of sleep right right why reading a book before night why would that i would think that would be like you're still turning your brain on well it depends on what you're reading you see i don't read anything has to do with work or media or politics you know i read poetry i read novels not even modern novels i like to read like jane austen or another world okay and you you read it but you're not really um trying to figure out their problems for sure sure yeah okay i love it and what about watching movies before bed don't do that no no no movies no movies no what about if you watch it before 30 minutes is up yes that's fine now you can watch a movie and then 30 minutes exactly you got it very good so don't lay in bed with the tv on no it might pass also exactly that's what happens a lot of people pass out and and what happens then often is that the tv stays on and then it wakes them up and then you're suddenly walking up by a noise and the minute you're walking up abruptly your body moves into a fight-or-flight mode and cortisol the stress hormone floods your body and then you are again much harder to fall asleep yeah yeah now well i understand the importance of sleep i practice a lot of stuff i'm good friends with sean stevenson i've had them on you know i'm applying all the principles so i get it right as an athlete i get it as a person i get it but let's talk about for entrepreneurs who you know they're striving to build their business they are struggling to make money so they got to put overtime in that overtime turns into many nights and months and months and then they drive their team to say you got to stay later you got to work harder because we got to make money you know you can't just work for free here uh so did you ever after you started transitioning huffington post into okay it's important to sleep we've got sleep pods here which i know i've been in your office i've seen them and you you talk about the importance of it but there are times in our business that we've got to drive forward we've got a product to launch we've got to get traffic up something and we've got to push people a little harder probably it's not going to be perfect balance all the time would you agree well it's never about i don't like the word balance because our lives are not really about balance it's all about integration for me okay and what it means if your everyday routine includes getting adequate sleep when you have a sick child a big deadline then you have some reserves to tap into life is always going to throw you curved balls where you have to stay up all night or something happens i'm not suggesting this won't happen but what has happened in our culture is you've made that the norm yeah the main thing and and that's really the problem and i think that's why i'm stressing that people need to understand that if all you care in life is about winning then you're going to improve your chances when you're fully recharged because that's when you're going to make your best decisions that's when you're going to be able to see the icebergs before they hit any titanic which is a very important thing for entrepreneurs and look at entrepreneurs now i was in silicon valley this week three quarters of startups fail and there is the myth of the entrepreneur who never sleeps stays up all night well maybe there's a correlation why are your family in sleep deprivation and three quarters of them failing interesting and i was speaking at the stand at the stanford business school and the students that the the mba students were telling me how how many of them um have meningitis or whooping cough or all these diseases which are signs of a suppressed immune system yeah because you are burnt out so in the end it's not even as though you're more productive because you end up being in bed sick right instead of being in bed because you're recharging sure sure i want to ask um a couple personal questions if that's okay with you sure um you know you've had a lot of success you're in the media all the time you are media with huffington post uh you're asked to speak you know number one your time best selling books do you have any fears of the future it seems like you've achieved so much and you've helped so serve so many people with your message and your work do you have any fears or insecurities about the future my fears have a lot to do with my daughters really and i'm working on them okay how many dollars do you have two two dollars um in their 20s 24 and 26. i see you posting photos of them all the time yes i know i adore them and um and i tend to very easily move into negative fantasies if let's say i text one of my daughters and i don't get a response within three and a half seconds really she always like that yeah so i think working on that is very important for me you know we all have areas where we're more vulnerable sure sure and and that's one of them plans why well my oldest daughter went through um a drug period she's now been sober for four years but i think that maybe has exacerbated but also whatever the reason you know fears are so irrational i mean i have a friend of mine who is incredibly successful and she thinks she's going to end up a bad lady you know a bag lady in the streets right right homeless in the streets but she's incredibly successful yeah she's incredibly successful incredibly wealthy and you think yeah sure maybe all of us will end up in the streets but the chances yeah right and are slim so sure so i think but again going back what i said earlier it's kind of amazing how um exacerbated these irrational fears become when you're sleep-deprived whatever they are yeah much more so you're already scared about things you're more scared right yes about whatever it is that you are scared about suddenly that seems more the fear seems much more real yeah interesting okay do you have any other fears was it just that's kind of my main fear yeah okay that's good that's not that big of an issue then well in the grip of it that's true she's pretty nice um what is next for you what's the big vision i mean you've again accomplished so much well right now kind of the the big vision for me is wanting to change the culture you know changing culture is not easy right it's challenging and so for me it requires like a critical mass and once that we attain that critical mass then suddenly people will look around and say can you believe that we slept for four hours and we thought this was more productive people are going to say can you believe how we used to live and i want to see that and that's why um we this campaign is multi-pronged you know it is the book there is the college outreach there is a partnership we launched with uber against drowsy driving because drowsy driving now is killing more people than drunk driving really because you know since the eighties drivers yeah what happened is that since the eighties we dramatically increased awareness around drunk driving so people are much more conscious and deaths and crashes from drunk driving have been halved wow since since the 80s because you know the whole designated driver campaign friends don't let friends drive drunk it has worked so we're launching a similar campaign for tired driving because while people are unless they're paralytically drunk you know conscious of being drunk and people are not always aware of being exhausted or they think they can power through and we have a very powerful psa we'll send it to you sure and that shows a man in a wheelchair for life a young man in his twenties who fell asleep at the wheel and um and his whole life was changed and it's very powerful and and the woman who was being driven amy caddy who is at harvard the brilliant woman right yeah the body language yes so she ended up having to relearn everything because of that accident when she talks about that so she said she says in the psa i lost 10 years of my life wow so and these are like two young smart people and one simple decision one simple decision literally microsleep they call it can be two seconds right and everything changes but since then since we launched this campaign i've had i've had two mothers who came to me one of them works at accenture has a big job there and she said i changed my life and my relationship to sleep when i i had my two children young children in the car and i i kind of hmm fall asleep dozed off yeah and and and cross the barrier towards incoming traffic with kids with kids in the back oh my goodness so but these things happen yeah they happen all the time 8 000 people died last year and one million two crashes so we launched the petition would love everybody to go take and on change.org okay and it's very simple it says i pledge not to drive drowsy and not to let my friends drive drowsy and now with ride sharing technologies like uber it's much easier wherever you are you can call an uber yeah exactly and um we'll have that link we'll have who was the most influential person in your life growing up oh definitely my mom really yeah because she totally um made me believe that it was okay to aim for the stars and if i failed it didn't matter she wouldn't love me any less and that failure is not the opposite of success you used to say it's a stepping stone to success and um and and that's why i think it's been easier for me to take big risks like launching the huffington post um and and kind of going for it going for it and you know you're never there no guarantees right whatever we do i must remember one more thing to tell you uh which is that you're asking me about my night ritual so i have created the sleep paradise in my bedroom in new york um in terms of the low lights and the completely dark room and the temperature and the flowers and the plants the plants a real alarm clock you know rather than i use a an old-fashioned round was your phone alarm clock as opposed to your phone and everything all that and so i have put my apartment on airbnb really and uh anybody can win and and a night at my apartment doesn't cost anything you just have to participate in the contest which is to write a short essay under 550 words about what would your day be like if you had gotten a great night's sleep the night before and virginer is going to fly the winner to new york stay at your place yes and i will have ready a fabulous greek dinner with all natural ingredients now none of the foods i write about that make it harder to sleep i'll give them a personal sleep consultation and then i will leave them alone with their house ground rules about sleep and the next morning we'll have hair and makeup for them so they can go on half post rides which is our morning show to talk about the experience interesting so what do they need to do that's all just go to airbnb where are they ariana's paradise it's called ariana's sleep paradise and submit their essay you know just it can be anything it can be 50 words it can be we'll have a link up here for people as well below i love that so you see we're approaching it from yeah yes books everything books everything i love it um final few questions um what do you think was your biggest failure before huffington post that actually taught you the biggest lesson for helping the post i would say my second book um which was rejected by 36 publishers now you're a writer so imagine getting 36 rejections that's harsh right it made me question whether i was really a writer or whether my first book was a fluke and and fortunately i walked into a bank in london where i lived at the time and asked the manager for a loan and the manager gave it to me i had no assets so you know in life often there are kind of amazing things that happen along the way and that's one of the things that actually might be a good place to end because i feel that one of the things people who are very um sort of type a personalities like i think i am and i think you are and think that we make everything happen but in fact um i have learned that life is more of a dance between making it happen and letting it happen and so rekindling our romance with sleep is a little bit like letting good things happen and not thinking that we need to be awake the whole time and make everything happen because that's not how life works sure sure i love that i love that well i have two actually two final questions for you i'd love to end it there but i've got two proper ones um because i have a ritual at the end of every one of my interviews so um my last couple questions is what are you most grateful for in your life recently so i'm actually very grateful for my accident in 2007. i seriously think i would be either dead or with a heart attack and if you look around look at 2015 the number of entrepreneurs and executives who collapsed on their treadmills are on stages you know the ceo of united collapsed and ended up with a big heart attack really wow the ceo of bmw collapsed on stage and the head of m a at jb morgan collapsed on his treadmill and died and that's kind of interesting because it was convinced people of the importance of exercising and nutrition but sleep is the other leg of the stool and so you have these exhausted executives who's training harder and harder training harder and harder who are now sleeping and they don't realize what how they are hurting themselves yeah wow so that that's what you know how they say the hidden blessing so that was a hidden blessing yes okay um this is a question i asked at the end and i didn't prep ariana on this but this is a question i asked at the end for all the guests so whatever comes up for you feel free um let's say it's many years from now and all your books have been erased everything you've created is gone for whatever reason but it's it's the last day for you and everyone's there it's a very happy moment and again you don't have any more books to give to people but you have a piece of paper and your great great great grandchild says will you write down the three truths three things that you don't need to be or that you know to be true about all the things you learn in life that you'd pass on to me and to everyone else since we can't read your books anymore what are these three lessons that you would apply or share with all of us that are very important what would you say so i would say the first one would be don't miss the moment the second would be what rumi the persian poet has said leave life as though everything is rigged in your favor no matter what and the third would be get enough sleep i love it i want to make sure everyone gets the book i've got one more question for you the final question before i ask you get the book the sleep revolution we'll have it all linked up but you can get it on amazon barnes and noble everywhere books are sold i'll tell you where to go get it specifically also all of the information about the essay about everything else we talked about with uber things like that so get the book and i highly endorse it so thank you for being here the final question before i ask it i want to acknowledge you ariana for what you're doing to change the mindset for so many people that have been sleep deprived and for show people that you can be extremely driven and achieve your dreams big dreams but also have a healthy lifestyle and it starts with taking care of the most important person in the world yourself first your sleep is very important so i want to acknowledge you for the incredible work you do for consistently showing up every single day positive loving and giving to the world it means a lot to me thank you so much thank you final question is what's your definition of greatness my definition of greatness is to be in a constant mode of learning and consider yourself always a work in pregnant in progress on the road to greatness i think that greatness is always aspirational and and yet always present but there's never finality about it there's never a moment where you can say this is it i cannot put a bow around it and just do maintenance right it's always a work in progress ariana thanks for being here appreciate it thank you so much thank you thank you guys thanks so much for watching this video i really appreciate it and if you enjoyed this video then make sure to subscribe to my youtube channel you can do that by clicking right here to subscribe because each week we come out with awesome epic and inspiring interviews and messages and videos just for you so click subscribe right here to get notified of new videos every week also if you enjoyed this specific interview 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Channel: Lewis Howes

Views: 33,205

Keywords: arianna huffington, Lewis howes, the school of greatness, Arianna huffington interview 2016, arianna huffington sleep recognition, arianna huffington drowsey driving

Id: RxmLjDejZ2s

Length: 41min 8sec (2468 seconds)

Published: Mon Apr 18 2016