ANDREW HUBERMAN: If, for instance, you're somebody who
falls asleep just fine but wakes up in the middle of
the night around 2:00 or 3:00 AM or any time for that
matter and has trouble falling back asleep, there
are two categories of supplements that you
might want to consider. The first is
myoinositol, typically taken as 900 milligrams
of myoinositol. Myoinositol can help
shorten the amount of time that it takes to fall
back asleep if you wake up in the middle of the
night. myoinositol has other beneficial uses
as well for mood, et cetera. If you'd like to see many of
the different effects that have been explored in
the scientific literature from myoinositol, you
can go to examine.com. It's an excellent site
not just for inositol but for all supplements
for that matter. Talks about the
human effect matrix. That is, the different effects
of different supplement compounds on different aspects
of hormone, brain, and body health where the
evidence is strong, where the evidence is weak, has
links to studies, and so on. Again, it's examine.com--
amazing website, wonderful website. It's provided such
a rich resource for me and for many,
many other people. Other people who wake up
in the middle of the night will wake up because their
dreams are very intense or they were having dreams
that were so vivid that suddenly they were
jolted from their dreams. Those people would do well
to avoid certain supplements. So in a moment, I'll
talk about the value of a supplement called
theanine for falling asleep. But theanine, which typically
is taken in dosages anywhere from 100 milligrams
to 400 milligrams depending on body
weight and experience and what you find to be most
effective for you-- minimally effective for you. Well, theanine can be
great for many people, but for people who have
excessively vivid dreams-- those excessively vivid dreams
can lead to immediate waking and sometimes a
little bit of anxiety upon waking in the
middle of the night. So some people who wake up
in the middle of the night sort of jolted mentally and
physically out of sleep because of their intense
dreams would do well to avoid theanine
supplementation. I've talked about
this a bit before, but it's something that I
think a lot of nighttime middle of the night wakers
might be familiar with and would want to take
into consideration. Now, for those of you
that are not waking up in the middle of
the night are not having excessively vivid
dreams but are having trouble falling asleep, two
supplements, in particular, have been shown to be effective
for shortening the transition time to sleep and allowing
people to ease into sleep more readily. And those are
magnesium threonate which is interchangeable
with magnesium bisglycinate. Magnesium bisglycinate
and magnesium threonate both have
transporter systems that allow them to readily cross
the blood brain barrier, and they lead to a mild
form of drowsiness. Mild in the sense that it's
not going to prevent you from operating a motor vehicle
or kind of any conditions under emergency that might arise
in the middle of the night, or if they did arise here
in the middle of night, you'd still be able to function. So it's not like a sleeping
pill, but people who take those often find that their transition
time into sleep is much faster and their sleep is
also much deeper. Incidentally, those
supplements are also thought to be useful
for cognitive support and neuroprotection. Although there's
less data on that. So that's for falling asleep. That's one category
either magnesium threonate or
bisglycinate would be interchangeable for assisting
the transition time into sleep. And then the other
supplement is apigenin-- A-P-I-G-E-N-I-N-- apigenin,
which is the derivative of chamomile. I've talked about this in
various podcasts before. Also acts as a bit
of a anxiety lowering compound, which is essential
prior to sleep for people to essentially turn
off their thinking or to be able to reduce
the amount of ruminating and problem-solving
and future anticipation that they're doing, which is a
requirement for falling asleep. So what's the rational
approach to supplementing in a way that allows you
to fall asleep more quickly and stay asleep? Well, would you immediately
take magnesium threonate and apigenin in together. Well, that depends. If you have the budget
and you just simply want to fall asleep quicker and you
don't care which of those two ingredients is going to
be more effective for you, well, then you could try one. For instance, magnesium
threonate and try it for perhaps a week and see
how that affects your latency to sleep time. That is, how quickly
you fall asleep, or you could try up
apigenin in the first week or you could combine
them both or you could try magnesium
threonate for a week then switch to only
apigenin for a week and evaluate which one
works better for you. If neither works for you,
I do recommend trying the combination together. Again, this is just the
way that any scientist would design an experiment
to try and understand which variables, that
is, which ingredients are most effective for the result
that you want as opposed to just lumping them
together and taking them. That said, a lot of people
want excellent sleep so badly that they
just say, OK, I'm just going to take
magnesium threonate. I'm going to take apigenin and
I'm going to take theanine. If my dreams are
too vivid or I'm waking up in the
middle of the night from excessively vivid dreams,
I'll drop the theanine. And many people will
actually derive great benefit from that approach. But because today we're
talking about the most rational cost-effective and
biologically effective approach to supplementation. If you're not sleeping as
well as you would like to or if you want to explore
what sleeping even more deeply might do for your
mental health, physical health, and performance,
well, then it makes sense to think about the
various supplements for falling asleep versus remaining
asleep, what to include, what not to include, and
to do that systematically. And again, I think
one week's time of taking something
provided it doesn't induce any negative effects. If something induces
a negative effect, I recommend seizing
taking it immediately. But if something does not
produce any negative effects, then I think you want to try a
single-ingredient formulation for about a week while
not varying anything else, not changing anything else
in your overall protocols of nutrition or supplementation. I mean, it's impossible to
clamp everything perfectly from week to week, but
don't change anything else dramatically and just add
that supplement for a given week see how it
benefits your sleep. Maybe add in a second supplement
if you like or rather swap and try a different
supplement for a week and then see what works best
and see if the combination works even better. [MUSIC PLAYING]
