Dr. Matt Walker: The Science of Dreams, Nightmares & Lucid Dreaming | Huberman Lab Guest Series

[Music] welcome to the hubman lab guest Series where I and an expert guest discuss science and science-based tools for everyday life I'm Andrew huberman and I'm a professor of neurobiology and Opthalmology at Stanford school of medicine today marks the sixth episode in our sixth episode series all about sleep with expert guest Dr Matthew Walker today's episode focuses on sleep and dreaming as well as lucid dreaming we talk about what's happening in your brain when you dream both mundane dream as well as heavily emotionally Laden dreams and we discuss how to think about and perhaps even interpret the content of your dreams and we talk about lucid dreaming which are dreams that occur while in sleep of course in which you are aware that you are dreaming and because Unfortunately they are relatively common we also talk about nightmares and both what to do about nightmares as well as how to think about nightmares this being the final episode in the six episode series all about sleep I put the call out on my social media handles for any and all questions about sleep that I could direct to Dr Matthew Walker so as today's episode closes I ask him those questions focusing specifically on the questions that were most frequently asked by you the audience and he answers them in Rapid succession before we begin I'd like to emphasize that this podcast is separate from my teaching and research roles at Stanford it is however part of my desire and effort to bring zero cost to Consumer information about science and science related tools to the general public in keeping with that theme I'd like to thank the sponsors of today's podcast our first sponsor is better help better help offers Professional Therapy with a licensed therapist carried out online now I've been doing therapy for well over 30 years initially I had to do therapy against my will but of course I continue to do it voluntarily over time because I really believe that doing regular therapy with a quality therapist is one of the best things that we can do for our mental health indeed for many people it's as beneficial as getting regular physical exercise the great thing about better help is that it makes it very easy to find a therapist that's optimal for your needs and I think it's fair to say that we can define a great therapist as somebody with whom you have excellent Rapport somebody with whom you can talk about a variety of different issues and who can provide you not just support but also insight and with better help they make it extremely convenient so that it's matched to your schedule and other aspects of your life if you'd like to try betterhelp you can go to betterhelp.com huberman to get 10% off your first month again that's betterhelp.com huberman today's episode is also brought To Us by element element is an electrolyte drink that has everything you need and nothing you don't that means plenty of the electrolytes magnesium potassium and sodium and no sugar as I mentioned before on this podcast I'm a big fan of salt now I want to be clear people who already consume a lot of salt or who have high blood pressure or who happen to consume a lot of processed foods that typically contain salt need to control their salt intake however if you're somebody who eats pretty clean and you're somebody who exercises and you're drinking a lot of water there's a decent chance that you could benefit from ingesting more Electro ltes with your liquids the reason for that is that all the cells in our body including the nerve cells the neurons require the electrolytes in order to function properly so we don't just want to be hydrated we want to be hydrated with proper electrolyte levels with element that's very easy to do what I do is when I wake up in the morning I consume about 16 to 32 ounces of water and I'll dissolve a packet of element in that water I'll also do the same when I exercise especially if it's on a hot day and I'm sweating a lot and sometimes I'll even have a third element packet dissolved in water if I'm exercising really hard or sweating a lot or if I just notice that I'm not consuming enough salt with my food if you'd like to try element you can go to drink element spelled El mn.com huberman to claim a free element sample pack with your purchase again that's drink element LM nt.com huberman today's episode is also brought To Us by Helix sleep Helix sleep makes mattresses and pillows that are customized to your unique sleep needs it's abundantly clear that sleep is the foundation of mental health physical health and performance when we're getting enough quality sleep everything in life goes so much better and when we are not getting enough quality sleep everything in life is that much more challenging now one of the key things to getting a great night sleep is to have the appropriate mattress everyone however has slightly different needs in terms of what would be the optimal mattress for them Helix understands that people have unique sleep needs and they've designed a brief two-minute quiz that asks you questions like do you sleep on your back your side or your stomach do you tend to run hot or cold during the night or maybe you don't know the answers to those questions if you go to the Helix site and take that brief quiz they'll match you to to a mattress that's optimal for you for me it turned out to be the dusk D mattress it's not too hard not too soft and I sleep so much better on my Helix mattress than on any other type of mattress I've used before so if you're interested in upgrading your mattress go to helixsleep.com huberman take their brief two-minute sleep quiz and they'll match you to a customized mattress for you and for this month only May 2024 you can get up to 30% off all mattresses and two free pillows again that's helixsleep.com huberman to get 30% off and two free pillows and now for my conversation with Dr Matthew Walker Dr Walker my day good fellow Dr hubman today is the Sixth and final episode in the six episode series that we've been recording on sleep during episode one you told us about the biology of sleep and some actionable items to get the basics of sleep well worked out for each of us and it's highly particular to our individual needs and you explained to define those needs then you beautifully described in-depth protocols for let's call it optimizing one sleep and then a third episode focused on caffeine napping and also food intake and its impact on sleep we talked about the relationship between sleep and learning and memory and creativity and then of course in the fifth episode just prior to this one you beautifully described the literature and actionable tools for connecting sleep sleep to emotional health and mental health as well as the relationship between lack of sleep and certain mental health challenges or conditions today we are going to dive into a truly exciting and fascinating topic which is dreaming I can think of fewer topics more intriguing than dreams I know there's a lot of interest in lucid dreaming that is one dreaming while being aware that one is dreaming you'll tell us more about that but I think Dreams Just Intrigue and Fascinate us for so many reasons but not the least of which is that at some point we all seem to have them and they seem to have a relevance for our lives they're not just epip phenomena as we say so today I know you're going to explain what they do and do not provide for us and I'm really excited to dive into this topic it's something that I've been fascinated by and I know many people are fascinated by so just to kick things off how do we Define dreaming what is a dream what is a dream state you would think it's fairly simple because when people say oh I had the strangest dream last night everyone seems to know what a dream and by the way dreaming is is we take it for granted we say oh I had a strange dream last night just think about it though last night both you and I and everyone listening as long as they slept we all became flagrantly psychotic now now before you reject my my diagnosis of your nightly psychosis I'll give you five good reasons first when we start to dream we see things which are not there so we hallucinate second we believe things that could not possibly be true so we're delusional third we get confused about time place and person so we're suffering from disorientation fourth we have these wildly fluctuating emotions something think that's psychiatrists called being affectively labile and then how wonderful you woke up this morning and you forgot most if not all of that dream experience so you are suffering from Amnesia if you were to experience any one of those five symptoms while you're awake we'd probably be seeking psychological or psychiatric treatment but for reasons that we still don't fully understand that seems to be a normal biological and psychological and in fact and I'll describe the data absolutely necessary life support perhaps necessary set of experiences to go through so that's the peculiarity of dreaming but how do we Define it one of the loose definitions that we often use in sleep science is that a dream is any report of mental activity upon Awakening so I'll come into the laboratory and I'll wake you up and I'll say what was going through your mind and if you just say nothing think really then we note that down as no dream report but if you were to say well you know what I was actually just thinking about the next time you're going to come in and wake me up um then we would report that as a dream but that's not really what most people mean when they say I had this strange dream what they're referring to is dreaming that takes place during the stage of sleep called rapid eye movement sleep or REM sleep and during REM sleep there we have these bizarre hallucinogenic these Vivid these narrative these emotion filled story experiences those are the types of reports that we get principally from Ram sleep so if I were to go back to episode one and say think about those different stages of sleep light non-rm sleep deep non-rm sleep and REM sleep when does dreaming occur well if I wake you up during stage two nonrem sleep that's one of the lighter forms of non-rm early in the night but especially later in the night you typically will report a dream maybe about 50% probability 50% of the time I wake you up out of that stage no report the other half yes if I wake you up out to a deep non-r sleep stages three and four where down to a 0 to 20% chance that you'll report a dream so very very unlikely if I wake you up out of REM sleep somewhere between 80 to 90% probability that you were going to report a dream there's Nuance in that REM sleep Story by the way rapid eye movement sleep is defined by those rapid eye movements but when you're in that stage of sleep you're not always having the eye movements they come in these strange phases so though you will be in REM sleep and we can Define that with lots of different um sensors on your brain and your body but then there will be times when your eyes are darting back and forth and times when your eyes are not and when those eyes are moving during REM sleep we call that phasic REM sleep and when they're not we call it tonic REM sleep don't worry about the the terminology when I wake you up out of tonic R sleep when the eyes aren't moving I'm around that 80% probability if I wake you up out of real sleep when your eyes are darting back and forth there is 95 to 100% probability that you're going to report a dream some people theories in the past have said well if that's the case then presumably those eye movements are tracking something in the dream if you do careful analyses that just does not seem to hold up there is some evidence that that may be the case but your eyes are moving back and forth it seems that these are impulses that are going to your eyes that don't have a strong correlation with what it is that you're dreaming visually in the scene that's that's not the case but that's a little bit of a definition of what dreaming is and also when dreaming occurs I should probably note by the way that we human beings we seem to be special in our REM sleep dreaming amounts now I've just done a little bit of a slight of hand when I say REM sleep I'm going to infer that it's dreaming but Charles nun um wonderful scientist has looked at the proportion of REM sleep across different mammals and what he found was that we human beings are a complete anomaly when it comes to our relative amounts of REM sleep in other words our dream sleep he found that across most other primates REM sleep was usually averaging about 9% of the sleep period however we human beings on average including When We're Young will have a REM sleep proportion of about 20% so if you plot the amount of REM sleep of primates in a graph they're all sort of clustered around this mean and then all of a sudden on the our right hand side you've got this one single data point that sticks out that's us human beings and we don't fully understand why it is that we have such exceptional amounts of REM sleep now I've done a lot of hand waving and written some theories about why that is but it's still it's still very unclear the other thing and that's a very I I can go very philosophical about the functions of REM sleep and how it changed as we made the transition as a species from tree to ground because don't forget as we mentioned in one of our episodes when you're hanging like a bird on a tree or you're resting on a branch as a primate up in the trees and you go into REM sleep you lose muscle tone so it's quite a fragile state when you're 30 foot up in the air and you've got um gravity desperately wanting to bring you and your your limbs down to the ground but when we made the transition down from tree to ground we no longer had to worry about that did that open up the opportunity for more REM sleep to occur and that explains why we human beings have that we don't know REM sleep however does seem to be quite fundamental and fundamental from a life necessary perspective there were some studies done back in the 1980s and there are studies that have not really been replicated and I I think I agree as to why because ethically and and you know they're right in that Gray Zone in fact for me I find them quite uncomfortable when I speak about them or even teach them in class they took rats and they deprived them of sleep totally and what they found was that Rats on average will die somewhere between about 13 to 17 days after total sleep deprivation in other words rats will die almost as quickly from sleep deprivation as they will from food deprivation it's that that essential brutal but then they did something different they said well what about the different stages of sleep so they selectively deprived them of either non-rem sleep and REM sleep the hypothesis was perhaps that non-rm sleep is from an evolutionary perspective a much older form of sleep the first stage of sleep that came into being was non-rm sleep and the way we answer that is we look across philogyny and these sort of different branches and what we find is that in insects and in reptiles amphibians and fish they all seem to have non-rem sleep but for the most part with a few exceptions they don't seem to have REM sleep but if you look at birds and mammals they do have REM sleep and in fact it seems as though REM sleep evolved twice independently once in Birds once in mammals which tells us probably that it it's essential if it's being forced through the evolutionary pipe twice independently so you would argue well if I selectively deprived you of nonr the older stage of sleep presumably that's more life support necessary and REM sleep REM sleep is the new kid on the Block evolutionarily they found the opposite they found that if they selectively deprive rats just of non-rem sleep they did die but it took them longer they died after about 60 days if you deprive them of REM sleep dream sleep they died after 40 days versus 60 days other words this this new type of sleep REM sleep seems to be on that basis maybe even more important to supporting life than non-r sleep it's super interesting and as I recall from graduate school there are certain patterns of brain activity that occur during a rapid eye movement sleep um maybe we could go a little bit deeper into those patterns of activity I know you touched on some of these patterns in the first EP episode um the thing that comes to mind here is PG waves pwns geniculate occipital um pwns being an area of the brain stem that is chocka block full of different neurons involved in basic functions rhythmic breathing um eye movements um and basic reflexive functions that preserve the the well-being and life of the animal and that the neurons there then um do indeed connect to the thalamus this is like egg like a shaped structure in the middle of the brain where you have something called the geniculate which is a uh there's a auditory geniculate and a and a visual geniculate but it projects to this relay station for vision mainly and hearing and then it goes up to the occipital lobe the area in the back of our brain that incited people as responsible for conscious perception of images and I was taught and I don't know if this is um still true uh that based on the work of people like um mer stad and um folks like that that these Pon geniculate occipital waves of activity that were ongoing during sleep I think during REM sleep um were essential for resetting uh something essential about brain function and wakefulness so that you needed these pggo waves and that maybe even the activation of the visual pathway was part of the reasons why we um often experience such robust uh visual hallucinations during dreams um what is thought about PG are they related to rapid eye movement sleep and um are they somehow the reset um that we need um and indeed is essential for life because as you pointed out in the absence of rapid eye movement sleep we die it's a great demonstration of the uniqueness of your brain I mean essentially what we're asking is um this is your brain on dreams explain and REM sleep has many different brain features to it the first of which is as we spoke in the first episode your electrical brain wave activity at the top of the brain the cortex looks almost identical to that which you have when you're awake which is stunning because you're not conscious you're lying completely still no presence of muscle tone whatsoever yet your brain seems to be just as on fire with electrical activity as it is when you're awake coming down a step though there are these unique pulses of electrical almost like lightning bursts that come up from the brain stem up to this sensory relay Center in your brain called the thalamus and then they were initially recorded out in the back of the brain in the visual cortex hence this pgo waves describes the three sites that I've just mentioned goes from the brain stem the ponds up to the thalamus a part of it called the geniculate and then out to the back of the brain called the ocip cortex pgo what they found was that those bursts of pgo wave activity were very much linked to these rapid eye movements so once you got this burst of a pgo wave um this sort of brain Stam up into the brain burst then you got one of these rapid eye movements so it was linking something there with the eye movements and I told you that when you're having these eye movements that's a state where there's a high probability of dreaming and is it a surprise then that the final destination of that lightning bolt where it sort of strikes is at the back of the brain in the visual cortex probably not there's also been some links with those PJ waves and learning not so much that those pgo waves seem to consolidate memories in other words they may not be critical for sleep after learning but they seem to be related almost to sleep and initial learning and the more that animals learn the greater the amount of pgo wave activity they have when they go to sleep so pjo waves are unique PJ waves don't simply just hit the back of your brain that we've now measured them in all sorts of different cortical areas and they seem to light up the lightning splits as it were and it strikes all sorts of cortical areas so then the question was well let's take humans and let's put them inside of brain scanners let's allow them to fall into REM sleep and then we'll start scanning the brain what did we find it was very interesting when you look at the brain during REM sleep compared to let's say non-rem sleep you see motor regions of the brain lighting up you see visual regions of the brain lighting up just as we described you see memory related structures lighting up like the hippocampus and you see emotional related structures like the amydala and something called the anterior uh cortex uh the anterior singular cortex I should say so if I were to just show you an expert a brain Imaging map with memory centers related uh in terms of their activity emotion centers visual centers motoric centers and I were to say to you Andrew this is a scan that we got from an individual just describe the type of experience that you think this this person was having in the scanner you would probably look at it and say well they were probably recollecting things from their past memory structures they seem to be having a visual experience but there was also probably movement involved in that brain scanning experiment and also there seems to be some degree of emotionality to it that sounds strikingly similar to what we know dreams are like with one exception though and another part of the brain bucked the trend of increased activation during REM sleep that part of the brain with a far left and right sides of your frontal lobe something that we call the dorsal lateral prefrontal cortex terrible mouthful of word salad essentially just means the far left and right sides of your prefrontal cortex those are very important for logical rational thinking and decision making those parts of the brain went down in their activity almost as though they were suppressed during REM sleep dreaming so now let's go back to our map you're having a visual experience it's filled with movement and memories and emotions but it's utterly bizarre completely illogical and totally irrational if that's not a perfect neural definition of this thing called Dreaming I don't know what is it's so interesting we think of dreams or at least I think of dreams as a fragmented representation of real world experiences from our recent past maybe even the previous day you know sort of meshed with um our distant past experience and then of course our brain is also a very good anticipatory machine and somehow you know puts that into a movie that um for all purposes when we're in it we feel as if it's happening in real time yeah then of course uh we try and untangle what the meaning of all that is uh I think people are really intrigued by dreams um because they're they just feel so real to us and yet we know they're not of the same real that is our waking experience and um and you know throughout history people have um alluded to the idea or have been convinced of the idea that dreams are meaningful and something we're going to get into and I I should mention by the way that your dreams based on those brain pain scans still remained your own you were the only person privy to the experience of the dream itself I could stick you in a scanner and I could say you know were you having a visual dream and was it you know filled with motor activity and emotions and memories that tells me how you're dreaming it doesn't tell me what you're dreaming so at that point you still had this degree of security in privacy no longer it seems there was a great study done by a Japanese group using very Advanced Brain imaging technology and techniques such as multivoxel pattern analysis again word salad but it's a very clever technique and they were able to start to understand exactly what you Andrew huberman were dreaming and they would know what you were dreaming even before you woke up and told us what you were dreaming and they did a two-part experiment first they showed you lots of very specific images images of cars of women of houses of men of dogs of cats of just a whole category of different visual elements and your brain was being scanned as you were awake watching each of these and then using this clever analysis they were able to build up this very specific pattern this very specific template of activity that for you Andrew huberman said he is now looking specifically at a set of keys or he was looking at a car or he was looking at a woman or a man or a house and we knew ground truth in terms of what your brain looks like when it is seeing these different categories and then they did something clever then they let those individuals sleep and go into sleep and then they started waking them up and getting dream reports but once they got the dream reports the analysis sort of Team remained blind to those reports what they did was almost like a forensic team that goes hunting for DNA at a crime scene they had the DNA and they started going around and searching to see if they could find a DNA match but here they weren't using the DNA they were using these templates of a woman's face or a car or a house and they would search through this electrical this brain activity sort of static of your dreams at night and find these matches and then we could wake you up get the dream report and see how well did our brain performing a sort of algorithm match with your actual subjective report when you came out and it was stunning how close so I could tell you were dreaming but you were also dreaming about a house and a car you're dreaming about a woman turns out and we started to want your dreams as I said were your own but now no longer because science can start to reveal those what we can't yet do is understand which specific woman in which specific house so what you would probably see my brain based on my uh own proclivities lighting up is it would just be full of cars probably sports cars and then maybe another special uh individual woman those two things would be dominant but you wouldn't know that I'm dreaming about the new Porsche 911 GT2 RS you can't tell that you can just simply tell me he was dreaming about a car so there is still some distance to go I can't help but ask based on what you just described when people say things in their dreams when they sleep talk um how Faithfully does that report what's in the dream it doesn't at all and the reason is because when you sleep talking or sleep walking or even sleep eating you're not dreaming because you're not in dream sleep this is one of the fallacies that sleepwalking or sleeptalking you're you know stop dreaming wake up you're dreaming you're waking someone out of the very depths of deep non-rm sleep and these different things sleep walking sleep talking sleep eating um sleep um there's sleep Associated sex behavior all of these things are what we call parasomnias Par meaning sort of around somnia obviously sleep so these are things that happen around sleep but they're not quite in sleep because when you have those you are launched from Deep non-rm Sleep up to wakefulness but you don't make it all the way to wakefulness and so you act out these very rote routine reflexive behaviors you just repeat certain words you lift a cup to your mouth go over to the refrigerator so they are not faithful to the dream because if I were to gently wake you as you're sleeptalking and say what was going through your head you'll say nothing at all and you don't report a dream I'd like to take a brief break and acknowledge our sponsor ag1 ag1 is a vitamin mineral probiotic drink that also can contains adaptogens and is designed 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can go to drink a1.com huberman to claim a special offer you'll get five free travel packs plus a year supply of vitamin D3 K2 again that's drink a1.com huberman earlier in this series You describ Beautiful experiments by Matt Wilson others at MIT um who explored neural activity within the brain within the hippocampus in particular an area associated with memory formation in which the neurons in the hippocampus fire in the same sequence as they did during a particular daytime activity that preceded that night's sleep but they do so at a much more rapid rate sometimes they play in Reverse Etc yeah um this raises the question of first of all is that sort of neural replay of events from the prior day is that also associated with Dreaming or more specifically is that Dreaming or is dreaming that and that's really to raise the larger question which is what is dreaming for what is the function of dreaming so what we know is that Matt Wilson's data during nonrapid ey mve and sleep the brain was replaying those memories 10 to 20 times faster so but when you go into REM sleep it's down to 0 five times so listening to this podcast now and you hit that speed button and you drop it down to 0.5 that seems to be the replay speed during REM sleep we've not yet been able to confirm that in human beings but if we did does that mean we can explain the time time differences that seem to happen in the dream state that time is longer in the dream world than it is in the waking world I think that's fascinating but you're right it does point us more towards the question though of what are the functions of this state called Dreaming and we can get on to whether or not dreaming is a very faithful recapitulation of our waking experiences and I'll give you a spoiler now no but I'll give you the data in a second but the functions of dreaming come back to some of the functions of REM sleep that we described in an earlier episode those two related functions in the episode on learning in memory um was that one function of REM sleep seems to be creativity associating memories together so that you can come up with these wonderfully Divine solutions to problems you couldn't answer when you're awake the second came in our last episode about emotional and mental wellness and we spoke about this theory that we put forward that REM sleep is a form of overnight therapy and we described the evidence supporting that therapy so I would say that those are the two leading theories of REM sleep and Associated dreaming but I perhaps didn't give you the full story there there is a Twist in both of those stories I told you that when you are in REM sleep and you're dreaming the next day you are better able to assimilate and Associate memories and come up with these creative Insight Solutions it turns out that sleep is necessary for that and not just sleep but dream related sleep REM sleep is necessary for that but it's not sufficient you not only have to be asleep and dreaming to get those benefits you also have to be dreaming of the very things that you are trying to solve the next day there's a great study by a scientist called Robert stick gold at Harvard and he had a whole group of individuals learn a virtual Maze and they were dropped down in different locations of the Maze and they had to try to get out of the Maze and gradually when you're dropped down in different locations you do that enough times you start to build up this mental map of the Maze and then he let one half of those participants take a 9 minute nap and the other half remained awake and then some hours later they tested them on the Maze and they measured how quickly were you able to navigate and get out of the maze that was the outcome measure and sure enough just as we described those people who slept versus those who didn't they were better able to navigate The Maze after they had slept versus those who remained awake but then they went back and they separated those individuals who were napping into two classes because as they were napping they were waking them up intermittently and getting dream reports from them and what they found was that those people who slept and still had dream reports but those dreams were not related to The Maze they didn't show an improvement but those individuals who slept and who dreamt but also dreamt of the specific maze elements themselves they were the only subset of people of participants who showed the benefit and that's a beautiful demonstration that yes you need to sleep to get creative benefits and in fact seemingly have dream sleep but you also need to be dreaming about specific things is that rule true for the second function of REM sleep dreaming this overnight therapy benefit yes it does seem to be true there were some great Studies by a scientists who sadly passed away now Rosaline cartright and she was looking at different patient populations who had undergone really painful difficult emotional experiences for example a very bitter painful divorce and she would at the time that those individuals were going through this difficult challenge she would be recording their sleep looking at their different stages of sleep and she was collecting dream reports from them and then she would track them and their progression clinically over the next year and what she found was that some of those participants about 50% of them ended up getting clinical remission from the depression that was instigated by the painful experience they'd gone through the other half did not get clinical remission from their depression they remained depressed and then she used those two classes to go back and have a look at the sleep and dream reports and what she found was some differences in REM sleep but more interestingly were the differences in the dreams both of those sets of individuals were dreaming at the time of going through those difficult emotional experiences some of them however were dreaming of that challenging experience others were not those who dreamt but also dreamt of the problematic experience were the ones who went on to get clinical resolution from their depression those who dreamed but did not dream of those events seem to be the ones who did not get clinical remission from their depression in other words here once again is this new rule that when it comes to Dreaming it's not just about sleep and it's not just about dreaming it's about dreaming of the specific things that you're trying to get the functional benefit from whether that's creativity and insight or whether it's emotional resolution and over night therapy both of them seem to depend very much on the expression of dreaming of specific things itself and we'll come on to why that's maybe relevant when we speak about Lucidity too what you just said is very reassuring at least to me because uh when I'm going through a challenging phase um which somehow seems to happen periodically in my life at a frequency that uh let's just say keeps me dreaming um about things um You're Not Alone by the way I'm sure I'm not which is no no I didn't mean that I just mean that there are lots of people who can resonate with that so thank you for being vulnerable and sharing yeah yeah it's um one of these things where I you know put my head down on the pillow fall asleep and um on you know assuming I can get good sleep amidst those those real life events which is something that um sometimes is the case sometimes is not I always dream about things related to those events or those events in particular and I'm a longtime practitioner of of um writing down my dreams when I wake up from them um or as we discussed in an earlier episode I'll um my phone is on airplane mode at night typically I'll grab my phone and I'll hit the voice memo um button yeah or function rather and I'll just you know in my groggy state with my eyes closed so I'm not getting any light in my eyes I'll say you know I'll describe what I can recall of the dream then I'll sometimes go back and listen to those um those recordings and they've provided me Insight um and in some cases a path to Solutions so I'm 100% on board the fact that our dreams can help us resolve challenges in our waking day what's always fascinating to me though is how the dreams are not a one forone representation of what happened during the day it's you know I think symbolism is a is a is a Hallmark feature of of dreams you know um and that's uh something I know we're going to talk about you know in terms of dream interpretation and much has been made of this um throughout history um so it seems that when we're asking what are the functions of dreaming one of them is to resolve uh challenges from our daytime experience um it's emotional first aid yeah that's beautifully put and in an earlier episode on learning memory and creativity you uh described how specific sleep stages and perhaps dreams themselves are involved in the consolidation of of memories from daytime experiences or things that we're trying try to learn from daytime experiences and then in the episode on sleep and emotions it was made very clear that rapid eye movement sleep is a time in which we get a a sort of um therapy that is a disentangling of the emotional load of a given experience from The Experience um so to me it just seem so clear like dreams are critical sleep is critical but I think one question that Still Remains unresolved at least for me is are dreams really there to just be a replay our waking lives with some Distortion because when the conscious mind is asleep the unconscious mind can kind of throw things up to the surface in ways that U you know don't seem so obvious like you know symbolism analogy some of us are more visual than others um you know are there any rules about the way that dreams convert our waking experiences into dream content there are and the short answer to your question do we simply go into sleep start dreaming and then rewind the videotape and Replay in a faithful recapitulation the waking day in our dreaming night and the answer is no and here again uh the scientist I mentioned before Robert stickgold um with uh raw fossy they looked at this question and it was a very difficult study to do they did what we call experience sampling during the day and they would give you sort of like a little beeper and they would set it to go off multiple times throughout the day and then you would write down what it is that you were experiencing right in that moment and again they were trying to build up this sort of time lapse photography as it were of your waking day experience and then they would bring people in and they would start to record their dreams at night and then they would match those two and ask what is the degree of overlap what is the ven diagram proportion or percentage of those two things aligning and what they found was that there was really only about 2% of your dreaming life that was a very faithful replay and reiteration of your Waking Life however what they did find was something even more interesting to me which comes back to this idea of overnight therapy they found that there is something that runs through like a red thread narrative from your Waking Life into your dreaming life that is emotional concerns and people of significance if there is anything in terms of an algorithm that seems to overlap and predict where those two vend diagrams sort of collide it really is in the emotional personal significance space once again pointing us to perhaps a re affirmation that a key function of dreaming is about dealing with our waking experiences and particularly the things that are Salient to us okay so clearly there's a functionality to Dreaming but what should we make of the specific content of our dreams really meaning should we interpret our dreams or should we allow anyone else to interpret our dreams there are scores of books out there websites programs there's a long history of this in classic psychoanalysis what about this dream interpretation business I mean it really started you have to give credit in some ways to Freud although if you look back at very ancient cultures so much of their artwork so much of the sort of left imprint on the world suggests that they were fascinated by dreams and use dreams and gods of dreams so we've always been thinking about what are these things called dreams and can we interpret them but it was really Freud who put his seminal works together in 1899 and then published it in 1901 um called the interpretation of dreams and it's probably one of his if not his most famous text and you can unfairly sum it up as um you know if it's not one thing it's your mother when it comes to to Freud but in some ways Freud with his interpretation attempt in my mind was 50% right and a 100% wrong because until the moment that Freud came along we left the interpretation and the instigation of our dreams to things outside of us maybe it was there were comments that it was due to our soul or it was from the gods on high that they would descend down these these dream manifestos to us but Freud full credit was the first person to put dreams front and center into this thing called the brain the mind so in some ways Freud shifted dream science from really more of a sort of spiritual philosophical you know condition to very much a neuroscience it was of the mind and therefore of the brain and earlier he had he had tried to describe the neural patterns and he had these beautiful drawings of neuronal circuits that could try to explain what was going on but Neuroscience was so anemic at the time in terms of its knowledge he had no chance to do what we can do now so in some ways it's very unfair of me to criticize him as his theory being non-scientific it is also non-scientific in the very strict sense of the word when we create create a scientific theory just as though he created his interpretation of Dreams Theory we allow that theory to be testable which is to say that a scientific theory is only a scientific theory if it can be falsified or supported but Freud's theory was not a scientific theory it was not something that you could test and therefore it was not able to be falsified or affirmed and in some ways it was Freud's simultaneous downfall and his utter genius it's the reason that Freud remains to this day because we we can't put him in way in a box and say we've disproven him but we equally will never be able to prove him and therefore he's been in some ways let go in hard science as being representative his theory which we don't need to get into which was um called disguised censorship was really a very interesting proposition which was that there was something about our dreams that was veiled and masked and Freud believed that he understood the decryption code to our dreams and if you tell him your dream he has the special filter that he can pull that dream through the filter and magically out on the other side is the true meaning of that dream there are several problems with that uh Theory not least of which I think you know at the time if you look at his writings it seemed that Freud was probably doing enough cocaine to kill a small horse at the time but we'll put that aside for a second uh the the issue there is that it's not very replicable as an analysis method and there was a fascinating um study that was I remember from a conference I I should check to see if it's been fully published and they did something clever they took the Freudian method and they took a single Dream from one individual and they had three Freudian psychoanalysts analyze that dream so it was the same dream but three different analysts now in a scientific protocol if it's a scientifically rigorous assessment tool you would get back the very same answer from that measure mement technique all three times or very similar so for example a carbon dating machine if I were to take a fossil and put it in a carbon dating machine and then another another one and another one for the most part they're probably going to return something that's much more similar than different in terms of the carbon date of that fossil why because it's been very well validated and replicated that's what you want from a scientific method and Tool but when they gave this single dream the f as it were to these three different interpreters the three different carbon dating machines as it were they all came up with completely different interpretations and so that's not necessarily a reliable valid method so in that sense we've abandoned and let go of Freud as being relevant or meaningful however I personally and I think if you look at the data I don't mean that to suggest that you should not try to think about and quote unquote interpret your dreams and the term interpret when it comes to dreams is so loaded so I tend to I would just simply say see if you can really deconstruct some of your dreams I think dreaming just as we've spoken about is a very solid window into the things that you should be concerned about from your Waking Life it's very obvious that what whatever it is that we typically dream are the things that our brain is telling us the human being this is the stuff that's essential this is the stuff you need to work through this is please pay attention to me and any amount of journaling or deliberation digestion citation of that specific dream is going to be beneficial to you because in my mind a life unexamined is not a life life well lived and that isn't just applicable to your Waking Life it's especially applicable to your dreaming life now does that mean I suggesting that everyone should race out and start cataloging and and uh interpreting their dreams not necessarily but I am saying that if you wish to do that I as a scientist based on the data I'm not telling you that that's whoy and non-scientific I think it's very valid it's just that some of the Freudian principles I think we've being able to dislocate ourselves from I wholeheartedly agree with what you just said um and I've spoken about dreams and their possible relevance to clinician psychiatrist such as Paul KY and others um some who have more of a psychoanalytic training than others but certainly folks like Paul um know a ton of Neuroscience they understand pharmacology they understand family systems models uh dialectical uh therapy and so many other man is he's extraordinary he's not extraordinary he's extraordinary he is extraordinary and um in part because he can synthesize across all these different domains of Psychiatry psychology Neuroscience Etc as opposed to just be existing in one Silo like psychoanalysis or um or psychopharmacology so and there are others um although few as um as as extraordinary as Paul which is why we hosted him on the series here and one of the things that has come up in the discussions with Paul and others um with similar training about dreams is that dreams seem to present us with emotional states and scenarios for which there's a lot of um swapping in and out of of identity so for instance the notion of symbols within dreams is a long-standing conversation and I think one of the mistakes as I understand it is to assume that every time there's an animal in your dream that it represents children or that every time it's a particular kind of animal it represents you know uh you know your boss or something right sometimes a cigar is just a cigar right right uh on the other hand it's very clear that within our dreams there's rarely a completely linear one forone relationship with what happened in the daytime um of real experience so there seems to be a swapping in and out and there I just sort of zoom out and forgive me for going long here but I think um this would be a good fod for for exploring this a bit more deeply you know one of the best um descriptions of brain function that I've ever heard is from the Nobel prize winning neuroscientist Richard Axel at Columbia who often talks about the brain creating abstractions of the outside world so if I were to take a photo of your face for instance and then show you that photograph you'd say yeah that's me but if I Were A Painter I might um you know swap some of the positions of of um components of your face and show it to you and you might say well that doesn't look like me and I'd say but that's my abstraction of your face so to me it makes sense because I understand the rules by which I made those swaps and moves there's some algor gorithms or rules that are are known to me so there's a s preservation of real world to the abstraction and that's really what our brain does all the time it attempts to Faithfully represent the the uh the world around us but it is indeed an abstraction and when it comes to the colors of things or the position of objects it's as one for one as our brain is capable of um but when it comes to ideas to feelings to our relationships to other people the brain abstracts those in a in its own little neural Symphony of this is the relationship to my dog this is the relationship to my friend and colleague Matt Walker so it makes sense that in dreams those algorithms could be different they could be faster or slower um but they could also be entirely different and I don't think we yet know what the algorithms of transformation of real world experience to dream experience are and once we do and I think somebody we will understand those through electrical recordings and MRI type um uh experiments and some of the experiments you talked about earlier point to this and so I think it's entirely reasonable to assume that we each have our own unique abstraction algorithms so that indeed we can have consistent representation of real world experiences in symbols but that it's not going to be the same for everybody correct right your way of abstracting your real life to your dream life could be entirely unique to you and mine could be entirely unique to me making it very difficult for a third party to come in and say okay Matt here's what your dream means but you can know what your dream means if you explore your dreams over time not just that one dream does that make sense it makes total sense because in some ways there is no one who knows your own autobiography by definition than you than yourself now I'm not suggesting that having that interpretation Guided by someone who also understands the emotional problems that you're having and also sees your blind spots which is what a really good therapist can do can then help with that interpretation but you're right because my representation of information in the brain is going to be very biased by also what I've experienced in the past and how that past experience augments and modulates the current representation of that information and thus the meaning of it for me the unique individual and you're also right to say that it's somehow you know it's almost as though you're squ inting your eyes when you're in dream sleep in terms of the true vision of things things get a little bit wacky and distorted this bizarre nature We There is some very interesting data and it comes back to what we described earlier the neurochemistry of the REM sleep State I told you that during REM sleep levels of neur adrenaline are at Flor levels neur adrenaline is shut off one of the things if you sort of drop neur adrenaline onto neural Circ it will very much increase what we call the signal to noise and this is why noradrenaline when it's released or if you administer it to an animal you can become very you can become almost um more directed you're much more Divergent you're focused in attending and it's really there you're very blinkered you're very focused but when that goes away the neural circuits become a little bit more Loosey Goosey and I also told you that the other chemical if there is a neurochemical that defines REM sleep dreaming it's this thing called acetycholine and acetycholine seems to do the opposite it seems to inject a little bit more noise relative to the signal so in other words your brain circuits are neurochemically modulated when you dream to inject almost what we would think of as fuzzy logic and this is why I think the analogy that we spoke about in a previous epe episode holds that when you are awake and you're given some information you produce the most obvious links and obvious associations because you're very much blinkered and you have nor adrenaline on board but when you go into dream sleep the it's almost like the Google search when you're awake you go straight to page one and it's very related but do that same search when you're in the dream state and it you know you go straight to page you know 35 and it's an utterly bizarre page and you think hang on a second this got nothing to do with the search term when you read it you think well a squint my eyes kind of does it's very distant very non-obvious but that's a very smart connection that as a waking brain I never would have put together so I think neurochemically we can start to understand it but I think this is a very good important Point were you could almost say the very best person to interpret your dreams it's probably you I want to take a brief break and acknowledge our sponsor whoop whoop is a fitness wearable device that tracks your daily activity and sleep but also goes beyond that by providing real-time feedback on how to adjust your training and sleep schedule to perform better as a whoop user I've experienced the health benefits of their technology firsthand for sleep tracking for monitoring other features of my physiology and for giving me a lot of feedback about metrics within my brain and body that tell me how hard I should train or not train and basically point to the things that I'm doing correctly and incorrectly in my daily life that I can adjust using protocols some of which are actually within the whoop app given that many of us have goals such as improving our sleep building better habits or just focusing more on our overall health whoop is one of the tools that can really help you get personalized data recommendations and coaching toward your overall health in addition to being one of the most accurate sleep trackers in the world whoop allows you to recover more quickly and fully from physical exercise and other kinds of stress and thereby to train more effectively and sleep better if you're interested in trying whoop you can go to join. woop.com huberman today to get your first month free again that's join. woop.com huberman some dreams we'd rather not have here I'm specifically referring to nightmares uh I've had one nightmare countless times throughout my life um it's I won't share what it is um it's not a real world experience or at least it's not a one for one of real world experience but I've had this nightmare since I was a kid I have it seldom these days but every time it starts again I'm like oh no and there's a bit of Lucidity to it where I'm like I hear him again been working on this one a while um as you can imagine but given what we understand about the relationship between real world experiences and dreams what should we make of the fact that we have nightmares so let's just start there the phenomenon of nightmares does it represent something that troubled Us in the daytime and that we're trying to work out in our sleep um and then maybe we can get into some of the specifics around why regardless of whether or not the answer to that question is yes or no that we would have this thing called nightmares especially given that there's all this Machinery to make sure that we don't move and the nor adrenaline is low in the brain While We're Dreaming um seems like there's all all sorts of mechanisms to try and ensure that our dreams are very pleasant or at least neutral but um nightmares suck but um so I'd love to know me that t-shirt please so I'd love to know that they uh serve some utility so nightmares how do we Define a nightmare in sort of science clinically it's a little bit tricky but usually the way we Define it is it's a strongly unpleasant dream that causes some time of daytime um displeasure so in other words some type of daytime dysfunction or distress so everyone can have a bad dream but when you go up into your Waking Life and about your waking day it doesn't seem to bother you too much and maybe we'll just say that's a bad dream when it really becomes a nightmare is when I almost think of it as though you wake up and that blanket of strong nightmare emotion is still wrapped around you and you can feel it you can just know that my emotional state is still heavy and I know exactly where it came from and it was from that Nightmare and throughout the day you don't seem to be able to drobe yourself from that cloaked affect of The Nightmare it drenches you almost that's where it really starts to become unpleasant and we actually do have a clinical category it's called nightmare disorder and the way we typically Define that is the same thing as I said a very unpleasant dream that causes some type of daytime distress and it's happening at least once a week at that point we start to move it into this category of nightmare disorder what are nightmares doing if anything at all there are at least two theories one is that it's simply the system failing the system gone wrong and we're not processing we're not moving through things and therefore nightmares are maladaptive they're not warranted they're not normative the other is that no they are adaptive and they are meaningful and it's us really trying to go to a very specific pain point and we continue to process it over and over perhaps to the point where we get resolution but sometimes we just don't so it keeps cropping up we don't have good data to disambiguate those two right now so I think it still remains at least I don't know of any data that tells me are they functional or are they maladaptive even when we get that answer in some ways it doesn't change the fact that it still leaves a patient with nightmares with recurring nightmares so then what do you do about that how do we is there any treatment for people out there if they're under this distress is there hope and for a long time there really wasn't very much hope at all you just had to go through it but recently there was a a method that was developed and it's very effective and it is called IRT which stands for image rehearsal therapy and its basis comes back to something that in fact we um I think hopefully published the first evidence and humans of um some years ago now called memory reconsolidation so in our episode on learning and memory we said that there is at least sort of two main steps of memory first you have to imprint and learn the memory lay down that memory Trace but then that memory is very fragile and vulnerable to being overwritten by competing information knocked out of place and for you to hold on to that memory you have to go through a second step called memory consolidation a very slow process it's like a very slow pressing of the save button because it's biological it requires Pro prot synthesis and all of that good stuff but that always struck me as a strange model because it's the equivalent of opening up a Word document you type out all of the information into it and then you hit the save Buton so I've encoded imprinted the information that I've hit save and saved it and then I close that file and then the next day I come back or some days later and I double click on that file again because I want to edit it I either want to add to it or I want to revise it and change it but according to that model it's been logged in place and you could never edit that word document that seems like a profoundly useless way to store information and what we learned is that every time in subsequent days when you reactivate which is to say when you recollect the memory that has been Consolidated it opens that memory file back up to once again being plastic and malleable so you can go in and update the information in that memory store and then the next night you consolidate it again in other words you reconsolidate it so it's memory updating and there is a very clear mechanism in the human brain that allows us to do this memory updating iteratively time and time again this comes back to nightmare uh disorders this therapy image rehearsal therapy or IR will have you sit down with a therapist and at first you'll describe the nightmare that you're going through and you'll write that narrative down and then working with a therapist you will agree to think about a more neutral ending to that that nightmare so let's say that I was involved in a very um very difficult car crash was just horrific and every night since I'd say at least once a week I just continue to have the the nightmare of the car crash I know that I'm traveling towards the junction I apply the brakes the brakes have failed I am just looking around I'm trying to maneuver but nothing is going to change this I go through the red light and someone sideswipes me and that's the end and I relive that time and time again and it's awful so you with the therapist or I with a therapist would then start to say well what about the alternative iio I depress The Brak and the brakes don't work but gradually I think well I'm just going to reach over to the handbrake and I'm going to gradually apply the handbrake and that slowly is going to bring the car to a nice safe stop and then I'm going to call the emergency services the car is going to get towed I don't go through the junction I survive everything's fine so you rehearse this alternate ending and you keep going through that rehearsing that and then you go to sleep the next night and you'll probably have a high chance of that nightmare again but if you keep doing that once you've got that alternative ending essentially what you're trying to do is every time you reactivate the memory of the trauma car crash and then you rehearse this alternate ending it's like me going into the word document and editing the section that was really horrific and bad and replacing it with something that's neutral or even positive and over time then I sleep and I will consolidate that memory I'll come back back the next day and I'll do some more editing and more updating and Time After Time After Time gradually you dissipate the narrative that is fixed inside of the brain and the nightmare frequency decreases in proportion now it's not effective for 100% of patients if if you look at the data on average it's about two out of every three people so about 66% of people will benefit which if you look at some Medical Treatments that's that's a great treatment that's still very effective there was a very recent study from um uh Sophie Schwarz and her colleagues at the University of Geneva that did an even more ingenious study and they were able to nudge the effectiveness of that treatment from 66% up to 92% and they used an additional memory related research tool we've uh come up with in sleep science and it's called TMR or targeted memory reactivation and here's how it goes I'm going to have you learn a set of associations have you ever played that card game I think in America it's called memory which is very apt where you get a deck of cards and it has two of the same items two houses two cars two fire engines two cattles and you Shuffle the cards and then you put them face down in a big Square in a big Matrix and over time you have to turn over one card and it's a kettle and then I'm just going to randomly pick another card and it's a fire engine H okay but gradually you start to learn where each one of the purs are located so what's clever about that is we would do that type of what's called a Pur Association me memory test you have you you learn these Pur Associates and then we test you after night of sleep and you're better however if for as you're turning those items over I play a congruent sound so let's say you turn over the fire engine and then when you turn over the other fire engine I'm going to start playing a fire engine noise in the background so I'm bonding the association of the memory card purs with this tone with this congruent sound and then a kettle I turn over a kettle I turn over the other Kettle and it's whistling and then when you let people sleep at night if you start replaying those same tones at a subway sub Awakening threshold so you're not waking people up and you bring them back and let's say that you only do those sound Q reactivations for half of the memories that you've done and the other half you leave untouched so with within an individual you have a unique within individual control you test them on the things that you didn't reactivate at night and those that you did it's almost like uh creating a bespoke playlist at night where you say look I learned all of this information during the day or wouldn't this be wonderful and then here is the stuff that I really think personally to me I want to remember well it turns out I'd been tagging that with particular music and then at night I replay that music and the next day it turns out that those things I reactivated are much more strongly Consolidated by way of sleep than those things I didn't so that's the basic method of what we call TMR targeted memory reactivation what they did was something very clever they had them go through this process of the image rehearsal therapy they were rehearsing the alternate ending but about every 10 seconds they were playing them this very pleasing piano chord in the background and they were just bonding the association of the new outcome ending to the nightmare with this Pleasant piano chord and then sure enough in the subsequent weeks afterwards Not only was that person day after day doing the diligent therapy practice of rehearsing the memory whilst the piano tone was playing but then at night they would wait until they went into REM sleep which is the state we think the emotional therapy begins and they would start to Replay that same piano chord over and over again and sure enough those people who had image rehearsal therapy standard they improved by about 60% in their nightmare frequency reduction those people who did that plus the memory reactivation at night it drove it from 66% all the way up to 92% so now modern day Neuroscience with its techniques is starting to overlap with classical Clinical Psychology and we're developing these next Forefront of methods that really harness and fine-tune the brain's ability to undergo effective therapy it's incredible I mean I think that we've known about classical conditioning for a long time and the uh you know the the case of Pavlov's dogs is the most you know known of those um am I right in recalling that um this pair dissociation way of bringing about certain memories or strengthening certain memories in sleep can also be accomplished with odors um that it's not just the playing of tones during specific experiences but also for instance if one were to pair a particular odor with a certain uh novel memory event in the daytime or attempt to learn something new that if that odor is then infused into the room of the sleeping person later that night that somehow the the memories would be strengthened do I have that correct there's nothing wrong I've said it before I'll say it again nothing wrong with your memory that was one of the seminal papers that started this whole movement and what they did was they had them learn this kind of Pur associate card test but they were wearing this Mass almost looks like a fighter pilot mask and they were either puffing up inert air that was that didn't smell at all or they were perusing this very pleasant Rose scent because smell in particular has a very unique relationship with our memory in part because we emerged you know from animals that would principally use smell as their navigational tool I think everyone has had this experience where you Bond a certain cologne or a certain perfume with a particular individual so they were puffing The Rose perfume up the nose of these participants and then when they went into sleep they started to reperfuse that Rose odor now what was clever also about the experiment you could say well look just anytime you get something that smells puffed up your nose your memory is going to be better now the initial experiment had them learning the information when they're awake with the rose scent getting pushed up the nose and then when they slept they had the rose odor again another group did had learning but they had no rose smell pushed up their nose to bond with the information at the time of learning when they were awake and then when they slept they also had Rose odor stuffed up their nose and they showed no additional benefit so it's not just enough to have Rose odor at night you need to have made the initial bonded familiar connection with the novel information that you're learning to get the subsequent targeted memory reactivation benefit and you could then think well practical tools what should I do maybe you know when I'm learning for studying for a test I should blaze up my you know my most preferred incense and I'm I have a particular proclivity to green tea incense it turns out and maybe then before I go to bed at night I get a couple of sticks and I you know Blaze them back up took my head on the pillow turn the light out however do not do that because it's probably a desperate fire hazard so do not listen to me but you could think about doing something along those lines perhaps anyway um so that's targeted memory reactivation yeah um it's a perf segue for what I wanted to talk about next which is lucid dreaming um but um before we move to lucd Dreaming I'm wondering whether or not there's a an opportunity here to construct an experiment maybe even a protocol of sorts to uncouple the negative experience of nightmares to our daily experience could you so for instance we're talking about pair dissociation based on odors or sound replayed in sleep to um sort of nudge um or conjure particular daytime memories to the surface in the form of dream sleep yeah but we also know that one can uncouple um associations so for instance um if one experienced something negative and maybe this is being attempted in the in the realm of of trauma therapy um and that experience was paired with a particular odor it would be hard to do with visual cues and sleep or sound um could one um attempt to introduce a sort of a competing sound you know set up a sort of a collision um uh stimulus so that in sleep the the dream would no longer contain the the scary content or it would be less scary or is this exactly the wrong approach because if we believe that the nightmares are serving some functional purpose allowing us to work through what you really don't want to do right okay great then we answer the question well no I I think it's I think it's unclear right now but you're on the right line because there is something that we have in in learning in memory called fear Extinction and let's say that I were to sort of classic pavlovian learning Pavlov's dogs let's say I show you a specific image on the screen and then you hear a specific tone and then you get an electric shock I show you the stimulus on the screen you hear the specific tone and then you get an electrical shock that I don't show you the S stimulus on the screen but you do still hear the tone and then what happens is that you have a braced response to the electrical shock and there's all sorts of combinations in between of that but essentially I condition you to learn that these things seem to be associated with a negative outcome the inverse being the pavlovian dog which is that you ring a bell you show the dog some food and it salivates you ring the bell show the dog some food and it salivates and then you ring the bell you don't give it some food and it still salivates because it knows that the Bell precedes the the meat being shown and I actually mixed my um my order around there in my own experiment to begin with but then there's something different that you can do you can start to perhaps change the sound or the bonded connection and then you don't start getting the shock anymore so that same ringing of the Bell now is no longer consistently associated with the food and gradually you decondition the dog such that after some time it learns oh I started to learn that the Bell predicted food but now it no longer does and it takes some time to remove that and that's what we call Extinction you've induced an association and then you gradually extinguish it by way of that alternate Training Method so the question then became could we use that type of method but during sleep could we train you up on a fear memory and then just begin the early signs of extinguishing of deconditioning you but then we don't do that very much we wait until sleep and we continue the deconditioning protocol and sure enough sleep seems to be as if not more effective at extinguishing those fear memories than when you enact the protocol during wakefulness so here is a very good example of where you can use this sleep dependent memory processing tapestry this opportunity to harness not just to strength them memories that you wish to keep but start to extinguish memories you wish to remove and so I think it's a very exciting it's right on the cusp of what we're starting to do right now but I love it because I think some people would like to experience certain dreams and other people would like to uh not experience certain nightmares which reminds me of a a tool that Rick Rubin taught me um I don't know of any experiments that uh support this directly but I've tried this and and it certainly has worked first time and every time which is Rick said um if you wake up from a dream and you want to remember your dream and you or and or you found it Pleasant or interesting lay there completely still with your eyes closed and it will come to you um whereas if you wake up from a nightmare which many people do and um in a state of anxiety and you have a hard time kind of shaking the the disturbing AFF effect associated with that nightmare to move your body get up and move your body and maybe even flip some lights on something that normally I don't suggest in the middle of the night but waking up from a nightmare can be quite quite um disturbing and it can be um disturbing enough that it makes it difficult to fall back asleep um so and by the way he's he's he's right I I don't know if he's read the science or it's he's just it's knowing Rick he's probably just because he's so Yoda likee he's probably intuited Supernatural levels of insight tens of thousands of scientific articles but he's absolutely right one of the ways if you really wish to remember your dreams is not just jump up out of bed and start trying to write them down don't lie in bed keep your eyes closed and gradually rehearse that dream over and over in your mind almost as though you're scoring it into the etched surface your memory Trace more and more and gradually when you've re sort of capitulated and pieced back the jigsaw puzzle then gradually open your eyes start to dictate start to write down but don't do it immediately because as soon as you start doing it it begins to float away it begins to dissolve in a way that's you you sort of you know you're running and you're trying to reach your hand out F exactly that's why I use the The Voice Memos last night I woke up in the middle of the night from a dream and I decided to turn on voice memos and I remember thinking I'll remember this in the morning and I remember you never remember this in the morning that is a perfect segue for lucid dreaming which is uh the awareness that we are dreaming well in a dream uh is lucid dreaming real can we train ourselves to lucid dream and what is the value of lucid dreaming is it just a fun um game we can play is there any is there any reason we should attempt to lucid dream if we don't already or encourage more lucid dreaming or even any reason we shouldn't perhaps um lucid dreaming you beautifully gave the definition Loosely defined lucid dreaming is that you simply know that you're dreaming whilst you are dreaming so in other words as the dream is unfolding you gain awareness of ah this is a dream but I'm still dreaming at that moment by science definition you are in a state of Lucidity but most people don't really mean that when they say oh I'm a lucid dreamer they mean yes I'm I become aware that I'm Dreaming as I am dreaming and then I take over the Reigns of control and then starting to decide exactly what it is you dream and how you dream so now I'm on the ground and I'm walking through a park and I decide that I just want to take off and I want to fly over the river or I want to fly out over San Francisco Bay and take a tour so I decide to start flying that is what most people think of as lucid dreaming if you were to think about it this thing called Dreaming as we've described is utterly absurd as a state based on its psychotic kind of Nature and characteristics to then start to say it's that idiotic and strange and bizarre but PS I can also take control of it and decide what I want to do with it injects a whole dose of disbelief into a process that's already unbelievable by itself so science for a while just thought this is charlatan type stuff that these people claim that they can control their dreams how can you ever prove that because don't forget when you go into rem's sleep and you dream you are paralyzed so I can't just wake up and say I was lucid dreaming that's not proof I have to in some ways be able to demonstrate that I'm lucid dreaming as I begin to become Lucid but I can't because I can't communicate with you as the scientist well it turns out that you can one of the things we spoke about in the first episode is that yes you get these rapid eye movements but think about what that means I told you that when you dream your brain paralyzes all of your voluntary muscles so that you can dream and dream safely and you don't act out your dreams with the exception that at least two muscle groups your extraocular muscles that move your eyes and your inner ear muscles for some reason they are spurred from the paralysis so you can still move otherwise you could never have rapid eye movements so the eyes all of a sudden because we have electrodes up top and below and left and right sides we can measure what you're doing with your eyes during sleep in fact we have to do this to determine are you awake or are you in REM sleep the brain activity by itself doesn't tell us that we measure your muscle activity and if you lose muscle activity and your brain is very active and the eye channels that we're recording start to show these darting back and forth signals we know you're in Ram sleep that's how we Define it so that then suggested to us we can use the eye movements to create a form of Morse code signaling from the participant to the experiment and so let's say that with this claimed Lucid dreamer who comes to my sleep center we'll create a very specific greed upon code which is that as you start dreaming I can see that and when you become Lucid in that dream firstly give me three leftward flicks of your eyes we never see that in dreaming it's a very deliberative act and then when you say okay I'm I've started the lucid dreaming and you've agreed with the experiment that you're then going to start um moving your hands you're going to start to move your right hand well when you start to move your right hand give me four flicks to the right and when you're moving your left hand in the dream give me four flicks to the left and so there we create this very specific instigation code but then how does that help help us well we can have you sleeping in a brain scanner and before the brain scanning session when you sleep I have you just go into the brain scanner awake and I say move your left hand and your right motor cortex is going to be lighting up and then I'm going to say move your right hand and your left motor cortex is going to be lighting up and for you and me I build up a very unique map of your left hand motor memory representation and your right hand motor memory representation and if it's the left hand as I said it's the right side of the brain if it's the right hand it's the left side of the brain so now I've got ground truth as to where your hand representation is on your motor cortex in my brain scanner and then I'm going to put you back in the brain scanner let you go into sleep let you start dreaming then you give me three left flicks good this person has now become lucid and now he's doing four rightward flicks which which means he's clasping his right hand over and over again and then he gives me four leftwood flicks which means he switched over he's now using his left hand in his dream by the way I'm looking at the participant inside of the brain scanner through the glass and of course they're not moving their hand why because they're paralyzed but in the dream they are claiming based on their eye movements that they are moving their hands we bring them back out of the brain scanner and we analyze their brain scans during the period when they said I'm moving my right hand I'm moving my left hand what did we see sure enough we saw the same and we being the Royal wi it's a great study by a German group sure enough you see exactly the same pattern it was scientific groundtruth evidence that when a lucid dreamer claims they are doing something in the dream the brain scans that we received confirmed that indeed that's exactly what was happening it's just that none of the signal is being sent out to the periphery to the limbs because there's that that um cut off at the spinal cord descending inhibition yeah at the level of the alphao neurons if your spinal cord incredible so here we are talking about lucid dreaming which is a kind of mixed level of Consciousness dreaming of course but also Lucidity that is an awareness that one is dreaming now in just about every one of the five episodes leading up to this sixth episode in this series you emphasize the key importance of deep sleep and rapid eye movement sleep and in many ways some of the problems that arise from waking up in the middle of the night too many times or being in Shallow sleep as opposed to Deep Sleep lucid dreaming it seems is a kind of a case of light sleep because of one's awareness or is it so that's one the first question and then just very quickly an anecdote when I was a kid I used to read these like boy life magazines and those kind of things I for what they called but in the back they would have these um these ads for for products like x-ray glasses or you know or um or sea monkeys which turned out to be Brian shrimp what a disappointment that was um and um I thought they were monkeys on the on the package they were little monkeys but they were Brian shrimp um there was a product advertised that I in fact purchased which was an ey mask that had a little blinking red light in one corner and it said learn to lucid dream and the idea was that you would put this thing on and look at the red light just prior to going to sleep and then you go to sleep with this thing on and then at some point in your sleep you would see or think that you saw the red light flashing and the idea was that because you were in the ey mask you're in enough of a dream that you would be able to link the waking State recognition of the light Etc okay people get it I purchased that product I used it I thought perhaps there was an effect quote unquote where I could lucid dream but I wouldn't consider myself an avid Lucid dreamer although sometimes I am aware that I'm dreaming and usually it's in um pleasant dreams in which case I'm usually like yeah let's keep this going things like flying and and being you know particularly talented in a sport that in my Waking Life I had minimal Talent things like that okay so is lucid dreaming a case of shallow sleep and therefore something to avoid or is lucid dreaming something quite different and is there any advantage to learning to lucid dream or enhancing one's amount of lucid dreaming and if so how should one go about that so I'll take the question should you be lucid dreaming and I think I can argue it both sides right now and we don't have a very clear answer yet the first side is if you take a step back and ask from an evolutionary perspective let's assume for for want of a better worth that lucid streaming is helpful it's meaningful and that we should engage in it if that's the case that it confers some type of evolutionary benefit then you would expect that a lot of people would be doing it but if you look at the statistics somewhere between maybe just 10 to 20% of the population are natural lucid dreamers and so from an evolutionary perspective I could say well if it was so powerful it was so meaningful because we know everyone sleeps and for the most part we can say that almost everyone dreams if that's the case then those must clearly serve a purpose but the fact that very few people are lucid dreamers doesn't that tell us that it isn't necessarily beneficial so from that perspective I can play those numbers there is an inherent flaw in my argument there however because that assumes based on the argument I've just given you that we have stopped evolving and of course we have not and so perhaps that 10 to 10 to 20% of the population who are natural lucid dreamers are at the Forefront of homonid evolution and they're the next Super rate we shouldn't be worried about AI we should be worried about the lucid dreams because they're going to come and take over the world so I can argue it from that perspective which is just a philosophical argument it doesn't have weighted data to it but there is some data some individuals have asked the question is there any changes to your sleep or even the benefits of sleep when you are a lucid dreamer versus not and what's interesting is that for some papers that have been published after nights when people report lucid dreaming they wake up and they don't feel as restored they don't feel as refreshed by their sleep in the morning suggest just as you sort of hinted at the that the lucid dreaming state is associated with perhaps a less deep or more shallow form of REM sleep or a more active state of REM sleep perhaps too active so that it's fatiguing and depleting and upon Awakening you don't get that memory and that body that brain and body reset there are however a few papers that have not found that result so I think right now we don't truly know if the Lucid state is associated with unrefreshing sleep and unrest of sleep but if that proves true then I think that that's one argument the other argument I would put forward against it from that perspective would be think about what we've said regarding the functions of dreaming memory processing but particularly emotional therapy to gift us mental health if we then come along and say presumably you know nature through millions of years of evolution has come up with this this blueprint Manifesto of exactly what should be served up on the dream menu this evening that's there's a reason for that and that reason has been sculpted over millions of years to become wonderfully optimal for us and our emotional mental health and then we come along in the space of a lifetime and perhaps you could argue a little bit humoristic we think h i perhaps know a little bit better than a couple of million years of evolution I'm going to push those things off the rank ordering chart of what gets served up into my dreams and I'm going to supersede that and decide what I would prefer to be dreaming about and again I think that there's no good evidence that you could argue that that isn't true but equally that it is true we just don't know yet it if that is the case that lucid dreaming does produce unrest of sleep in some ways it also begs the question well what is happening in your brain during lucid dreaming is there anything in your brain that would explain why you don't feel refreshed and early studies looking at lucid dreamers when we put them inside of a brain scanner I told you at the start of this episode dream sleep has a unique brain signature memory regions emotion regions motor regions and visual Regions they're all lighting up but then there's this one part of your brain that does the opposite which is the lateral uh left and right sides of your prefrontal cortex The Logical rational thinking controlling regions of your brain those go offline but early studies demonstrated that the activity including the electrical activity over those frontal regions would be down as you were in non lucid dreaming but then when people rise back up and said now I'm lucid dreaming with those leftward flicks that activity was brought back online which makes a lot of mechanistic sense which is all of a sudden the part of your brain that prevented you from having rational logical control has been re-engaged and as a consequence you yourself can re-engage in volitional dictation of the outcome of what you're dreaming some studies however have not replicated that finding because when they looked at it and they took out some uh sort of what we call these um covariates or these confounding factors and I can bore you with what that principle is it removed that result and all of a sudden the prefrontal cortex went back to seemingly being nonactive they did find an alternate result what they found is that the electrical activity of the brain when you go into a lucid dreaming State seems to be a bit more frenetic a bit more active versus non-lucid dreaming states of electrical brain activity and if that's the case if the cortex which is already active is forced to become even more frenetically active when you are in this lucid dream state is that part of the reason that when you wake up from the lucid dreaming and you go about your day your brain just doesn't seem to be at the same operating ability because it's being fatigued above and beyond it's like saying I do a standard workout and I always go to you know one or two reps before failure but now as I'm lucid dreaming I am constantly going to complete muscle failure and then the next few days if you go and do a workout and I've been listening you and I have been trading workouts I don't want to do an Andrew hubman workout trust me you are this man is mine are short short and sweet this I I'm well let we'll work out at some point together but it's it's almost as though then no big surprise that after you do a legs day if I were to wake you up the next day and say you're back doing legs she said I can't do that I'm toast I'm host my legs are done and that's what we think could perhaps explain why you get that fatigue does that make some sense makes very good sense and you know in the absence of of better language to put to it I've long thought that one of the best things about sleep is that we are not engaging our frontal cortex that much in sleep um and as we talked about in an earlier episode The frontal cortex during waking is responsible for things such as the suppression of reflexes I mean it has to do that according to context of a situation it's a lot of work um and the frontal cortex does a great number of other things as well but I think one of the most wonderful things about sleep is that we get re release and um a break from all of that analysis of duration path and outcome you know what's how long is something going to take what path is it do I need to take in order together what's the outcome going to be all that analysis of things past present and future it's work it's it's mental it's mental work and I think that if if you tell me and I think you just did that lucid dreaming involves any kind of um encroachment of duration path outcome type of analysis into my sleep my personal preference is going to be to not lucid dream I'd rather just have very robust perhap you know dreams of different kinds and try to make sense of them once I wake up but it's so tempting though isn't it because like you I've had those experience I remember an amazing dream where I was snowboarding and I'm I am a below average snowboarder and all of a sudden I was just taking jump and I was doing all sorts of X game you're sha white I was it was unbelievable and I felt so and I was so happy in the moment and I remember waking up and just thinking firstly I'm sad I'm waking up right and second that was Sublime and all I want to do tomorrow night is go back and now I'm going to switch my snowboard out for a dirt bike and I'm going to do the dirt bike X Games version of it and going to be doing all sorts of Superman can't get greedy with Mother Nature know know she body slams you I get it I know if people out there are are you know enjoying it or wanting to do that um and by the way I didn't answer I'm so sorry your um red light question which is if you wanted to do it how can you do it if you're not doing it already there are in fact two scientific methods that have been developed one of them actually has a vague whiff of relationship ship to the light device although that's one of those things where if you know if a friend sent it to me or a random person said oh Dr I've seen this in the back of a magazine do you think it works I would just say please go and spend your $199 on something that is going to I think I was about 11 or 12 years old I think it cost something like I $10.99 or something which at the time for me was a lot of money but I had a paper rout I had a paper route back then and I had a little little bit of of a a disp I income but um it was cool cuz it was it was probably one of my first experiments I've been running experiments since I was a kid but but I I think self experimentation can be fun provided you can see that but sorry coming back to your red light the two methods one of them is something called the mild technique which stands for the pneumonic induction of lucid dreaming m i l d pneumonic just meaning a memory based technique induction obviously what we're trying to induce something and what is it we're trying to induce lucid dreaming and it's a very simple technique which is that you consistently rehearse before bed this notion that I will remember my dreams and I will instigate control in my dreams and you do this and it sounds just so hokey and non-scientific sure enough you do this over and over again the probability that you will loci a dream increases I think the better one maybe the more effective one is called the reality testing method and it was probably made famous in a brilliant movie if you haven't seen it everyone should watch it it's called Waking Life and it is an amazing Richard linklater uh the director it just for the philosophy alone in it it will blow your mind it's exceptional but it's a beautiful tretis on dreaming and lucid dreaming and in that they describe a method where during the waking day you are constantly perhaps you can set an alarm and you're constantly reminded to go over to let's say the wall and flip the light switch on and off on and off on and off and sure enough what happens the lights go on and off why because it's the real world and it complies and it's complicit with the laws of physics so you do this time and time again and you start to train yourself that at unique moments throughout your waking experience you always go over and you test some version of reality and it or it could just be I'm going to press my hand into something solid and this table is resisting my hand right now as I'm pressing and I just keep doing that and then at some point it becomes routine enough that you start to do that same thing when you are dreaming but now when I press my hand against the table or press my hand against the wall my hand goes straight through the wall or I flip the light switch on and off and the lights do nothing and all of a sudden that's my cue to say I'm not awake am I I'm I'm dreaming and therefore at that point I gain Lucidity and it increases the probability so those are the two methods that people have used and statistically scientifically they do seem to have some degree of success I love it I love it I personally I'm going to opt to not encourage lucid dreaming because I'm and myself because I'm I'm working on getting my sleep deeper and longer uh through the night with uh fewer waking episodes we will get that we will get there using the tools described in the previous and this episode of the uh of the series that we're doing here my sleep's been excellent at times pretty good at other times and and lousy at others which I think makes me well qualified um to talk about tools for sleep because I feel like I've come at it from every level of of performance very much and by the way um Shield swort in hand I'm right there by your side we'll we'll make it happen don't worry well thank you uh truly okay so sadly we are nearing the end of this six episode series and here we are in the sixth episode however last night before leaving the studio I decided to put out a word on social media on X AKA Twitter and on Instagram asking people what questions they have about sleep and I made it very Broadband you know I said ask anything you want about sleep Matt Walker will will do his best to answer and of course we had thousands and thousands and thousands of questions um and we're grateful let's push on through till dawn which completely violates every one of the six EP I'm they'll benefit we'll we'll struggle however we were able to um bin those responses into most frequently Asked uh most frequently liked Etc and so while we can't ask every question of you uh what I thought would be fun and very informative uh for the listeners is to ask 10 of the most popular questions um and fingers on buzzers no confering here we go and these are questions for which I I think there are practical answers um and so we'll do this not in Rapidfire Q&A but in uh let's just say a bridged format and then um perhaps we have you back another time um to uh answer more of the the questions before we get into these questions I will say that many of the questions that were asked uh of the uh by the audience in those comments um were in fact answered in the earlier five episodes of this podcast series with Matt Walker as well as the one that that we held today on on dreams and lucid dreaming so if you don't hear the answer to these uh to your question here and you have a burning question chances are your question was answered in a previous episode and all of those episodes are um time stamped in a lot of detail so people can navigate quickly to the topics most of interest to them so without further Ado questions from the audience first question is about best practices for managing rumination and negative thoughts when trying to fall asleep meaning if somebody is ruminating and they're having negative thoughts when they're trying to fall asleep what should they do in order to get past that and fall asleep short circuit you need to Short Circuit that situation and the way that you can do that is through a variety of methods there are multiple methods for short circuiting rumination the first I would recommend and it's something I practice meditation but really all of these that I'll describe are about getting your mind off itself that's the biggest problem regarding anxiety and sleep onset insomnia which is what I think this person is describing so meditation allows you it's either guide Ed and you're speaking about what you should be doing with your breathing or relaxation uh guided meditations all of those stop your mind from being able to play on itself and go through that Rolodex of anxiety you can do breathing techniques you can listen to sleep stories you can do your own type of body scan anything that you can you can do and something we described which is seems to be a quite effective method is taking yourself on a mental walk close your eyes and a walk that you know intensely well with Vivid 4K detail replicate that to the L I left foot on the first step down the steps take a right out the driveway up I go walk up the hill look to the left the bay is out there it's 5:00 p.m. the sun is starting to set that level of detail and usually when you do any one of these things the next thing that you remember is that you're waking up in the morning because you are able to Short Circuit that would be the best advice terrific and I must say the other night I woke up in the middle of the night and was having a little bit of trouble falling back asleep and I used this mental walk approach and it and it worked um oh very very well so thank you I um the next question is what is the best position to sleep in best body position best body position is probably the absence of the worst that would be your back and it's ill advised mostly for people who snore when you are on your back the likelihood of you you snoring and that Airway collapsing entirely and you having what's called a hypoxic event where you stop breathing entirely is significantly higher than if you sleep on your side or on your front so I would say that for most people if you know that you don't snore if your partner says I don't hear you snoring that's partial confirmation that you do not snore if you are curious and everyone should be everyone should be curious as to whether they snore I would say download an app and we can link to it I have no affiliation with whatsoever I pay my money I think it's like Pennies on the dollar it's like $2 a month or something and it is called snore lab so the word snore and then lab and you download it and it's an app and it is uh something that you install on your phone and then you say start recording and you place your phone face down and it listens to you all night and it records your breathing nothing more can't know what you're doing or saying don't worry there's privacy but it assesses your breathing and then it will show you a distribution of your snoring throughout the night and it categorizes that snoring from quiet no snoring to mild snoring to moderate to Epic and it literally is like a RTO shock and you will see very clearly if you are snoring or not wor still and impactful most is that you can go to those spikes when you are snoring and you can replay it and it is quite frightening to hear yourself struggling for breath if you see a confirmation of snoring by way of that snor La go and see your doctor that is the best advice 80% of people who have sleep apnea or snoring or in sensation of breathing are undiagnosed right now and it will take years off your life and when you get treated it is transformational patient once told me when I got treated with with my sleep app device I felt like I was 10 years younger it was almost as though and I'll remember it to the day I die it was almost as though someone came along and wiped a fogged glass clear and I could finally see that was the trans so my advice is if you think you are snoring stay away from back sleeping from sleeping on your back from sleeping on your back and even if you don't suspect you are a snorer just download this app you get a couple of nights for free just do it for a couple of nights consistently and then ask also by the way if you take on board alcohol and you have mild snoring it is very clear I would be highly surprised if on the nights that you drink you don't get a significant increase in your score of snoring terrific the next question is why does my body wake up at 3:30 a.m. and I'm presuming their mind as well no matter what time I go to sleep so to that question and we will have spoken about this before my first response is how do you know it's 3:30 and their response is because I look at the clock that's the first problem take all clock faces away from your sight when you are sleeping it is only going to reinforce it the second is that 3:30 can sometimes or if it's a consistent time it's not there's no sort of special thing about 3:30 it's just for this person people wake up at very specific times quite reliably so part of that is because they're going through very reliably timed sleep cycles and every time we finish a REM sleep period we wake up but it's normally very brief and the reason is because we've been in paralysis and the body needs to move so we wake up we make a postural shift we move in our bed just slightly and then we go back to sleep it happens to us all for some of us we will wake up and then we will stay awake and that's why it seems to be so religiously timed to certain specific moments in our night but this other sort of individual mention no matter what time I go to bed I seem to always wake up there that to me smells of a suggestion of reinforced learning that you've woken up a couple of times you've checked the clock and now you have taught your brain very very quickly that I always wake up at 3:30 in the morning and lo and behold what happens is that you start to do that more frequently the more frequently it happens the more times that you check the stronger that memory Association becomes the more likely it is to happen remove the clock face from the bed room terrific uh can we Bank sleep or catch up on Lost sleep it's a great question you you can and you cannot Bank sleep and it is directional so what we found is that for certain things such as let's say um an immune um vaccination or learning in memory if you are sleep deprived let's say the night after learning a specific task and lots of people have done this so you are deprived the first night after learning and that first night we know is critical for consolidating saving those memories but then the next day I don't test you in the way I would normally do instead I give you a full recovery night of sleep or maybe I give you two full recovery nights of sleep and then I test you do you show any evidence of a memory consolid consolidation benefit and the answer is no you don't in other words if you don't sleep the first night after learning you lose the chance to consolidate those memories so there sleep in that sense is an all in nothing think phenomenon if you don't snooze you lose in that regard and there are other examples of that downstairs in the body that is what happens when you go into a debt and then you try to pay it back with later credit and it fails you can't seem to do that with sleep so in that sense sleep is not like the bank in that direction you can't accumulate a debt and then let's say at the weekend after short sleeping during the week see if you can pay off that debt at some lat pointed time it doesn't work like that so for example if I deprive you Andrew hubman of sleep tonight let's say it's an 8 Hour opportunity and then tomorrow I give you all of the recovery sleep that you want and then on a second night third night fourth night do you sleep longer those subsequent nights yes you do but you only sleep back about 50% about four extra hours in fact if you look at the data it's usually less it's usually around two so only about 25% of the eight hours that you lost so you are all always running a debt and if that's the case if you can't truly pay back your sleep debt and you're constantly running that short sleep cycle you are it's like compounding interest on the loan it just escalates dramatically and that's why I think we see that short sleep really does predict ill health outcomes and more an early mortality the later and later in life that you go however there is a different form of sleep banking I told you that here you're going into a debt and you're trying to pay it off with credit later what if you had the inverse let's say that you are a a doctor or a nurse or um you are working in the emergency services and you know that you have two nights where you're on nights and it you're going to be probably very busy and you're not going to be sleeping well for the next two nights and that's going to be next Monday and Tuesday and I'm Curr L on Wednesday in the week prior there is something that has been demonstrated called Sleep banking which is where I know I'm going to go into debt so I sleep longer and I create credit to begin with and then I spend that credit as I go into debt and it seems to lessen the impact of that debt it doesn't remove the impact entirely but it does lessen it so here it's the inverse I'm not going into debt and then trying to pay it off later I build up credit and then I can spend that credit with debt so there is a form of sleep banking that seems to be present but it's not the Sleep banking that most people think about does that make I know it's very confusing but I tried to be clear about made it very clear that you can um buffer some of the Sleep loss that you anticipate um but there's no there's no retroactive saving of of what you lost that's right um what are some of the best practices is for getting back to sleep after waking up in the middle of the night there I would say there are several things first don't try too hard because trying to get back to sleep and become frustrated is very much like trying to remember someone's name sleep is just like this that the harder you try the further you push it away and as soon as you stop up all of a sudden that name just pops back into your head and it's the same way with sleep now previously I've said you don't want to spend a lot of time awake in bed because you learn the association that your bed is the place of wakefulness and every time you come in at night you're always wide awake and you don't know why despite having fallen asleep watching television just 20 minutes earlier the other suggestion however is most people don't want to get out of bed it's dark it's cold I get it I understand it the other thing to do in this situation is enjoy the concept of rest so wouldn't it be wonderful if in the middle of your working day someone said look just come away from your desk now and here is a beautiful calm bedroom it smells very nice nice dim light I would like you to lie down no need to fall asleep don't fall asleep just lie down on the bed or on the couch and just rest for the next 30 or 40 minutes just have a wonderful good old rest that sounds lovely and if you are struggling to fall back asleep and you've listened to me and the idiocy of what I've been describing over the past six episodes you you could start to get very stressed and say gosh well sleep is doing this and this and this and and I'm now and it's been 20 minutes and I can't fall back you just get more and more stressed instead take a different approach at that point instead of if you all the techniques that we've spoken about getting your mind off itself and we list them just now and we've listed them in a previous episode if none of those are working and you just can't catch it don't worry just say to yourself you know what tonight is not my night and he told me it's okay and it really is it's it's fine tomorrow night is going to be a better night tonight instead rather than trying to force myself to sleep I'm just going to lie here maybe with my eyes open I'm just going to rest I'm just going to enjoy and not stress I'm just going to enjoy a good old rest in my bed and once again the next thing that happens is that the sun has emerged it's bright in your room despite the blackout curtains and your alarm is going off because as soon as you relaxed out of the state of trying sleep came back in a resplendant didn't way terrific someone asks quote I used to be a great sleeper but as I've gotten older and then they mention that they're 65 currently I find that I wake up much earlier than I did previously and it's difficult for me to get more than six hours of sleep what do you think is going on and what are some remedies the first question I would want to ask is how do you feel on 6 hours of sleep and we can go from there if you are imper and you're struggling during the day and this person sounds as though they are unhappy with that 6 hours then we can start to have a conversation what would that conversation sound like I want to understand perhaps the reason that you can't get back asleep and we'll begin these techniques that we've spoken about for trying to get back to sleep let's say that you've gone to bed at 10:00 and you normally would like to wake up at 6:00 but you're always waking up at 4:00 and there's just nothing you can do at that stage you just don't feel the sleepiness over you weighing you down and there's no amount of these methods are going to help you you just have to get up we see this a lot in older adults sleep late in the night is very fragile much greater probability of them waking up in the second half of the night and the last quarter it's also miserable because most older adults the Cadian Rhythm shifts earlier I told you that as we go through our teen years our Cadian Rhythm shifts it gets sort of pushed into the the future and we like to go to bed much later and wake up much later and then into older adult sort of into well adulthood it drags back a little bit and we find our sweet spot but then as we get older it starts to regress back to what happened when we were children we want to stay up late but we can't we go to bed so early and we wake up early some regression happens as we get older by the way it's the reason that there is the quote unquote early bird special in Florida where a lot of people retire it's the early bird special because most people are to bed by you know 9:00 p.m. and they want to be eating starting to eat at 4 p.m. so how do you deal with that one way is you can use one of the four methods the four sort of macros of good sleep that we spoke about Q qrt quantity quality regularity timing here I would say see if you can delay your bedtime as best you can if your bedtime is 10: and you would like and you're normally waking up at 6:00 but you're consistently waking up at 4:00 start trying to go to bed at 11 p.m. push push push as hard as you can until you are so sleepy you sleep and then you will it will take a couple of days to build up that sort of remembering of from your brain and the de that to begin with you'll go to bed now at 11: and you'll wake up at 4: again and things are even worse but after a while you're building up this pressure to sleep and all of a sudden you're going to bed again at 11: but your brain thinks I have had four nights of now just 5 hours of sleep this I'm not doing this anymore I'm going to sleep through until 5: and you can keep moving your schedule later because when older adults are waking up at 4: and they can't get back it's also miserable because the rest of the world is asleep and the people they want to engage with have a social life you know call the kids uh speak with their grandkids they can't do any of that so it's a very difficult situation if those things don't work you can also speak to a board-certified sleep medicine clinician cbti cognitive behavioral therapy for insomnia which you we've spoken about in this episode is also effective for older adults to help them stay asleep if that doesn't work and you don't like to think about a psychological treatment there are some medications people think I'm probably a bit anti-m medication because I've been very vocal about classic sleeping pills but there are some sleeping medications that I think do show promise I'm not anti- pharmacology by any means one of them that's been shown to be effective for older adults is something called dopin and and trazadone 2 although there is some sort of push back a little bit by the community against trazadone and there's a new class of drugs that we've spoken about in a previous episode called the Doras the jeel orexin receptor antagonists d r a small s so I've spoken about three there trazadone dopin the Doras by the way I'm a scientist not a medical doctor this is scientifically descriptive not medically prescriptive tesone has perhaps been used more so if anything to help people who strug to fall asleep doyin if you look at the data is a medication that's much more helpful for keeping people asleep and including in a especially it seems for older adults and there it's lower dose doxin I think if you look at the data 3 milligrams and 6 milligram doses have been effective you can get it in pill form although usually not in those Doses and you have to end up cutting pills in half because it comes in 12 milligram there is a liquid solution that is provided and there I think the standard dose starts at around half a milliliter so you get a little syringe and it's a 1 mm syringe and you suck up that um half a milliliter and then you just put it in a drink in the last half an hour before bed it's tasteless and it helps you stay asleep so there are a variety of different things you can do just go try for rest and just give yourself the chance push your bed to a later time point you can also try cognitive behavioral therapy for insomnia and you can speak with your physician about some sleep medications terrific there were a good number of people that asked about sleep and menopause um one question was quote since entering menopause I have not gotten a good night's sleep in years um I think this question dovetails with the previous question I mean it could be age related right could be directly related to menopause um so are you aware of any specific treatments that you haven't covered in the course of this uh Q&A that are unique to menopause I think the answer you just gave um to whom ever asked uh the question about you know how to get more sleep or better sleep as one has gotten older should probably handle the answer to this question but what of the um men anda's specific requirements for getting um better sleep it is a huge problem in um premenopausal and perimenopausal uh women and of course women going through uh menopause it's principally because of what we call the vasom motor symptoms of of menopause which is to say these hot flashes where you just get EX sort of really for the body at Le quite extreme increases in temperature you get so hot and don't forget in our um episode two we spoke about how you need to regulate temperature and there's a very beautiful and complex relationship between temperature and sleep and we said you need to stay cool to stay as sleep but here is a situation where when you're asleep you're not staying cool you're doing the opposite you're getting warm and that is the adversarial thermal situation for staying asleep and so individuals wake up and then they struggle to get back to sleep I would say and we know the reasons why too some of the other issues with sleep are problematic it has to do with some of the sex hormone changes and uh I think I've myself have released a a podcast on this um specific issue and I won't go into the mechanisms as to why I'll speak about the treatments one treatment which is non-medication based is trying to make your bedroom cool but also using these smart mattresses now I've spoken to Mato the CEO of eight sleep another fantastic product and he has had a huge amount of feedback from menopausal women saying that that cooling mattress has been very helpful for their vasom motor symptoms so that's one method you can go down the the other is a medication method and here I need to be very careful I'm going to speak about bioidentical hormone replacement therapy for menopause now there is a lot of controversy again I don't have a horse in the race I would simply say if you want to think about this you have done a fantastic podcast on female health and female reproductive health I know our friend Petra Tia has got a very clear stance on female hormone replacement therapy and the absence of fear one has to have around the risk of breast cancer and if you listen to him he will excise or at least he has disabused I think many people of the belief that that is a concern but it's a very personal choice it's a woman's choice no one but a woman can decide but I would say that when women have gone into bio bioidentical hormone replacement therapy one of the things that benefits is also sleep because it brings back under control some of the these symptoms it reinstates some of the uh renormalization of aspects of um reproductive hormones and those are things that can promote sleep which when they become absent through menopause are causing sleep disruption great someone asks what does it mean if I can remember my dreams conversely what does it mean if I cannot remember my dreams does this have any reflection on my Sleep Quality well some of this was addressed during today's episode but maybe um just to give a a short recap um response uh how would you respond to this so I would say that just because you remember your dreams or you don't remember your let's say you don't remember your dreams many people will ask me then does that mean that I don't get REM sleep or I don't get enough REM sleep no absolutely it doesn't there seems to be no correlation between how much REM sleep that you're getting and whether or not you remember your dreams that's I think Point number one point number two is that there doesn't seem to be a strong correlation between you remembering your dreams and the quality of the waking day that ensues as a consequence of that dream remembered sleep from the night before versus dream nonrem remembered the only time that we've got a little bit of data comes on to what we've spoken about today which is Lucidity which is a different sort of oneup level of dreaming there maybe there's some unrest sleep argument but for the most part I would say do not worry if you're not remembering your dreams it doesn't mean that you are not Dreaming by the way I've got a wacky Theory it doesn't mean that you are also not storing those dreams and being influenced by them there is something called implicit memory and it was long sort of held you know these versions of you go into a movie theater and for very brief milliseconds of periods of time you're shown images of Pepsi cans or Coke cans and then during the intermission you track people's purchasing of soda and sure enough they will buy more Pepsi see if they get flashed sort of so we can actually embed implicit information into people and it changes their behavior they have no recollection of the memory but it's clearly there and it's clearly influencing the behavior what does this have to do with dreaming I have a theory of dreaming where people and I told you most of us forget most of our dreams and we think when we forget those dreams have gone they've evaporated from our brain what if it's not the case have you ever had that experience where you are waking up and you know you are dreaming and you just cannot capture it and you think it's gone that's it I've forgotten it and then two days later you're in the shower you're looking at the shampoo bottle and the label all of a sudden just unlocks the memory of that dream and it comes flooding back as a neuroscientist that tells me an important thing that memory is in existence but previously it was unavailable this is the difference between availability versus accessibility the memory was available able but you'd lost the IP address to go and retrieve it available not accessible now if most of our dreams are still always quote unquote implicitly remembered but we always fail to have accessibility those memories arguably according to my theory are always available they're always in our brains we just don't have conscious accessibility to them that doesn't change the fact that our dreams may shape huge amount of our Behavior implicitly and to me that's a wild crazy Theory and someday when I retire I'll do the study and try and disprove it anyway love it what are the key supplements for sleep and I just have to say that's a huge topic that that's an entire episode Into You and I should probably do intellectual jazz on that at some point yeah we should do that but um let's um constrain the question a bit um for sake of time um what if any supplements do you personally take or recommend to people um with the understanding that many people perhaps do not need supplements all right we never want to give the impression that that's the first lined um approach to dealing with sleep issues get your sunlight get your Darkness get your qqr right all of that if it's mysterious to you all of that as in the previous episodes of this of this podcast series um but assuming that someone wants to explore this supplement space and uh what do what do you recommend what do you take and please here I'm going to encourage you to not take into consideration at all what I've ever said about supplements for sleep because I think it's actually most useful if people get a uh a tapestry of opinions um please I'm just going to say that outright I don't say maybe you you could say a little bit more about those that you would recommend and and I think they're going to probably overlap because I already sort of know some of them but sure um the recommend again I just want to say that um never take anything or remove anything from your regimen without talking to your doctor first but uh and all always always make sure that you're doing all the behaviors correctly first but um and there's so many of them you know don't eat too close to bedtime get your morning sunlight on and on you know um but the supplements that I recommend when people ask and for supplement recommendations specifically are magnesium 3 and yep um it's more or less interchangeable with magnesium bisglycinate it has a slight sedative property a lot of people are deficient in magnesium anyway um and this is Magnesium taken about 30 to 60 minutes before bedtime the other one is appenine which is a essentially a derivative of chamomile yep um and then the third is theanine which is known to have a a mild uh anti-anxiety uh component to it um the one caveat is that theanine can be problematic for people that have very vivid dreams it can often people say that it makes their dreams even more Vivid and so if you suffer from that or it's waking you up then I suggest leaving out the theanine actually recommend people start with just one thing and then see how it affects them and then and then um bring more in I'll put a link in the show note captions to the dosages that were contained within a zero cost newsletter about sleep rather than listof dosages here and can link to that in the show note captions those are the main three and then there's one other which and I use those by the way um most every night before sleep and it has improved my sleep dramatically the other thing that I sometimes use is 900 milligrams of inositol um which for whatever reason has I find again this is anic data makes it easier for me to fall back asleep when I wake up in the middle of the night especially if I haven't eaten very many starchy carbohydrates in the days preceding I try and some starches after hard training and things of that sort but sometimes if I'm on a lower carbohydrate regimen then I find it extra difficult to sleep so I'll throw in some um some anasol um I will say there have been nights where I forget my supplements and just fall asleep and uh and so you know it's tough to say exactly what each of those is doing and in what combinations you always need to think about how much disposable income somebody has again get your behaviors right get the dos and don'ts that Matt described during the course of this podcast series write and then consider supplementation but yeah that's pretty much what I rely on yeah I like what you're saying um both the philosophy of it too because the things that we've spoken about the qqr and all the different methods they are a log order magnitude greater in terms of how they will cause correct your sleep than probably any supplement effect that I know of to go back to your um magt mag 3 and8 I think there is some evidence definitely interesting evidence it was more so in older adults and were able to show increases in the total amount of deep sleep I think it was somewhere around about um 15 to 20% although that's the relative percent difference if you look I think it was only about six or seven minutes of total deep sleep but there is some evidence there the evidence by way of you've heard the story of that magnesium is good for sleep it's principally derived from evidence of people who are magnesium deficient and when you make them magnesium normative they start sleeping better that's a very different question than saying I am magnesium normative I am in normal ranges and then I add to it how do I expect any greater benefit that's like me saying you know you're at an oxygen saturation of 99.9 and I'm going to give you pure oxygen it's not going to move you above 100 you're already at ceiling whereas if you are at 85% and I give you oxygen you're going to get a lovely benefit from that so but I like mag 3 and8 um because it is based on the evidence the only one that does cross the blood brain barrier people have said well then why do I get a benefit from things like the other one that I would speak about is probably um slow mag because it can be tough on some people's tummy and it's a coated uh form of magnesium that doesn't necessarily cross the bloodb brain barrier but um magnesium I would say want to focus on would maybe be magnesium chloride that seems maybe Petra has released a podcast on this too that seems to be I think an effective one for bio bioavailability but if it doesn't cross the blood brain barrier how can it be affecting sleep because sleep is of the brain by the brain and for the brain one of the reasons is because of muscle relaxation so if you're to tense in your body it feeds signals of stress to your brain and if you're stressed as we've spoken about you're not going to sleep well so I think there could be indirect effects of forms of magnesium that do not cross the blood brain barrier again assuming that you are magnesium deficient I think epogen um chamomile has some good evidence valaran root unfortunately if you look at the state the data it doesn't seem to hold up in terms of any sleep benefit whatsoever probably two that I would add to that list the first is glycine and here we're talking about doses of maybe 1.5 to two Gams of glycine has quite a reliable robust literature now it's not randomized control Trials of a level of a drug because these are supplements you don't get those studies but it does seem to have quite a reli will benefit based on what I've seen in the literature the final one I would say which has very good data to support its action is something called phosed sarine phosph serine and again I've got no association with any supplement company whatsoever but this has been reliably demonstrated to Tamp down the cortisol response now that data you've got to be careful if you look at it and read the studies which I have it's principally in athletes and they use an athletic performance intervention to Brute Force cortisol to go up and then they use this medication and it brings it back down but it is reliable I bring this up because we spoke about in our one of our episodes insomnia patients as they're trying to fall asleep cortisol is coming down just like it is in all healthy people and it drops low just as we're about to fall asleep but in insomnia patients it spikes back up again and then it does in the middle of the night so here is a medication that one could try to try to temp down that cortisol specifically as you're going into sleep and that may be of helped too so those are the only two that I would give with the same caveat that get everything else straight stop worrying about buying supplements and thinking it's going to be a quick fix get the basics in place and then we can think about fine-tuning you for the final couple of percent optimization that you get from supplements terrific answer the final question h of this Sixth and final episode of this podcast series on sleep with Dr Matthew Walker I'm so sad I don't want to leave I don't want to stop speaking about we can always do another I would love the literature changes it evolves it um we can do another and another is the following if you could give just one tip for getting better sleep what would that be regularity just keep things regular if you get regular sleep a lot of things will start to take care of themselves and after that if they don't we'll have another conversation and we'll go back to the other three keys the other three of the four macros of sleep quantity quality and regularity as I've spoken about in timing and then all of the other protocols that we've mentioned but start with regularity get that straight and I would also say you're timing to the r and the T of qqr T figure out your chronotype get good with your chronotype as best you can and then get regular if you do those two things sleep in synchrony with your chronotype rather than against it and you are being regular weekdays and weekends you will get a long way to getting better sleep fantastic well I'll put one in if you could give just one tip for getting better sleep what would it be I suggest you listen to all six episodes of The hberman Lab podcast guest series with Dr Matthew Walker about sleep and ways to improve sleep because episode one covers the biology and the basics of how to get better sleep and what sleep is episode two gets into the more advanced tools although I think they are tools that everyone I know they are tools that everyone can and should consider episode three gets into the power of naps caffeine food and the timing of those oh so powerful episode four gets into the role of sleep in learning memory and creativity what's more interesting than that episode five we discussed sleep and its impact on emotional health and mental health and today we were discussing dreaming and lucid dreaming and here is where I get to say Dr Matthew Walker thank you oh so much oh so much for giving us a absolutely worldclass grand tour of this incredible aspect of Our Lives that we call sleep and in doing so also making it extremely clear extremely actionable at every step and very very thorough in a way that really honors the interest and intellect and just real sincere interest in this topic on the part of the audience so I could not think of a single better person for this series than you alive or dead fortunately you're alive and I just want to say on behalf of myself everyone else here at The huberman Lab podcast and the many many millions of people listening to are watching this series thank you ever so much for having me on for giving me this opportunity firstly thank you but also for for the generosity of your heart your your intellect and you're willing to disseminate knowledge to millions of people myself included it is my privilege to sit next to you across from you and I've received so much wisdom and knowledge from you as so many others have you are an international treasure thank you Andrew Well thank you I'll try and take that in I'm grateful for you uh being a colleague and a friend and my favorite sign off with people I love is more soon take care thank you for joining me for today's episode with Dr Matthew Walker to learn more about Dr Walker's research and to learn more about his book and his social media handles please see the links in our show note captions if you're learning from and or enjoying this podcast please subscribe to our YouTube channel that's a terrific zeroc cost way to support us in addition please subscribe to the podcast on both Spotify and apple and on both Spotify and apple you can leave us plus up to a fstar review please also check out the sponsors at the beginning and throughout today's episode that's the best way to support this podcast if you have any questions for me or comments about the podcast or topics or guests that you'd like me to feature on the huberman Lab podcast please put those in the comment section on YouTube I do read all the comments on many episodes of The hubman Lab podcast we discuss supplements while supplements aren't necessary for everybody many people derive tremendous benefit from them for things like improving sleep for hormone support and for Focus to learn more more about the supplements discussed on the hubman loud podcast go to live momentus spelled o us that's Liv mous.com huberman if you're not already following me on social media I'm hubman lab on all social media platforms so that's Instagram X LinkedIn Facebook and threads and on all those platforms I discuss science and science related tools some of which overlaps with the content of the hubman Lab podcast but much of which is distinct from the content covered on the huberman Lab podcast so again it's hubman lab on all social media platforms if you have haven't already subscribed to our neural network newsletter our neural network newsletter is a zeroc cost newsletter that provides podcast summaries as well as protocols in the form of brief one to three page PDFs that cover everything from neuroplasticity and learning to sleep to deliberate cold exposure and deliberate heat exposure we have a foundational Fitness protocol and much more all of which again is completely zero cost you simply go to huberman lab.com go to the menu tab scroll down to newsletter and by supplying your email you can subscribe I want to point out that we do not share your email with anybody thank you once again for joining me for today's discussion all about sleep with Dr Matthew Walker and last but certainly not least thank you for your interest in science [Music]

Channel: Andrew Huberman

Views: 177,983

Keywords: andrew huberman, huberman lab podcast, huberman podcast, dr. andrew huberman, neuroscience, huberman lab, andrew huberman podcast, the huberman lab podcast, science podcast, matthew walker, matt walker, dr matt walker, sleep, dreaming, science of dreaming, lucid dreaming, sleep science

Id: Jy4rJcYmtUM

Length: 153min 5sec (9185 seconds)

Published: Wed May 08 2024