Common Daytime Habits That Sabotage Your Sleep | Dr. Matthew Walker

welcome to the show i'm jordan harbinger a lot of us whether we're entrepreneurs or nine-to-fivers well we want to optimize our sleep or just get more or better sleep and there's been a lot of talk about sleep hacks in the business and health community lately but much of it has been pseudoscience and does not come from people who are actually doing the research well that changes now today we're talking with my friend dr matthew walker he's a scientist and professor of neuroscience and psychology at the university of california in berkeley his research focuses on the impact of sleep on human health and disease he also doesn't seem to be aging at all because he looks about 20 something so perhaps there really is something to this whole sleep thing and that is what we're going to discuss today first though we're going to scare the crap out of everyone by talking about what happens when you don't get enough sleep i know most of you just have to look in the mirror to see those effects but it's actually far worse than it seems and i want you to get a full grasp of what sleep does for us and how we can make sure we're getting enough of it after our deep dive on sleep and health we're going to learn the answers to some questions we've all got about sleep such as why do i always wake up right before my alarm that happens to me all the time what's going on in my dreams and what do they mean what are lucid dreams and how come sometimes i can control what i'm dreaming about y'all know me i'm a full i'm just full of weird questions and i've dialed in on matthew today to get some interesting nuggets you can use to improve your sleep as well as your understanding of your sleep and finally we'll talk about how we can use sleep and sleep management to learn better make memories and skills sink in more effectively avoid some common misconceptions that almost everyone has about their sleep and more this was an absolutely fascinating interview and i could have gone on for hours there's just so much practical information in here that we can all use to improve our sleep improve the health of our brains and improve the health of our bodies as usual we've got worksheets for every episode including this one at jordanharbinger.com and if you want to learn how i managed to book all these great guests go to jordanharbinger.com course i'll teach you my networking secrets it's free i really think you should know this stuff it'll change your life enjoy this episode here with matthew [Music] walker [Music] now you mentioned hey is that an ora ring and i said yeah it is you know i've been trying to optimize my sleep because the more i sleep the more productive i am big surprise yeah and so i want to optimize my sleep i've got hue lights they turn the deep red color i use those at night i got my blue blockers my swan swannies they're called swan with sweeps yeah yeah so you know those yeah yeah and uh i started tracking my own sleep with the watch which is i think just heart rate dip and i've got the ur ring how accurate are these things though i mean can we really track sleep by something we're wearing um right now those devices they're pretty good at determining whether you're awake or you're asleep um so the gross metrics of sort of total sleep time maybe some of the metrics of where you are awake during the night and for how long they're somewhat accurate once you then try to get into passing the different stages of sleep so there are two principal types for humans non-rapid eye movement sleep and rem sleep or rem sleep and within non-rem sleep there are four separate stages one through four decreasing in their depths of or increasing in their depth of sleep so stages three and four are the deep stages of sleep most trackers will separate those four stages into light sleep stages one and two and deep sleep stages three and four and then rem sleep their ability to do that separation is not quite accurate um i would say the range right now is somewhere between about fifty to seventy percent accuracy for some of those different stages it's better for some it's worse most of them overestimate light non-rem sleep most of them underestimate deep non-rem sleep and they're a bit shaky on rem sleep as well will we get there in about sort of three to five years time in terms of accuracy i think we will do um but right now there's only so far that you can get if you're just using the the finger pulse measure as it were of heart rate you know you just can't people just can't seem to move the needle any further i used to have this clock and you would wear a band on your head and it would show you what phase of sleep you were in which is pretty cool they went out of business yeah it was like a co yeah it was like a 600 clock that's why they didn't survive right but they were brilliant because they were the ground you know if you're looking for the grandfather of kind of home commercial sleep tracking they were it and it was a great demonstration of an idea whose time arrived before i think the movement was ready for it definitely i think it was actually a really great form factor and people have tried to replicate that and they're doing that now so i think it was um right product wrong time totally and it came out in like 2009 yeah 2010. yeah so if you bought one of those back then you were just like the only people buying those were rich nerds maybe early early biohackers because there was no such thing as bulletproof tim ferriss had just come out with his book and he was probably looking at quantified self stuff with 20 other geeks like me in san francisco and the editor of wired and everyone else was like i'm not paying 600 bucks for a clock see you later right yeah and that was it and then i checked recently and i was like i'm gonna get this zeo again because this thing is great and it does more than all these other devices and it was perfectly comfortable and they were like they were just long gone i don't think the website's still there yes i think that form factor will probably come back because right now i think it's the only way that you're going to get a true brain signal and that is probably the only way that you're going to get at that kind of granularity if you want to actually get accuracy that i would get at my sleep center here at university of california berkeley that's the type of device that you would need for that level matt i've actually this might sound a little weird but i think there's probably something to this i think what's disturbing my sleep the most is the fact that i'm trying to track my sleep does that make sense it does and there is an emerging clinical disorder and a name for that oh good got a new disorder yeah tell me all about it yeah it's called orthosomnia so sure ortho simply means um straightening so you've heard of sort of you know orthopedics for example sort of keeping bones straightened so this is about people who are too fixated on getting their sleep right or getting it straight as it were and so much so that you become and i'm like this too because you know i'm a sleep scientist you know i i know too much about sleep so you become the woody allen neurotic of the sleep world yeah and you get so you know i think anxious and sometimes competitive both with yourself and other people if you've got a tracking competition i've heard people do doing this um so there is a an emerging disorder is it a a tiny fraction of the population i think it is well sure i think most people are in danger of probably underestimating the importance of sleep and not paying enough attention there are a few people who take it to the extremes we will always see that bell curve distribution we'll always see the extreme edge cases nothing keeps me up at night like worrying about how much sleep i'm getting or not getting i'll tell you well that was the funny thing with the book i think you know i wanted to i'd done enough public lectures out there in the world that i started off speaking about the wonderfully good things and amazing things that happen when you get sleep and people thought that's great that's really fascinating but then they never had behavioral change then i switched to actually speaking about the demonstrably and frighteningly bad things that happen when you don't get enough sleep that's when people really start started started to sit up and pay attention so i think the book was sort of biased towards maybe it wasn't scaremongering because i don't overemphasize i don't exactly exaggerate the science no it's actually just real scary sort of just hard truth but it's just simply frightening the science behind insufficient sleep and i did get a few reviews and i could get a few people right to me to say you know it was so frightening that it's actually now keeping me up at night doing the opposite and i thought oh no try hitting yourself in the head with the book until you fall i wish i was so bold to offer a suggestion like that but it is scary because we see how easy it is to fall behind on sleep and then end up cognitively impaired and some of the examples you give in the book are like hey if you haven't slept for 16 hours or whatever which is like a normal day and then you try to drive and it could be 20 hours you'll you're the expert here so correct me where i'm wrong you're basically driving after having drank enough to be considered intoxicated after 20 hours of of no sleep after 20 hours of being awake for straight you are as cognitively impaired as you would be if you were legally drunk right so if you work late and you got up at six and now you're going home at 10 like every lawyer on wall street you better work in manhattan and take the train home because otherwise you're too tired to drive and if you look at the profile of accidents you know and you sort of make it relative to the amount of traffic on the road you see exactly that type of nighttime spike and it's quite frightening i should also know by the way that um road traffic accidents are a lot more deathly when they're caused by insufficient sleep than either drugs or alcohol firstly we know that a lack of sleep and fatigue causes more accidents on our roads than drugs and alcohol combined wow but the reason that they're more fatal is because with drugs or alcohol which are obviously desperately you know bad when it comes to driving there you tend to mate make a late reaction so your response is too late or your response is inappropriate when you have what we call a micro sleep which is where you're driving and you sort of you your eyes just close over for you know a couple of seconds and then you come back around you get this kind of like head nod micro sleep there you don't make any response or any reaction whatsoever that's the difference between being under the influence versus having a micro sleep at least you make some kind of a correction some kind of effort breaking you're you're late at breaking but at least you're braking when you fall asleep there's no braking at all and at that moment there's a two ton missile traveling at 65 miles an hour and no one's in charge right and yeah that's that's terrifying and i think we've all been maybe maybe i'm outing myself here i think everyone at one point in their life at least once has probably dozed off behind the wheel and be like wow that was really scary oh my gosh i need to pull over somebody i mean i've done that in college or been in a car with my college roommate and i'm like hey we're on the rumble strips oh my god he's asleep oh yeah sorry i'm just really tired hey are you okay to drive yeah i'm fine now and then i'm like okay which is you know completely inappropriate response the response should be no pull into that mcdonald's for the next 90 minutes we'll take a nap you take a nap wake up yep get coffee let it kick in the half hour of what what is it called like when you're when you wake up sleeping sleep inertia yeah wait for that to wear off then get back on the road or switch drivers entirely exactly yeah split shift get some sleep but and once you get that first hit of a sleep attack when you're driving trust me it's only going to get worse it's a dose response function so the further and further you keep trying to battle it the more and more frequent those will happen you know if people and people have told me this i'll drive up to a stop light and i'm so glad that it's red because i know that i'm just going to get the chance for just a wee little sleep oh my goodness at that point you know don't risk it it's a terrible thing to have the weight and the guilt of someone else's life lost on your shoulders let alone your own or other people in the car it's just not worth it it honestly isn't and it's it's not about staying up all night by the way we know that if you're driving a car and you've only had six hours of sleep you're 33 percent more likely to get into road traffic accident so no one would you know come up and say hey we've got a great new car um it's it's fantastic um the only downside is that it's 33 more likely to get into a crash no one would buy that car that's exactly however what happens when you get into a car and you've only slept six hours which is like every buddy that i know yeah based on the numbers we know that almost one out of every two american adults in fact one out of every two adults in most developed nations is trying to survive on six hours of sleep or less during the week so we're all driving around pretty much worse than drunk i think there is a safe bet to say that fatigue is a major catastrophic problem on our roads today so let's say all right fine i take uber to work or i ride my bike which can't be any safer or maybe i ride the train at the bus so i don't have to worry about sleep that's just my existence but that's not really true what else happens when we don't get enough sleep um every major physiological system in your body and every operation of the mind is incredibly dependent on sleep wonderfully enhanced when you get it and markedly impert when you don't get everything everything yeah that's it fine your problem i know so where do we go from here you know well that's the end of the party life is terrible you don't sleep enough you'll die young i mean well and that is actually the truth though the last statement that you made we know that um short sleep predicts all-cause mortality it's a simple fact the shorter your sleep the shorter your life and there's a recent study that came out about 12 weeks ago now from sweden they looked at about 50 000 people and probably one of the most striking findings was that if you're trying to survive or regularly getting five hours of sleep or less you have a 65 percent risk of dying at any moment in time increased risk relative to people who are getting for any reason hours or more yeah for all courses heart attack stroke obviously correct i don't usually just drop dead for no reason yeah that's right and we can go we can sort of then say okay if that's the bigger picture what is so deathly about sleep every disease that is killing us in the developed world now has a causal link to insufficient sleep that collection that list currently includes cancer and alzheimer's disease the two most feared diseases doesn't stop there though it's also stroke cardiovascular disease diabetes obesity depression anxiety and most recently suicidality as well geez all from i'll just watch this another episode of you know whatever's on netflix or i have to get up early and you know i'm not going to bed on time i mean it seems like such a crazy price to pay because we're kind of conditioned i think and correct me if that's even possible but a lot of people are my friend jaco for example navy seal gets up at 4 30 a.m every day i'm like oh man would he go to bed at nine he's like now i go to bed at 11 i just don't need as much sleep and i thought oh did that just come up we always like that he's like no i got it you know when i was in the military and i thought oh okay they train this into you but are they training it into your body or are you just training yourself to deprive yourself of what you need on a regular basis so based on the wealth of the evidence and this is evidence from probably over about a hundred thousand studies now across different uh domains the number of people who can survive on five hours of sleep or less and without showing any impairment rounded to a whole number and expressed as a percent of the population is zero really so basically there's some freaks of nature that can get by on very little sleep there's a tiny fraction there is a genetic abnormality and we know the gene um it's called dec dec um which allows people to sleep um around about five and a half um six hours of sleep and they don't seem to show any impairment now at this point there's probably a lot of people thinking oh i wonder yeah i wonder if i'm one of those people just to give you a sense it's a tiny fraction of one percent of the population it turns out that you are far more likely to be struck by lightning in your lifetime the odds of which are about one in twelve thousand five hundred than you are to have this gene that's far better than i thought in terms of getting struck by lightning yeah it's it's actually odd isn't it statistic quite a good chance actually yeah um but your chances of of having this gene are infinitesimal and so um i think that there may be people who um either have that gene and are capable of it but those people who usually think that they can survive on insufficient sleep it may not get you acutely one way that it can pop you out the gene pool very quickly is just as we were sort of you know discussing which is a road traffic accident that you can um die and there are you know vast amounts of people you know for every 30 seconds that we've been talking there's been a road traffic accident in america caused by insufficient sleep um so that's one way that it will pop you out the gene pool very quickly that way the other way however is chronically and acutely and so you can have people in their 40s or in their 50s who say you know i've been sleeping for five hours a night for most of my life and i'm still here and i'm still fine but it's a little bit like high blood pressure you don't know you have it until finally you have that heart attack at 57 and you either survive or you don't and so i'm always weary of that mantra to say look i'm in my 50s i've been i've had a very successful career i'm free for the most part of any major disease and i've been sleeping you know five to six hours at night and then you know several years later that person gets a diagnosis of you know bowel cancer or prostate cancer or one of the other cancers that we know in fact i should know by the way that the link between a lack of sleep and cancer is now so strong that recently the world health organization decided to classify any form of nighttime shift work as a probable carcinogen so working overnight will give you cancer period pretty much the the rate of the increased probability um is so dramatic that they listed that category of jobs as in the bucket of being a probable car carcinogen yeah are there any other animals besides humans that will purposely deny themselves without the right amount of sleep human beings are the only species that will deliberately deprive themselves of sleep for no apparent gain there are probably um three circumstances under which animals will seem to undergo sleep deprivation the first is migrating birds and it's there's actually a fascinating story about this there is a bird called the white crowned sparrow and it turns out that the american military particularly darpa the the advanced defense agency section of the military invested millions of dollars into this tiny little passerine bird the reason is this during its migratory phase it goes for long periods or long stretches where it doesn't seem to be sleeping because it's flying a lot and what they noticed was that when you deprive that bird of sleep during that period it doesn't seem to show many physical or cognitive impairments but when you deprive that same bird of that same amount of sleep but outside of its migratory window it just falls apart in other words for a short period of time there is something biochemically or biological at least that it is capable of deploying that prevents its suffering that develops immunity resilience against sleep deprivation and so the military obviously thought goodness me if we could discover what this is we could create the 24-hour soldier we could augment the biology of our military and make them you know need sleep less or not at all what does it go wrong you know so they yeah so that's one circumstance um the other circumstance is that we've seen in killer whales when they give birth to the young the mother um will often undergo um sleep deprivation caring for its young it seems to deliberately stay awake for longer periods of time then once that young has re sort of been reintegrated to the pod because they tend to go out away from the safety of the pod from its clan to give birth and then they come back and once they come back they start sleeping normally again but for that period they're sleep deprived the final circumstance which is really interesting is if you put an animal under conditions of starvation it will start to increase the amount of time that it's awake the reason being is because starvation is a signal to suggest that it needs to forage a wider perimeter than it otherwise normally would and to do that it has to be awake for longer i always had a secret suspicion you know how people in la are always like oh i did i'm doing a fast and i have so much energy i'm always like yeah because your body's like oh crap i need food so bad i need this exercise exactly no is that true no i think you're absolutely right well it hasn't actually been demonstrated in the literature the only evidence that i know of is research studying people during ramadan where there is a long period of fasting and what they have found is just what you described which is that sleep typically gets shorter and more fragmented under conditions of starvation now i think there is an interesting movement right now where there is prolonged fasting or intermittent fasting i actually have done a lot of research and reading on that evidence i actually think it's quite a good practice it causes what we call autophagy which is where the body essentially cannibalizes cells that have lived their life and need to be removed out of the system and time-restricted feeding or even fasting seems to be able to remove that and it is good for longevity on the basis of many of the reports so i am suggesting that i think intermittent fasting is a good thing what you should know however is that when you undergo that intimate fasting your sleep will more than likely get worse or at least will become shorter in duration that may mean that when you sleep the quality is ironically better because you have such a short period of time to get the sleep that when you do the brain latches onto it and basically creates a supercharged version of sleep you get actually typically a lot more deep sleep i don't think however that is sustainable so people should not take that suggestion as meaning that you can start to just live chronically on short sleep you cannot the evidence is overwhelming you will live a shorter life and the quality of that now shorter life will be significantly worse but when you undergo fasting you should probably expect to see a significant change in your sleep for exactly the reason that we've just discussed and intermittent fasting for people that don't know is essentially and there's different versions of this of course but the usual fitness version is getting all your food during the day during an eight-hour window so not eating dinner too late not maybe skipping breakfast entirely that way you have sort of this 16-hour period where you're not eating anything yeah so that would be classified as time-restricted feeding okay and there's a wonderful scientist sachin pandra the salk who's done a lot of great work on this too um the and then there is intermittent fasting which is where you will perhaps go for 24 or even 48 hours without food that usually means even without coffee if you're going to do it just black coffee no sugar no sweetener no cream no milk that can happen for 24 hours sometimes 48 hours as well people try to sometimes push it further so that they go into a state called ketogenesis which is where they start burning your natural fat stores and there's a benefit there too but yeah yeah beyond the scope of the book definitely i don't usually cover fitness and so i'm always like okay but it's different because you are actually a phd the the problem is when guys come on and they're like look i'm 21 i've read everything about this let me come on and tell people how they can not eat for 30 days and why it's good for you and i'm like pass but uh not the doctors know everything no but and doctors need to actually recognize they you know they they know little and they know something but they know a little i am just as much of a student of sleep as as most other people that's great yeah i appreciate that and in the book why we sleep i thought there's a lot of interesting stuff in here i've got way more notes than we could possibly record but i thought it was interesting that even plants have a circadian rhythm you what was the experiment i don't know if it was you who ran it but it was like plants in the dark they're not going to open their leaves and sure enough they still kept the rhythm even though they were probably pretty damn confused about why there was no sun yeah every living species that lives at least longer than 24 hours seems to have some kind of rhythmic activity to it and that rhythmic activity is hardwired into not just our brains but every cell of our body all of our cells have little clocks inside of them 24-hour clocks now there is one master clock that sits within the brain of human beings and that's called the suprachiasmatic nucleus so it's a little bit like lord of the rings it's one ring to rule them all well there is one clock to rule them all and that sits within the brain but you have clocks all over the body and they understand the 24-hour rhythm because we were we evolved on a planet that rotates around the sun and so from the start of time the sun has always ridden risen and the sun has always set and that rhythmic activity changes light it changes temperature it changes pressure that changes our biology and species have to be aligned to those fluctuations what helps us align to that is our internal body clock that's where we get our timing from and it's not just human beings as i said even bacteria that live a couple of days seem to have some kind of rhythmic you know active state and a passive state it was probably the precursor of what we now call wake and sleep so what that tells me is that sleep evolved with life itself on this planet and from that point forward it has fought its way through heroically every step along the evolutionary path now some people go to bed late they get up early this makes sense for this is another one of my theories based on absolutely nothing other than reading a lot but i assume that this happened because we're tribal and it's good for some people to be awake pretty much all the time uh not the same people though exactly so hey this guy this person gets up early great i can sleep in a little i'll stay up late while these older folks go to bed early our chances of getting eaten by lions diminish by that much right yeah and that's that's the theory that i said tried to put forward in the book so we all have something called a chronotype which is your natural timing tendency for when you want to be awake and when you want to be asleep some people are sort of night owls right other people are mourning locks yeah daniel pink wrote about this in a book recently called when we covered it on the show some people get up 5 a.m they're totally fine or 6 a.m other people it's like how do people get awake before eggs yeah precisely that so and we know it's called your morningness or eveningness score it is not a choice people need to firstly realize that if you're an evening type and you're being shamed because you're not at work at seven o'clock in the morning or you can't function at seven o'clock that's not your fault it is genetically hardwired we know the genes that dictate whether you're a nighttime person or a morning person why is that sort of just to take step back to your question though which i think is a beautiful one why would we have designed such variability it turns out that if you look at hunter-gatherer tribes who are untouched by electrical civilization they typically sleep as a group as a collective as a tribe just as you described and this then comes on to why it would be beneficial because from an evolutionary standpoint think about sleep it is the most idiotic of all things because when you're asleep you're not finding a mate you're not finding food you're not reproducing you're not caring for your young and worse still you're vulnerable to predation sure yeah it seems like a waste of time absolutely you know on any one of those grounds but all of them combined you know sleep should have been strongly selected against in the course of evolution the fact that is persisted and is preserved in every species that we've studied to date means that if sleep doesn't serve an absolutely vital function it's the biggest mistake the evolutionary process ever met so what's then peculiar however is how could you risk mitigate what seems to be a biological necessity well here's a great idea if you are a co-sleeping species and you've got a 24-hour period and you all slept at the same time because your genes all want you to sleep from midnight to 8 a.m in the morning you're all going to be vulnerable for 8 hours however why don't we shuffle the debt genetically why don't we have some people who are going to bed at 9 00 a.m you know and waking up at four or five other people who are going to bed at you know 11 00 p.m waking up at seven other people are going to bed at 3 3am waking up sort of at 11 or 12. now all of a sudden everyone still gets their chance to get eight hours but you as a collective species are only vulnerable for maybe two hours and so it's a beautiful mechanism by way of nature and this is just the theory this is just the theory i put forward in the book i don't know if there's any good evidence right now for it but i think it's a tenable possibility tell us about sleep pressure because this kind of larks back or harks back to the the idea that we're falling asleep in the car and things like that i thought you just started to fall asleep when you're tired but actually there's hormones that build up are they hormones they build up in your body chemicals that build up in your body that eventually you just can't resist and caffeine and things like that sort of turn those switches off temporarily and then when the caffeine goes away it's like all right i'm leaving flips the switch back on kind of just walks out of the room and you're like i'm freaking dying now that's the crash right that's the crush i didn't know there was such a thing as sleep pressure there is so sleep pressure is caused by a chemical and that chemical has a name and it's called adenosine now from the moment that both you and i woke up this morning that chemical has started to build up in our brain and the more of that chemical that builds up the sleepier that you will feel and after about 16 hours of accumulation of adenosine you should feel sleepy enough so that you will fall asleep easily and then stay asleep throughout the night when we sleep the brain particularly during the deep stages of sleep will actually clear out that that adenosine that sleep pressure so when we sleep think of it like a pressure valve on a pressure cooker that all of a sudden you just release that 16 hours of sleepiness and you can do it within eight hours so that when you wake up the next morning you feel refreshed you're alert and you can go for a neck another 16 hours um that's where caffeine comes in though they sound quite similar adenosine caffeine end of them is the same and it's for a good reason pharmacologically caffeine will actually race into your brain and it will latch on to the welcome sites for adenosine that are called receptors and adenosine is pushed out of the way caffeine jumps and hijacks those receptors but when it locks onto those receptors it doesn't stimulate them to create more sleepiness it just blocks them to prevent the sleepiness signal so it essentially is like the mute button on your remote for the tv you know you've got lots of volume it's increasing across the day it gets to some loud sort of you know pressure and you fall asleep and then caffeine comes along and it races in and it just mutes the signal or it drops the signal down by let's say 50 so your brain was thinking i've been awake for 13 hours 14 hours 15 hours then you swig some caffeine and your brain thinks oh hang in a second i'm it looks like i've only been awake for seven hours now because it's not getting all of that sleepiness pressure signal the problem is that for the duration during which that caffeine is in your system it doesn't stop the brain producing adenosine the sleepiness chemical that continues to build so then by the time the caffeine is washed out of the system not only do you go back to having the whole weight of sleep pressure that you had four hours ago or three hours ago you have that plus all of the additional weight that's been building up while the caffeine's in your system and that is called a caffeine crash so now you actually have to start reaching for more caffeine to get back to where you were and it's a vicious cycle so that's one of the problems with caffeine in terms of sort of its alertness and it's caffeine crash caffeine however has a marked impact on your sleep most people know that it's a stimulant it's what we call a psychoactive stimulant it has to be right because otherwise it wouldn't work if i woke up fully refreshed and i drank caffeine and i right when i get up and i had no adenosine really building up then i wouldn't need any caffeine and it would have in theory no effect so it has to have some sort of additional effect other than just blocking those receptors otherwise i could drink a whole pot of coffee and feel exactly the same as if i didn't as long as i drank it right when i woke up definitely has some properties where um it it's thermogenic too so it will increase your core body temperature which will typically um increase your alertness that's why a hot drink even in the mornings even if it's non-caffeinated will typically help you because your body needs to rise in its core temperature to wake up naturally you didn't know that it's a good hack for people actually it's to sort of fit your set your thermostat um you know for maybe half an hour before you want to wake up and you can use that thermal cue but caffeine is a problem um firstly if you're drinking caffeine before midday then you're probably self-medicating your state of sleep deprivation right right and i look around on planes sometimes when i'm you know departing at 10 o'clock in the morning that should be starting to get to your peak level of alertness depending on what your chronotype is but it used to be that you couldn't use your phone you couldn't do anything on takeoff for that 40 minute period and boredom is a wonderful way to unmask your chronic state of of sleep loss and i would look around and half the plane was asleep at a time when biologically it should be almost impossible to sleep but coming back to caffeine it has a couple of stings in its tail firstly for some people caffeine will just keep you wired so you can't fall asleep or you wake up throughout the night but there are people who will say to me i can have a cup of coffee with dinner and i can fall asleep and i stay asleep just fine like any italian person who has i have a shot of espresso before dinner shout out for after dinner shot of espresso before bed and i'm like how many do you have each day i don't know 16 17. and i'm just and i sleep like a baby man and passed down the couch it's possible that they will maintain their sleep but we've since these were if you give people just a standard dose of a cup of coffee which is 200 milligrams of caffeine um just in the evening and then you measure their sleep relative to when they have not had caffeine in the evening what you typically see is about a 20 loss of deep sleep now to put that in context i would have to age a human being by about 20 to 30 years to produce a 20 reduction in deep sleep or you can do it by just having a cup of coffee in the evening geez because the caffeine half-life just keeps everything that's going in your system it does which delays the deep sleep onset and it prevents deep sleep it has a mechanism that we understand and your point by the way about half-life is a really important one too we know that caffeine has a half-life of about six or seven hours but caffeine has a quarter life of 12 hours what that means is that if you have a cup of coffee at noon a quarter of that caffeine is still circulating around your brain at midnight and it would be the equivalent of tucking yourself into bed at midnight and just before you turn the light out you swig a quarter of a cup of starbucks and you hope for a good night of snack yeah it's not going to happen but that's what you do to yourself if you have caffeine afternoon yeah i think people get confused about half-life because they go oh well that means that so if it's a six-hour half-life then half of it's gone by six and it's all gone by midnight it's like no no you half the half you don't just get rid of the second half yeah it's kind of hard to wrap your brain around things like half-life until you look at maybe a graph yeah because it's a it's a curve it's not like it's an exponential decay which yeah still but curve is a much better word than a yeah what is it asymptotes yeah that's where it flattens out yeah right right okay cool so how do we how do we know if we're getting enough sleep generally because it's clear that we're all just not and we're going to die young of terrible diseases but how do we know look i'm self-employed i can get enough sleep if i want to which is kind of half the reason i'm self-employed because i remember as a kid getting up for school and being just chronically underslept and just thinking they're gonna find out in 20 years that this is so bad for us you know and now and they did by the way what are we yeah and what are we doing in fact there is right now as we speak there is a law going to the california legislature um to actually try to delay school start times here and i've lobbied that i actually sent them a letter and posted it out on twitter imploring them to make this vote and the evidence is very clear that when we delay school start times academic grades increase behavioral problems decrease truancy rates decrease psychological and psychiatric issues decrease but what we also found which we didn't expect in those studies is the life expectancy of students increased and you may be thinking how is that possible yeah um the the leading cause of death of adolescent teens right now is actually not suicide that's second it's road traffic accidents and it comes back to this and you know there was one study for example in tetan county in wyoming they delayed their school start times from 7 30 in the morning to 8 55 in the morning the only thing more impressive than the one hour of extra sleep that those teens reported getting was a 70 drop in road traffic accidents in vehicle car crashes in that narrow age range of 16 to 18. so if our goal as educators truly is to educate and not risk lives in the process then we are failing our children in the most spectacular manner with this incessant model of early school start times yeah when i was a junior i i had a study hall that i could move around so i moved that naturally to the first period i took an elective that was a self-study thing during the second period so that i just did it after school and then i had a weightlifting class where you could make up any weightlifting session at any other free point during the day because they thought we would study otherwise or we would work on projects and things like that i don't remember exactly how it worked so i basically had the first three periods where i could just sleep in genius you had to the system and my grades went through the roof my mom would go hey shouldn't you be in school and i'm like look i made it so that i don't have to be there till 9 30 or whatever it was so i would get up at like 8 or 8 30 instead of 6 00 a.m after doing my homework until 12 30 because i would have five hours home exactly my grades went through the roof during the hardest year of high school and i was in a good mood and everything changed everything changed it is radical at change too and for a 7 30 start time i should note that school some school buses will begin leaving at 5 30 in the morning that means that some kids are having to wake up at 5 15 5 o'clock maybe even earlier this is lunacy and by the way 7 30 a.m for a teenager is the equivalent for an adult of them waking up you know at 4 30 or 3 30 in the morning you know it's not the same when you are that age because during adolescence your biological your sort of essential chronotype starts to shift forward in time you want to go to bed later you want to wake up later you become more like an owl rather than a lark but yet education is born within the mold of grown adults teachers sure and they want to administrators they have exactly the data to get things done right and they're waking up you know at you know seven o'clock or 6 30 and maybe that's not too bad for them but that's like asking an adult to wake up you know as i said at 4 30 and wake up and learn efficiently and act with grace and not suffer mental health problems it's just not going to happen i just i've i've told my wife jen this over and over i said we're going to figure out a way that our kids are going to get enough sleep i'm not going to turn into one of those adults who's like well i had to do it so you have to do it because it's not laziness like i was not no no i worked my butt off in school i was not lazy but i needed that sleep i knew i know that it was biologically necessary but of course my my dad's like you get up it's 8 30 i'm like it's saturday first of all and two i didn't go to bed at 8 30 p.m dad i went to bed at 1 30am well and furthermore what you're simply doing is trying to sleep off a debt that the school system has desperately lumbered you with during the week and we know that about 70 percent of parents of teenagers believe that their teen is getting enough sleep yet only 11 of teens are actually getting the sleep that they need so there is a mismatch and i think what's happening is that there is a parent to child transmission of sleep neglect that they rip the covers off at the weekend they say you're wasting the day you know what's going on and then what happens in 20 or 30 years time those teens become parents who then pull the sheets off their teenagers and say the same thing we need to break that viral transmission i agree look if administrators out there listening if you can do anything about this change it i know you want to get your errands done why don't you read pick up a book listen to a podcast early in the morning quit bugging your kids um can we make up for sleep that's a you brought up this the sleep debt idea can i just deprive myself for five straight days and then sleep all weekend or am i actually not really solving the problem here you're not really solving the problem so sleep is not like the bank but you can't accumulate a debt and then hope to pay it off at a later point in time now there was i should note a recent study that was published which suggested that those people who are short sleepers during the week and then are longer sleepers during the weekend actually have a reduced level of mortality of risk of death relative to those people who are short sleeping during the week and then short sleeping during the weekend as well so there's some degree of trying to sleep it off that seems to benefit however if you look at the details of that paper you should be weary it was all over the press as if this was some you know green light to do that by the way that's called social jet lag and it's very bad for your health where you actually you know short sleep during the week and then you binge at the weekend you sleep late and then come sunday night you have to try and drag your body clock back so two or three hours it's the equivalent of flying back and forth from san francisco to you know new york every weekend it's torture on your biology but if you looked at that paper more closely what you found is that those people who were short sleeping during the week and long sleeping during the weekend were about twice as likely to be in very poor health they were about 30 percent more likely to smoke they were twice as likely to be abusing sleeping pills and so i just don't think the recommendation is there right now you could argue by the way why isn't there a banking system like that in place yeah wouldn't that be useful because there is precedent in biology for a system like that and it's called the fat cell because there were times during our evolutionary past where we had caloric famine and we had caloric feast where we had lots of food and then we had no food at all and the body came up with a brilliant solution which is a storage cell a credit system for calories where you could store up when you had a feast in the form of fat and then you could spend that caloric credit when you went into debt during famine where is the fat cell for sleep right yeah wouldn't it be one and there is no fat cell the reason is because as we discussed human beings are the only species that deliberately deprive themselves of sleep in other words mother nature has never been forced to face the challenge of a chronic sleep debt mother nature has therefore never had to come up biologically with a solution to overcome insufficient sleep that's why we implode so demonstrably so quickly when we go without sleep why do i always wake up right before my alarm what's going on there i don't even need alarms i can say i've got a flight at this time i always almost always can just decide about when i'm gonna wake up and pretty much nail it and i've always been like that what's going on there so if you're getting sufficient sleep your body will just typically acclimate to its natural amount and by the way this comes back to your question which i failed to answer before which is how do you know that you're getting enough sleep yeah one of the ways is that you have you can wake up naturally so a good demonstration of you not getting sufficient sleep would be this would you would you oversleep or would you sleep in if you didn't have an alarm and if the answer is yes then you are under slept clearly because your body would still need more sleep but you are terminating that sleep artificially that's probably the very best metric it's it's a good metric as a as a positive but you can have false negatives what i mean by that is some people have early morning awakenings due to insomnia and that means that they are it doesn't mean that they're well rested it means that there's other problems usually anxiety typically that are causing early morning awakenings but for the most part that's one good sign would you sleep past your alarm if it didn't go off if the answer is yes you're not getting sufficient sleep are you using caffeine in the morning to wake up if the answer is yes you're probably underslept um other little telltale signs have you driven in the morning and you can't quite remember whether the traffic light was red or green that you passed through i mean i would hope it was green you would hope but if you're asking that question you know another one is you're just staring at a paragraph that you've read for three times now and you're thinking why can't i understand what's going on that was my entire school career that experience now sometimes it's just bad writing but at the time i did go to law school i mean there's a reason i read the whole thing and went wait what what's going on yeah yeah short of legalese um but so those i think are examples of um good telltale signs that you're not getting sufficient sleep but coming back to your point there are two circumstances where that happens one is where you're just consistently well slept and you just typically wake up naturally and your body will find that sweet spot and we've done these studies where you take people out for two weeks you say goodbye to your family friends put your phone away you are now basically incarcerated with us and we remove all cues all clocks all signs of daylight and we can just wash you out of all of the ills of modernity and we can see what your natural sleep rhythm is and firstly most people acquiesce to about eight to nine hours of sleep um in young health maybe they're just bored because they don't have their internet or their tv with them well boredom usually doesn't lead to sleep unless you are chronically underslept if you're bored you're just going to be frustrated um but the only time boredom leads to sleep is if you are chronically underslept okay so we can wash people out and then they will just start to find this natural sweet spot where they go to bed at their natural genetic predisposition and they'll wake up naturally and they feel it's surprising to hear how they feel which is that they feel fantastic there's a great study done not by myself but a guy called kenneth wright professor down at out in colorado he took some people up to the rockies uh for camping these are people who would say i normally just get sort of seven hours of sleep that's what i need um took them up no light no electricity no nothing no watches no gadgets sleeping with biological temperature dictated by the ambient light dictated by the ambient and they started sleeping about eight to nine hours again wow consistently this seems to be the natural human tendency so i think that's one of those things where you will start to wake up naturally the other however is a deleterious case which is called anticipatory anxiety most people will experience it if you have to wake up for an early morning flight or if you've got a job interview that you've got to go yeah and you just know firstly that your sleep that night is going to be rough yeah it's not going to be deep it's going to be shallow quality of sleep and you can set your alarm for let's say you know 5 30 and almost guaranteed you'll wake up at 5 28 yeah yeah as if internally and we are now starting to understand these mechanisms you have some kind of intrinsic quartz like precision you know metric of time where you don't need an outside clock at least non-consciously you have that clock tick-tock of time yeah um the one of the problems by the way in modern society phones because they create a a low level form of this every single day what most people typically do is they sleep with their phone in their bedroom some people are good that they don't keep it you know quite by their bedside but some people do um removing clock faces from your bedroom is one of the best pieces of advice that i can give you by the way um even if you're good and you keep your phone and you don't look at it during the night a lot of people i'm so sorry chad um this is going to be grounds for a marital dispute i hope not but um i tell her this all the time i'm like don't look she's like i can't sleep i'm like definitely looking at instagram at 3am is a great way to make sure that you don't sleep at all it's it's a almost a guarantee then the studies are in for this too what will happen though is when people wake up in the morning the first thing they typically do is swipe and unlock crap and it just unleashes this wave of anxiety cascades into your day in a way that we have never evolved to really expect this and just by knowing that that's how you're going to wake up in the morning when you go to bed at night essentially creates a very micro dose of that same experience that you would have of an early morning flight so your sleep just isn't as shallow and we can see this the amount of anticipatory anxiety correlates with the depth of your sleep if you have very little you have lots of luscious deep sleep which means you wake up feeling refreshed but if you have a strong level even a moderate level you won't sleep as well so if i'm getting rid of screens in the morning coffee in the morning i just realized i my entire life for as long as i've lived has revolved around doing something pretty unhealthy in the morning right when i wake up try if you can and you know i sound like a terrible prude and i'll you know i've spoken about coffee and we can speak about alcohol too life is to be lived to a degree you know and and i'm not you know immune to any of these things too but it's all about it's not about all and i think it's not about absolutes it's just about finding that correct sweet spot try to just go for five minutes firstly in the morning without opening your phone is it the light from the phone like what if what if i study chinese flash cards in the morning instead of checking my email so if you were to use your phone to just do a meditation and have it on aeroplane lock mode so you don't create that anticipation of twitter facebook instagram email you know messages um that's probably not too bad because it's not going to be that what we call fight or flight activating trigger within the nervous system that's a terrible thing to wake up and expect so try for five minutes without just plugging into all of those things and then try to extend it try to do seven minutes ten minutes so go through to the kitchen make your cup of you know uh if you like herbal tea or caffeinated drink um and you know finally when you've got some degree of wakefulness open your phone open your laptop do that but don't wake up expecting that it really can be a ball and chain to a deathly loss of your deep sleep at night what about jet lag are there easier there's all people like oh i do this and i don't get jet lag or i take this and i don't get jet lag or i i wear these earphones that have lights in them and i don't get jet like is there any truth to any of this or is it just look jet lag we're not evolved for it it takes time to to to adjust we're not evolved for jetlag and the jet engine was a remarkable invention for the transportation of civilization across around the globe but that jet caused a terrible lag in our biological time and it's what we call jet lag um there is no cure for jetlag but there are some treatments some hacks that you can actually implement that will help you diminish the severity of jet lag it won't overcome it and they're probably let me see they're probably five things you can do to overcome jet lag firstly when you get on the flight don't sleep in the last so this is the assumption that you're taking a long transatlantic flight let's say from san francisco to london which i will do i will always try to sleep in the first half of the flight and then i will wake myself up and i will force myself to stay awake for the rest of the flight and throughout the following day when i arrive in the uk the reason is because i need to build up enough of that sleep pressure so that i fall asleep or give my chance give myself the chance to get a good nights of sleep so the rule of thumb is make sure that you give yourself at least 14 hours of consistent continued wakefulness from the time that you wake up to the time that you expect or want to go to sleep in the new time zone which typically means sleep in the first half of the flight i often see people making that mistake they stay awake for the first half they sleep in the second half they arrive you know they touch down in london at 11 o'clock in the morning and they've only just woken up now if you'd been awake and normally active in london and you've only just woken up at you know 10 30 in the morning and then you expect to go to bed at 9 00 pm in the evening you're not going to feel very sleepy but that's what you've done by sleeping late on the plane that's the first thing the second avoid alcohol and caffeine on the flight they are served liberally and freely do not do it both of them will make it harder for your 24-hour clock your biological clock to adjust in the new time zone once you've arrived in the new time zone light exercise and time to feeding are your friends firstly try and get out for at least 30 minutes of natural daylight sometime before 10 o'clock in the morning in the new time zone next try to exercise and try to exercise before midday physical activity even if it's just that 20 minute 30 minute active walk outside if you go outside in the in the morning which you should it's fine if it's bright and sunny to wear a hat or sunblock but do not wear shades i know it looks cool but keep shades off your face you want that natural daylight to penetrate if you go out in the afternoon it's fine to get daylight in the afternoon but now is the time to wear shades start blocking that light in the afternoon the next thing is eat meals at a regular time when everyone else is don't eat meals when you want to when you're hungry which will be mismatched to everyone else's meals food is just a powerful trigger and cue to reset your biological clock as daylight is so do those things and then expect that your body clock will reset by about one hour for every day that you've been in the new time zone if i fly back home to england it's eight hour difference it's going to take me about eight days before i feel normal that's the expectation interesting yeah that makes sense so one hour per day so if we're gmt minus seven right now in san francisco it's going to take you a full week to fully readjust as long as you do everything else right if you just keep screwing up things up and eating dinner at 3 a.m and staying up all night absolutely you're screwed no matter what okay interesting there was by the way i should say melatonin is another good thing that's why melatonin is efficacious yeah um melatonin is a hormone um that hormone is often called the hormone of darkness or the vampire vampire hormone sounds very intimidating yeah not because it makes you when you take it look at people's necks longingly and want to bite into them it's just that that hormone comes out at night it's the hormone of darkness melatonin um rises when the sun sets and when we get the signal of darkness the brain releases its breaks on a gland called the pineal gland that gland releases melatonin into your bloodstream once melatonin circulates around your brain and the body it tells your brain and body it's night time it's time to go to sleep so melatonin helps time the healthy onset of your sleep you can use melatonin strategically in the new time zone because when i first arrive in the uk my melatonin spike is not normally going to happen for seven or eight hours you know despite it being 11 pm at night when most people in the uk they they're in the full swing of their melatonin rise now but i can fool my body into thinking that it's nighttime by taking some melatonin most people take too much melatonin by the way they typically take five or 10 milligrams that's actually too much so that your system will actually start to adapt and become intolerant to the melatonin best dose advice is probably about 0.5 milligrams 2 milligrams that seems to be the most efficacious dose so take that five milligram pill open it up dump half of it into your hand half in the other choose the smaller half and then exactly yep and usually you should take it about 45 minutes before your desired bedtime ah okay interesting man there were so many things in the book that were interesting about sleep obesity disease and things like that i want to sort of rap though with with dreams but before we get to that there was something in the book while we sleep that was you kind of just barely touched on it but it was there was a way in which people were using sound to program people's memory sleep tell me what what's going on there because that just sounds like some black mirror stuff waiting to happen yeah there should be an episode so um we have done uh at my sleep center a lot of work on sleep and memory and we know that sleep after learning will essentially hit the save button on those new memories so that you don't forget so sleep will actually future proof that information within your brain but you can even hack that system again too and there's a clever trick so there is something called context dependent or q dependent memory which is where let's say that you associate a particular set a list of words with a smell and then i ask you recall as many words from that list as you can and maybe you'll recall 50 of them but if i say okay recall that list of words but now i start reperfusing that smell up your nose you will remember maybe 70 of those words because the smell which you originally associated with learning that information when it is re-triggered into the brain when you are cueing that um that memory with the smell you unlock those memories more powerfully so and this is why people if you study in the room that you're going to take the exam you will typically do better because you use the cues from around the room as triggers to unlock those memories so visual and center because exactly visual olfactory sounds crazy all types of sensory so here's what i can do i can have you do a memory test where i'm going to teach you a bunch of photographs of different objects like the photograph of a cat or a fire engine or a kettle and those photographs will be placed at different geographical locations on the screen and then at a later test i'm going to show you a picture in the middle of the screen and i'm going to ask you two questions firstly did you see this picture before yes or no and if you say yes because let's say it was the kitten face i'll say great but where was it located on the screen and you have to try and position it in terms of its geographical location and so we can measure your memory accuracy for the object and also where it was in space but here's the fun thing during that learning and i'm going to teach you 100 objects you're going to have to try and learn 100 of those objects for for um those for every one of those objects when i show it to you on the screen i'm going to play a sound so i show you the cat face and there's a meow yeah i show you the sound of a fire engine i play the bell i show you the sound of the the kettle and i sorry i show you the kettle and you hear the sound of it whistling but here's the fun thing as you go into the stage of sleep that cements those memories at night which is called deep slow wave sleep or the deeper stages of non-rem sleep for half of those things that i showed you i'm going to replay those sounds whilst you're asleep at now it's at a level that won't wake you up but those sounds still penetrate your brain and they get into the brain and they basically just tickle and unlock those br those memories and they force those memories greater priority in the rank ordering list of being cemented and strengthened in the brain so it's almost like i'm triggering your brain to replay those memories more strongly at night how do i know that has a benefit well the next day i come back and i test you on all 100 of those items and what i find is that those items that i replayed during your sleep are remembered at twice the degree of recall wow double the memory benefit than those that you still slept on but i did not replay so you can imagine now trying to hack the system where when you're studying you're playing you know your favorite playlist and then when you go to sleep at night you play it at a lower level and you know you are replaying the specific information is that possible we you know uh we've done it experimentally i don't know about the playlist thing it's probably just going to disrupt your sleep and you shouldn't do it but is there a black mirror episode waiting yes probably yeah that's that's really really interesting why do we dream i know that in why we sleep you mentioned that memories and things like that are kind of encoded in the brain during rem sleep there's also this sort of cleaning of the brain between neurons that happens when we're getting certain types of sleep and things like that where we maybe clear out amyloid plaques and things like that we wash away alzheimer's disease essentially yeah but but what else is going on here what's going on in our dreams i mean it's such a weird thing i don't get what they're for they seem like they're really long even though it's only been four minutes when i wake up other people are walking around sleepwalking and dreaming at the same time like what the heck this is the weirdest thing that humans do it is weird and when you think about it everyone who slept last night you all became flagrantly psychotic yeah and before you dismiss my diagnosis of your nightly psychosis let me give you five good reasons firstly last night when you were dreaming you started to see things which were not there so you were hallucinating you believed things that couldn't possibly be true so you were delusional third you became confused about time place and person you're suffering from disorientation fourth you had wildly fluctuating emotions something that psychiatrists call being affectively labile and then how wonderful you wake up this morning and you forget most if not all of that dream experience so you're suffering from amnesia i remember a ton of my dreams but it's not a good thing people are always jealous and i'm like no you don't need to remember that you were in a flying submarine transporting cocaine with vanna white there's no marginal benefit to my life there's another black mirror episode right there as well but um so firstly you know dreams are just so peculiar when you realize that but for for both psychological and biological reasons that state seems to be actually optimal what we've discovered is that dreaming serves at least two different functions for the brain the first is creativity that during deep sleep is when we we cement those individual memories that's the hitting the save button sort of function that's deep sleep however rem sleep then takes those newly freshly minted memories in the brain and starts to collide them with all of the back catalog of information that you've got stored up it's almost it's almost like memory pinball it's sort of um i don't know it's like group therapy for memories you know where all of these memories get a name badge and during dream sleep they all get to speak with each other and they all find these new connections and new associations so that when you wake up the next day you have a revised mind wide web of associations a new associative network a rebooted ios that is capable of dividing remarkable insights into previously impenetrable problems and it is the reason that you have never been told to stay awake on a problem instead you're told to sleep on a problem yeah good point and in every language that i've studied to date from you know english to swahili that phrase or something like it actually seems to um seems to exist in other words the creative benefit of dream sleep transcends cultural boundaries um i should note by the way that the french translation i think is much closer to you sleep with a problem whereas the british we say you sleep on a problem french you sleep with a problem the french are kind of here it says so much about the romantic difference between the british and the french but uh yeah so that's the first benefit of dream sleep that it's about associative memory processing it's about creating understanding the the statistical rules in which this world we we live in operates and coming up with sort of novel solutions um and sort of uh creative connection building it's the difference between wisdom versus knowledge knowledge is what you get from deep non-rem sleep remaining uh sorry retaining facts wisdom is what you get from rem sleep which is what happens when you fit it all together the other function of dream sleep though is emotional first aid yeah that's that i found extremely interesting as well yeah and we've done now a lot of this work so i put forward a theory back in 2009 that it's during dream sleep it is the only time during the 24-hour period where the brain when you look at the chemistry of of of sleep the brain shuts off a stress-related chemical called nor adrenaline in the brain or norepinephrine the homologue of that in your body everyone knows which is called adrenaline or epinephrine but in the brain it's called noradrenaline that chemical is shut off during dream sleep which means that your brain is devoid of this stress chemistry and then when we were looking at people inside an mri scanner when they went into dream sleep what we noticed is that the emotional centers of the brain and the memory centers of the brain they reignite they're actually up to 30 more active than when you're awake which is stunning so what this meant to me or suggested to me however is that you have this brain that can reactivate and reprocess the emotional experiences of the prior day but do so in a neurochemical state that is quote unquote safe that is devoid of this stress-free neurochemistry so that in other words the brain could actually strip away the painful sting from those emotional memories so that when you woke up the next day yes you still remember those emotional memories better but you are left with a memory of an emotional event but is no longer itself emotional it's almost like having a sparring partner where they're gonna hit you sometimes but they're not gonna knock your head off it's just like i'm dealing with this i'm working this out okay i've gotta keep my guard up on my right side but you're not getting hammered with a right cross every single time you drop your guard your brain is just working through these issues without your hormones making you go crazy but what's what's happening when we do have a physical response sometimes we wake up sweaty you know we're going wake up in a fit of whatever you got these people screaming at night or whatever what's going on there obviously they're having some kind of crazy physical response they are having a physical response but typically those nighttime sweats do not occur during rem sleep they actually occur from non-rapid eye movement sleep and people usually have what are called night terrors yeah which is where they wake up like a bolt and their heart is racing they have terrible anxiety they don't remember anything they don't remember dreaming the end the reason is because they weren't in dream sleep they were in deep non-rem sleep so that thing about in movies where people wake up sweating they're sort of racing and then they say i had a terrible dream that's actually not true like no that comes later in yeah exactly yeah but it's during rem sleep that you're essentially divorcing the emotion from the memory it's almost um you know it's it's emotional um i think it's emotional therapy it's overnight therapy is what i would describe it as so that we know is a function we the one clinical condition where we see that fail is in ptsd or post-traumatic stress disorder that's where those people seem to have repetitive nightmares and i don't think it's a coincidence that they're having repetitive nightmares if you look at those individuals that chemical noradrenaline is in two high amounts and i published theory 2009 we did a whole bunch of experiments to demonstrate that in fact that's exactly what rem sleep was doing which was it was divorcing the emotion from the memory it was kind of peeling the bitter rind from the informational orange of emotional memories um and then a wonderful psychiatrist murray raskin up in seattle he started to treat ptsd patients with a drug that would try to lower down that excessive level of noradrenaline in ptsd patients to try to bring it back down to a level that would be normal based on this overnight therapy theory that we'd published and lo and behold those patients stopped having nightmares and they had clinical remission to some of their ptsd and it's now and i'm wonderfully humbled it is now the only or one of the only drugs that is prescribed for vets in the va system for nightmares and ptsd i know that we're coming up on time here but one last point which i thought was extremely fascinating really was that we lose our ability if we get if we lack rem sleep our brain's ability to decode emotions actually goes way down what's going on here that's kind of scary because it's it's kind of like saying well if you're under arrested you're going to trust a con man or get in the car with a crazy stranger or choose poorly when it comes to friends or there's all kinds of things that could go wrong here yeah so this was a study that we just recently published about um 18 months ago looking at a new function of rem sleep which is actually the recalibration of your emotional networks within the brain so our brains are have a vast amount of them dedicated to emotion processing and emotions are critical they convey all sorts of information consciously non-consciously they and your ability your eq is just as important as your iq your emotional intelligence is eq one of the components of eq is to be able to accurately read the emotions of other people most of that comes from the face some of that comes from the voice other aspects come from movement some of it comes from touch most of it in us primate species comes from the face so being able to accurately identify emotional facial expressions is critical a good demonstration of when it fails is people who have autism now what we discovered is that when you have a full eight hours of sleep you have a beautifully kind of um tuned curve for picking up and discriminating subtle emotions but when you suffer sleep deprivation particularly a lack of rem sleep that tuning curve that ability to accurately separate friend from foe and recognize those signals becomes blunted so you can't accurately discriminate facial expressions so you are at an evolutionary disadvantage now that runs through to things like business for example because you're constantly looking for people and looking for these signs are they on board with me do they understand me do they not like me are they warming to me all of these things are critical same goes for relationships think about the conditions where emotional intelligence and facial recognition is critical yet they are underslept medicine military new parents all of these are circumstances where that function is absolutely vital but it goes away because of the chronic sleep deprivation that they are put under well that's a little bit terrifying right the hardest work welcome the people who are keeping us safe the hardest workers among us are the people that have the the least amount of sleep and are rapidly decreasing in their ability to do what they do best which is kind of scary so it's it really does sort of say hey if you're in an important position maybe start treating your sleep more seriously and that was the overall message i got from the book which is we're all almost all of us are kind of chronically underslept and it's not this badge of honor that we should be wearing it's actually hurting us in our creative pursuits in our work in the way that we relate to others and at the end of this episode i did have this huge checklist of things i wanted to cover but we're going to end up throwing them in the worksheet we do worksheets for every episode there's uh the getting better sleep checklist limiting blue light where to get blue blockers not drinking alcohol the half-life of caffeine a lot of these alcohol and sleep the cbd darkness dog society drop your temperature at night regularity if i was going to give you one piece of advice go to bed at the same time wake up at the same time no matter whether it's the day or uh sort of you've had a bad night of sleep or even if you know it's the weekend regularity is key that's great yeah we'll we'll throw that in the checklist so for the worksheets which are always in the show notes for the episode we will have everything from caffeine to temperature to blue blockers and uh how to nap properly you're our sleep ambassador now that's right wonderful that's right somebody's got to do it because we've been taught our whole lives that getting enough sleep is for wimps or a luxury that you can only have on saturday it is it is a huge problem um this stigma that we've labeled sleep with which is laziness slothful um sleep is not an optional lifestyle luxury sleep is a non-negotiable biological necessity sleep is a life support system i would say and it is mother nature's best effort yet at immortality and the decimation of sleep throughout industrialized nations is now having a catastrophic impact on our health our wellness as well as the safety and the education of our children it is a silent sleep loss epidemic and i would contend that it is fast becoming the greatest public health challenge that we now face in the 21st century matt thank you very much dr matt thank you very much you're welcome thank you and sleep well hope you all enjoyed that you can find more episodes of the jordan harbinger show anywhere you get podcasts spotify apple podcast or anywhere else any other app now click here for an interview with james clear click here for an interview with bj fogg and click here of course to subscribe to the channel

Channel: THE JORDAN HARBINGER SHOW

Views: 25,774

Rating: 4.9049234 out of 5

Keywords: podcast, interview, best podcast, top rated podcast, lifelong learning, the jordan harbinger show, jordan harbinger, soft skills, social science, social influence, social psychology, personal development, self development, podcast full episode, matt walker, matt walker sleep, matthew walker, matthew walker sleep, matthew walker interview, matthew walker podcast, sleep, better sleep, how to get better sleep, rem sleep, better sleep tips, better sleep quality, dreams

Id: VMoQKwNv_iY

Length: 77min 5sec (4625 seconds)

Published: Sun Jul 26 2020