POOR SLEEP Is Killing You! - DO THIS To Optimize It TODAY! | Matthew Walker & Lewis Howes

why is there such mortality risk caused by insufficient sleep and what we know is that a lack of sleep and typically getting certainly less than six hours of sleep is associated with a high risk of cardiovascular disease high risk of diabetes high risk of stroke and then downstairs in the body we know that there is links between a lack of sleep and certain forms of cancer if i were to take you and limit you to let's say four or five hours of sleep for one week your blood sugar levels would be so disrupted that your doctor would classify you as being pre-diabetic so that's not a lifetime that's just one week i think you gotta have a dream the school of greatness really yeah please welcome a former athlete as a someone who's always wanted to perform at high levels in business and sports and just have a great life i've been obsessed with the topic of sleep and i've been obsessed with creating sleep sanctuaries uh you know figuring out what plants you put in your room when you sleep what temperature should it be the blackout shades like all this stuff i've been obsessed with this and uh and i'd love to start with asking the question about if we sleep poorly how does this impact our brain if we just sleep poorly one night or over and over and over again how does that impact the brain chemistry yeah so i i think firstly in response to the general question sleep is probably the single most effective thing that you can do to reset both your brain but also your body health of course as well and i don't say that flippantly against the notions of diet and exercise of course both of those are fundamentally critical but if i were to take you lewis and i were to deprive you of sleep for 24 hours deprive you of food for 24 hours or deprive you of even water or exercise for 24 hours and then i were to map the brain and body impermanent that you would suffer after each one of those four hands down by a country mile a lack of sleep will implode your brain and body far more significantly the only one i would probably lose out on is oxygen at that point i'll give it up you know sleep will take the silver medal oxygen definitely gets the gold but thereafter sleep seems to be paramount over sleep food and water sleep is the most important thing i would say yeah you know i i used to say that sleep was the third pillar of good health alongside diet and exercise but i think the evidence has suggested that i was utterly wrong that sleep in fact is the foundation on which those two other things sit and you can do wonderful things in those two main domains but if you're not getting sufficient sleep those things tend to be far more futile as a consequence and so what is sufficient sleep then so right now we recommend somewhere between seven to nine hours for the average adult once we know that you go below seven hours of sleep we can start to measure objective impairments in your brain and your body and in fact the number of people who can survive on less than six hours of sleep without showing any impairment rounded to a whole number and expressed as a percent of the population is zero without any impermanent what does that mean so if i can measure lots of different operations of your brain let's say your cognition your attention your learning in memory also your moods and your emotions and your anxiety or downstairs in the body i can measure aspects of your cardiovascular system or your blood pressure or i could measure your immune system or your metabolic system how it's regulating your blood sugar and your glucose i can measure this sort of pinwheel this kaleidoscope of health metrics on lewis howes and then i can see when i keep dialing you back with less and less sleep at what point do i see at least one of those things demonstrating a breaking point and it's very rare for us to be able to find any individual who can go below six hours of sleep and not show some kind of impairment and a great even frightening demonstration of this um is that he took a group of perfectly healthy individuals and they limited them to six hours of sleep a night for one week and then they measured the change in their gene activity profile relative to when those same individuals were getting a full eight hour night of sleep and what happened and there were two critical findings the first was that a sizable and significant 711 genes were distorted in their activity caused by that one week of short sleep um and that's you know in some ways i think about this lewis because it's it's reality we know that almost a third of the population is trying to survive on six hours of sleep or less so it's it's not just you know total sleep deprivation which doesn't happen very frequently this is a common occurrence what i found most interesting was that about half of those genes were actually increased in their activity the other half would decrease now those genes that were suppressed were genes associated with your immune system so you became immune compromised or immune deficient those genes that were increased in their activity or what we call overexpressed were genes associated with the promotion of tumors genes that were associated with cardiovascular disease and stress and genes that were associated with long-term chronic inflammation within the body and i i make that point just because you know many people i think have this concern about things such as genetically modified embryos or even genetically modified food but when we don't get sufficient sleep we are unwittingly performing a genetic manipulation on ourselves you know if we don't let our kids get the sleep that they need then we're inflicting a similar genetic engineering experiment on them as well wow this is crazy so what if you've been sleeping less than six hours a night for years what is that saying to your genes and is there a way to recover the gene damage and reverse and go back to a healthy genes healthy body healthy life so firstly we know that short sleep duration so using that sweet spot and we can speak about oversleeping or excess sleep because that i think that's an interesting part that hasn't been spoken about too much but using that recommended cdc amount of seven to nine hours of sleep there is a simple fact firstly across the lifespan which is the shorter your sleep the shorter your life that short sleep predicts all cause mortality but then we can dig a little bit deeper and start to sort of ask you know exactly what is going on why is there such mortality risk caused by insufficient sleep and what we know is that a lack of sleep and typically getting certainly less than six hours of sleep is associated with a high risk of cardiovascular disease high risk of diabetes high risk of stroke high risk of dementia and i would love to double click on that and go into the alzheimer's disease risk because that now evidence is very very strong and then downstairs in the body we know that there is links between a lack of sleep and certain forms of cancer after if i were to take you and limit you to let's say four or five hours of sleep for one week your blood sugar levels would be so disrupted that your doctor would classify you as being pre-diabetic oh my goodness so that's not a lifetime that's just one week and there's an even more interesting experiment that i speak i think speaks to the subtlety of this because the there is the largest sleep study that's ever been conducted and it happens actually to around 1.6 billion people across 70 countries twice a year and it's called daylight savings time now in the spring when we lose just one hour of sleep opportunity firstly what we've seen is that there seems to be a 24 increase in relative heart attack risk the next day which stuns me um and what's fascinating in the fall in the autumn when we gain an hour of sleep there's a 21 reduction in heart attacks so it's bi-directional and that's just one hour of sleep um and you see there's some great recent data you see a very similar profile regarding that um daylight saving shift for road traffic accidents on our streets i've heard about this tragically um suicide rates as well and then even more recently what we discovered is that during that spring time shift when you lose an hour of sleep the sentencing of federal judges is significantly harsher because their mood and their emotion is that much worse because of that one hour of sleep that they dole out harsher sentences so you know we can walk you know you can ask the question what about a lifetime we don't even have to ask about a lifetime of short sleep we can ask about these really you know one week of short sleep or even one night of one hour of lost sleep and i think that's how fragile our brains and our bodies are to this thing called a lack of sleep and you could then ask well you know why are we so sensitive because i can go without food for 24 hours and i can go without water for 24 hours you know i'm still not too bad i'm in fairly decent shape why is sleep the exception to that rule and the answer seems to be this human beings are the only species that will deliberately deprive themselves of sleep for no apparent good reason why is that and it was such a unique thing and what that means is that mother nature through the course of evolution because no other species does this without real need for survival and i can speak about some of the exceptions but human beings are strange like this in other words mother nature hasn't have to face the challenge of coming up with a solution called sleep deprivation because she's never faced it in the course of evolution and so there is no safety net in place here and that's why we think human beings implode so quickly and thoroughly mentally cognitively and physically caused by insufficient sleep and why do you think why is the why are the majority of people bad at getting good sleep is it what it is that we're distracted is it we think we need to be doing more is we're stressed and worried about the past and the future is it you know what we want to work harder what is the main cause of why we get poor sleep that's it's such a fundamental question and in some ways it's all of the above plus so i think the first and i've thought about this a great deal why are we suffering this global sleep loss epidemic that we're under right now i think the first thing is that unfortunately sleep has an image problem that you know the pr agent for sleep should be fired because we as we associate sufficient sleep with this concept of being lazy of being slothful and that's a terrible disservice to this thing called sleep and it is very different to things like diet and exercise you know i think a lot of people like to virtue signal with you know what they eat and they certainly are very proud to tell you you know i work out five times a week i'm in the gym at this time of morning and you know all of which i think are great and to be applauded and supported but we have the very opposite we have this almost you know well we we don't some some niches of society have the sleep machismo attitude you know this kind of you can sleep when you're dead um mentality which by the way based on the evidence is mortally unwise yeah it will lead to both a shorter life and a life that is significantly less healthy so i think the first thing is we need to change our cultural appreciation of sleep from something that is a waste of time to something that in fact is an incredible investment it is probably the very best and the most freely available democratic and painless health insurance policy that i could ever imagine i think the next thing is the way that we work in society we are working for longer hours and before the pandemic people were commuting increasingly longer amounts of time what that meant was that people were leaving the house earlier they were arriving home later and no one wants to shortchange time with family or netflix or whatever is your poison and so the one thing that has become squeezed like vice grips in the middle of the night is this thing called a sufficient bout of slumber um but then there are plenty of people who give themselves the opportunity to get enough sleep but they can't obtain it and that is where things such as insomnia or sleep disorders things like snoring come into play and you touch up and i know that you've spoken and i'm so grateful for what you've done regarding discussions of mental health we know that one of the principal roadblocks to getting this thing called a good night of sleep is anxiety um worry anxiety regret all those things yup resentment holding on all that stuff it is that is toxic to sleep you're absolutely right and in fact anxiety and physiological stress is our principal model for the explanation of insomnia right now it's not the only cause but it seems to be one of the principal causes and in modern society it's become so easy and i'm not finger wagging i suff you know i'm just as guilty we are constantly on reception but rarely do we do reflection and unfortunately the time when most of us do reflection is when we turn off the light and our head hits the pillow and that's the last the first time oh you know because i don't know about you louis but you know at night in the dark thoughts are not the same thing you know concerns become twice as big or you 10x the size of concerns i start to worry i ruminate i catastrophize yet in the light of day those things seem very different and so we can speak about sleep tips perhaps later on but certainly getting right with your emotions and your anxiety is key to good sleep and that's one of the things that prevents sleep i also think that there is a an issue at the public health level you know we've had in many first world nations wonderful government mandates regarding health regarding drink driving regarding you know safe sex regarding uh drugs and alcohol and even food and even inactivity and sitting and when was the last time you heard of a first world nation provide a public health message and memorandum regarding sleep never and i don't remember one either so from every level at you know at a public health global you know government level down to a workplace level you know we lord the airport warrior who's flown through four different time zones in the past three days they were on email at two and then they're back in the office at six you know we so we need to we celebrated those people we did you know and the funny thing by the way is that after about 20 hours of being awake straight you are as cognitively impaired as you would be if you were legally drunk now i would never you know as a ceo say i have got this fantastic team of people they're drunk all of the time but we do say i've got this fantastic group of people they just are at it all hours they are dedicated they're always working you know they spend minimal time sleeping they're just all out they love this project but we've got this strange mentality and then i think it comes down to um you know even within schools we've got this incessant model of early school start times and super early isn't it it's it's going to be there what 6 30 or 7 or something 6 30 7 7 30 and that data is actually very powerful what we found is that when we delay school start times first academic grades increase wow truancy rates decrease psychological and psychiatric issues decrease but then what we also discovered is that the life expectancy of students increased and you may be thinking well hang on a sec you know how do you how do you measure that and the leading cause of death in teenagers 16 to 18 is actually not suicide that's second it's road traffic accidents really and here sleep matters enormously and i'll give you one example it was in tetan county in wyoming they delayed their school start times from 7 30 in the morning tonight to 8 55. um by the way what are we doing trying to educate our children at 7 30 in the morning i can't think yeah i mean i remember being in school and being every day was hard for me every day i was tired every day i was hard to focus or i'd be irritable i wanted to like you know jittery or something but it was like so hard to focus and then you're at lunch time and then i eat and i'm tired again afterwards and you want me to focus and pay attention at a desk it's like right it doesn't work like that for me especially no sleep or very well for any any you know in sort of developing brain it doesn't work like that and for some people to make a 7 30 a.m start time school buses will begin leaving at six o'clock or 5 30 in the morning that means that some kids are having to wake up at 5 5 15. this is lunacy and what we've understood from the academic grades and i'll come back to the car accidents in a second when sleep is abundant minds flourish and when it's not they don't and what we've discovered with the road traffic accident in tent county when they made that shift the only thing more remarkable than the extra one hour of sleep that those kids reported getting was the reduction in car crashes the following year there was a 70 percent drop in vehicle accidents wow and to put that in context you know the advent of abs technology anti-lock brake systems that dropped accident rates by 20 to 25 percent and it was deemed a revolution here is the simple fact of getting enough sleep that will drop accident rates by 70 so you know i i need to get off my soapbox but what i would say is this i think if our goal is educators 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 is anyone listening to this that you've been speaking about this to and they're actually adopting this new model whether it be work time or school time or just you know integrating this do you know systems that are integrating this there have been some and i think i i've tried to do this in the education domain i've tried to do this within medicine because the way that we train residents is is almost inhumane actually it's not almost it absolutely is inhumane and the statistics there are stunning as well and then i've tried to do it in the workplace too because i do a lot of speaking events at sort of fortune 500 companies and at first i think i took the wrong approach where i was really speaking a little bit more about sort of the compassionate approach you know why it's good and kind for people to gift them more sleep because i see sleep as a biological necessity and if it's a biological necessity then i think it's a civil necessity and if it's a civil necessity sleep is a civil right but what i would say is that that wasn't particularly well received you know i'd go into business companies and say your employees you know they're desperate for more sleep they will be happier and healthier or i would speak about medicine and i would speak about you know what it was doing to the patients and the harm and it would fall on deaf ears what i then realized is that if you're going to change large organizations you have to speak in their currency which is money yeah yeah you need to and then i would describe the medical malpractice lawsuits that would come and the cost savings within medicine firstly and then administration started to change the tune because before that you know there was almost this old boy's network in medicine where we went through residency and it's almost a hazing and despite armed with incredible data to the country i think the mentality 10 years ago when i started trying to do that was my mind's made up don't confuse me with the evidence crazy because they went through that themselves and so they want to pay it back or something i think so i i think there was some of that i went through hell so everyone else has to go through a hell yeah right it's a rite of passage you know if you are tough enough you'll make it through it's kind of like boot camp um which i don't think we need to do anymore uh and then within business you could describe you know the rand corporation did an independent survey a couple of years ago and what they found was that insufficient sleep will cost most nations about two percent of their gdp of their gross domestic product so here in the us that number was 411 billion dollars of lost productivity due to insufficient sleep um in japan it was 130 billion dollars my home country of the uk it was over 50 billion dollars so if i could solve the sleep loss crisis within the workplace i could almost double the budget for education in the us or i could have the health care deficit so when you speak about money then people start to listen so that's how i've tried to communicate but um and i don't think i'm i don't think i'm a particularly good communicator and i've been sometimes bullying a china shop as i probably have been for the first uh however long we've been uh talking but it's just because i'm so you know i'm just desperately passionate about this thing called sleep and some years ago before i started trying to i wrote a book and then i've been doing podcasts sleep was the neglected stepsister in the health conversation of today it was a second citizen and i was so sad to see the disease the sickness the harm the lack of productivity the impact on education that a lack of sleep was having and i think i just came out probably a little too strong you know it was sort of sleep or else dot dot i'm curious oh go ahead yeah no no sorry please i'm curious what is the has there been research or studies done on if someone who has a horrible diet they eat horrible they smoke they drink occasionally um but they get eight hours of sleep versus someone who gets five hours of sleep but works out hard every day eats perfect clean vegan whatever the the perfect clean diet is for them don't smoke don't drink i wonder who has more susceptibility to diseases and cancers and and poor health and what which problems uh are each case more prone to half perfect eating but not not proper half the amount of sleep four or five hours a night but you're taking care of physically you're taking care of spiritually and nutrition versus your sleep perfect maybe you won't be able to sleep perfectly for eating that bad but you sleep eight hours a night nine hours a night but you're eating horrible who has it worse off so firstly i think you should be a sleep scientist because it's a fantastic questions it's a great study and it's an incredibly complex but important thing to do the first answer is that no one has actually done that type of experiment we've done a we've done a diluted version a kind of you know um diet very light lite version of it which is we look at sleep and we ask what is it in terms of the mortality risk and the health consequence risk when you're not getting sufficient sleep and then we take all of those other factors that you've described smoking history diet history mental health history etc and we add those as additional factors into the analysis and we absorb them and control for them so that we can say independent of those things or in spite or in the face of those things sleep still carries a significant vote in determining your mortality your rate your date of ex expiration as it were so that's the only evidence that we have right now where you can at least control for those but we haven't done what you're describing which is the much more elegant smart thing to do which is you know can we put them sort of almost in a a coke pepsi doctor challenge kind of dr pepper challenge phase and see which one wins out you know diet exercise or sleep when those two other things are held constant but you manipulate one of those then hold the other two constant and manipulate one of lovely experiment love to do it it's not been done god so we don't know what would your hypothesis be my suspicion is that sleep will still probably carry a larger influence than those two other factors now there's a lot of assumptions i'm making there but i'll give you another quick example a study done back in the 1980s which will probably never be repeated because of the moral and ethical issues they took a group of rats and what they found after sleep depriving the rats was that rats will die as quickly from sleep deprivation as they will from food deprivation so sleep is that essential those rats were dying usually within 20 days so sleep seems to have a deathly consequence to it what was also fascinating however is that they then and maybe i'll back up a little bit human beings and most mammalian species will have two main types of sleep what we call non-rapid eye movement sleep or non-rem sleep and rapid eye movement sleep or dream sleep and what they found was that total sleep deprivation will absolutely kill a rat if you just selectively deprive the rat of either deep non-rem sleep or rem sleep or dream sleep they found that the rats would still die of either one of those two so both of those types of sleep are essential but rats were dying almost as quickly from dream sleep deprivation as they would from total deprivation well they died within about 40 days whilst the rats who were deprived of deep non-rem sleep they died after about 60 days so you know we can almost then not that i would wish to pit the different types of sleep head to head and ask which is more important now i should say all stages of sleep are critical that's probably the one of the biggest messages that we've learned different types of sleep do different things for your brain and your body at different times of night all of them are important but it seems as though if you want to ask the question of death risk dream sleep may be more important than deep sleep on the consequence basis of how quickly you die but you need all of them bad things happen when you don't get any one of them gotcha can you talk about dreams and the importance of dreams yeah we've done quite a lot of work in this area and the belief maybe 20 or 30 years ago was that dreams were just an epi phenomenon they were just a byproduct and so the analogy would be you know think of the the light bulbs that i think i can see behind you in that lovely background you know when you when you create this apparatus called a light bulb to produce this thing called light in the same way that the brain has been created to produce this thing called dream sleep called rem sleep when you create light in that way with the light bulb you also produce this thing called heat it was never the purpose of the light bulb it's just what happens when you create light in that way and the belief was the same thing for dreaming that when you create this thing called rem sleep which serves lots of different functions one of the conscious spin-offs one of the byproducts is this thing called dreaming and that never made sense to me for the simple reason which is this when we are dreaming it is more consciously energetically demanding than not dreaming is my assumption from a brain based perspective and any time mother nature burns the most valuable unit in your body which is called an atp molecule an energy molecule then it usually has some evolutionary advantage to it in other words if dreaming is metabolically more active and you could have rem sleep without dreaming but she still added dreaming a top of rem sleep then it must serve some benefit and we've now discovered that it serves at least two vital functions really the first is that dream sleep provides a form of almost overnight therapy that dream sleep is emotional first aid interesting and it's during dream sleep at night that your brain takes those difficult emotionally charged experiences sometimes even traumatic memories and it acts like a nocturnal soothing bomb and it just takes the sharp edges off those painful difficult experiences so that you come back the next day and you feel better about those experiences and in that way it's not time that heals all wounds it's time during dream sleep that provides emotional convalescence as it were and it's not just dream sleep it's also even what you dream about not just that you dream in other words i'm talking about your dream content being important because there was a study done several years ago and they looked at people going through a really tough time a traumatic experience such as a really painful and bitter divorce and at the time when that was happening they were recording their dreams and then they tracked those individuals for a year and one year later about half of them had clinical resolution to their depression and the other half did not and then they went back and they separated the dreams of those two different groups and what they found is that those people who were dreaming but not dreaming about the emotional events themselves they didn't get clinical resolution one year later those people who were dreaming but dreaming of the abet event they got the clinical resolution so in other words dreaming is necessary but it's not sufficient you need to be dreaming of what those events are to process those how do we influence how do we influence dreaming what we want to dream and not nightmares that's right yeah um well this moves us into the territory of what we call lucid dreaming yes and for most people lucid dreaming from within my field within the scientific field is actually a more simple definition it's simply the moment that you become aware that you're dreaming that's your wildest dream whilst you're dreaming correct does that exercise more energy when having the dream creates exerts more energy if you're conscious and aware while dreaming is that another level of energy that you're exerting like oh gosh you need to be a sleep scientist uh this is absolutely that's why i've got you on here you don't need me actually um so the answer is is in part um yes but what we've so for most people though lucid dreaming really means not only i'm aware that i'm dreaming but now i can control what i'm dreaming about do you often have lucid dreaming um do we often as a as a group you individually no i personally i've only experienced lucid dreaming probably you know six or seven times and it's great when it happens but right now we know based on the population statistics about 80 of the population does not lucid dream um 20 percent of the population does lucid dream which then brings us on or back to your astute question which is can we control our dreams and is that a good thing to gain lucidity into gain control and to give over the driving seat to me the individual rather than to mother nature's blueprint that she's worked out and i can play both sides of the the theory equation here on one side i would say if lucid dreaming was so beneficial to you as a human being as an organism then many more people would be natural lucid dreamers than there are now that would just there's that statistic would be reversed if anything well i mean if sleeping an extra couple hours a night is more beneficial which it is then more people would also be sleeping more well that's that's the hard part is that with lucid dreaming it's very difficult to control but to choose not to sleep that's unfortunately very easy to control a lot of a lot of people think it's difficult well we'll come back to it i mean there's really two separate things with insufficiency there is you either not giving yourself the opportunity to sleep or society not giving you the opportunity to sleep despite you being able to sleep very well right right versus you giving yourself plenty of opportunity to sleep but just because you have a sleep disorder or you have sleep issues you cannot generate the sleep so the difference is opportunity is present but you can't create the sleep versus you can create the sleep but you don't have the opportunity to do so and those two things are quite different but from the lucid dreaming perspective i could come back and argue the other side which is to say my assumption there the belief that mother nature would have had us all doing it if it was good makes the wrong conclusion that we've stopped evolving in other words what if that 20 of the hominid population who are lucid dreaming is the next wave of evolution they are the superhumans who will come next and succeed people like me who aren't natural lucid dreamers so i can play both sides of it interesting is there a way to train your mind and body in order to lucid dream more there have been some attempts so there's a scientist called stephen leberge who actually has an institute of lucidity and he's got different courses and classes how effective they are it's a little bit unclear and there are some simple techniques where you can firstly before you go to bed at night and it sounds hokey and strange is just repeat like a mantra to yourself i am going to try and become conscious of my dream i'm going to try and become conscious and then you can do virtual reality testing in the dream and you can do this when you're awake so right now you know i am looking at my laptop and you know if it's a physical entity and i'm in the real world and i'm awake if i were to tap my screen i can feel it physically and you can go around and keep reminding yourself you know i can go over to the light switch and turn it on turn it off do i have voluntary control of what's going on in my environment because often you don't have in your dreams and then by doing that in your waking day you can try to train yourself to do that during your sleeping dreaming life and at that point when you flick the light switch and it doesn't change anything or you tap the screen of your laptop and your hand goes completely through it then you think oh hang on a second this isn't waking you know this is clearly a dream so there's different ways that you can test the reality of waking life versus dreaming life and adopt that mindset the other thing is just to simply start trying to remember your dreams some more so in the morning when you wake up that's the first step towards a path of lucidity don't jump out of bed and sort of just close your eyes and try and remember your dream instead wake up and then keep your eyes closed and don't try to write the dream down don't try to dictate it just rehearse the dream because dreams have this funny nature to them were as soon as we wake up they almost evaporate so quickly from our brain and so if yeah yeah if you don't feel it right then in moments or minutes it's gonna be gone it's gonna be gone so just wait there and try to crystallize it try to set the dream in amber by sort of you know going over it and rehearsing it rehearsing it in your mind build that picture build the memory ingrain the memory and then pick up your pad of paper and your pencil next to you on the bedside and write it down and gradually as you start to remember your more of your dreams there is some evidence that that can also increase the probability of lucidity but in truth i'm not really and i don't know anyone who's truly an expert in being able to you know increase the frequency with which you can lucid dream from a scientific perspective there's lots of people out there who claim you know i've got this course that you can do and but the science doesn't support it that well but the science now has proven without a shadow of a doubt by the way that there is a thing called lucid dreaming we used to think it was a charlatan science that it wasn't real and we can go into the details as how you prove it but it has been proven lots of different ways yeah and what is the do we have any research on what lucid dreaming is does for healing the body or hurting the body or the brain we haven't found evidence that it either hurts or helps right now all we have is evidence understanding what happens when you become lucid as a dreamer and this comes back to what you are asking about which is is there an additional metabolic consequence of going into lucid dreaming one of the fascinating things when we go into dream sleep well there are many but i'll give you just two the first is that when you go into dream sleep your brain paralyzes your body you are utterly incarcerated in physical lockdown and the reason is very simple your brain paralyzes your body so the mind can dream safely so that you don't act out your dreams so you don't go move your body and yeah correct and so what we know is that the mechanisms that control rem sleep and non-rem sleep start deep down within the brain in fact in the brain stem so if you were to take a pur a fruit like a power and you would turn it upside down it's that sort of you know thin end and the stem of the power that's your brain stem it's there where the principal battle for non-rem and rem sleep plays out across the night to create the 90-minute cycle of non-rem to rem sleep in humans but as it's expressed upstairs into your brain during rem sleep which activates lots of brain areas but also deactivates them there's a separate signal sent south of your neck right down into your spinal cord which paralyzes what we call the alpha motor neurons which is all of your voluntary skeletal muscles now that fortunately means that your involuntary muscles things like your heart and your inspiration don't worry they keep going otherwise we would have been popped out the gene pool together very quickly but your voluntary muscles those are paralyzed the second interesting feature coming back to lucid dreaming though is that many parts of your brain when you dream light up the visual areas at the back of the brain the motor strip areas across the top of the brain the emotional centers and the memory centers all of these things light up and some of them in fact are up to 30 percent more active when you're in dream sleep than when you're awake which in some ways is fascinating but the one part of your brain that goes in the opposite direction is something called your prefrontal cortex and this is sort of you know it's like the it's like the ceo of the brain it's very good at making high-level top-down executive control decisions and communication that part of the brain as we go into dream sleep is actively inhibited so your rational logical brain is shut down and all of these emotional and memory centers light up no wonder dreams are bizarre illogical hyper-associative filled with memories filled with visual aspects often have kinesthetic aspects to them but what we've realized is that the difference between dreaming and lucid dreaming is that that prefrontal cortex part of the brain actually comes back online as we become lucid in other words as we gain volitional control over what we dream the prefrontal cortex seems to be coming back online gifting you that volition to do what you wish in your dreams i've had uh i don't know maybe a handful of times where i've had this dream where i wake up my eyes are still asleep but i'm awake and then i open my eyes but i feel paralyzed and i feel like i'm screaming yet nothing's coming out and i can't move my arms and i'm like am i paralyzed and then eventually like something comes out of my mouth and i can move but it always feels very weird it's like paralysis i don't know if that's and what it what it's called is sleep paralysis it's a very well known thing and normally what happens to all of us as were so rem sleep and non-rem sleep as i said will go in this 90 minute cycle but what's interesting is that in the first half of the night that's when you get most of your deep non-rem sleep and you don't get very much rem sleep in the second half of the night that's when the seesaw balance shifts and now you get much more of your dream sleep in those last few hours especially and normally as we're waking up out of sleep and therefore typically rem sleep and therefore typically dreaming the brain has this beautiful synchrony this lock step of increasing consciousness into wakefulness and increasing release of that brain body paralysis so that as you are regaining waking mental life your body is released from its physical lockdown from physical incarceration however there are times when one leads too far in front of the other and it's called sleep paralysis and you've experienced it i've experienced it too can often happen when we're under levels of high stress or were typically sleep deprived and at that point you become a pseudo aware you're sort of in this mixed state of consciousness in you're between the worlds of wake and sleep as it were but your body is still in the paralysis so you are you can't lift your eyelids why voluntary skeletal muscles you can't shout out why voluntary skeletal muscles and it's often paired with a sense understandably so of dread and fear and a presence of someone else being there and it turns out that this phenomenon called sleep paralysis accurately explains most if not all of so-called alien abductions because when you you know when was the last time you heard on the news an alien abduction story that happened in the middle of the day and you know people were outside at lunchtime with friends at work you know they're all eating their sandwiches and then all of a sudden they heard this sound whoosh i was like my goodness you know did you see that tommy was just abducted by alien you know it never happens like that it's usually at night you're usually by yourself you describe a presence or a sense in the room you say that they injected you with some kind of paralyzing agent you tried to fight back but you couldn't it's sleep paralysis paralysis yeah right now by the way it's it's not necessarily something to be worried about if you have it it seems to be somewhat normal about 25 of the population will experience it in other words it's as common as hiccups but just be aware that there's nothing wrong with you and it's not that you're being visited by anything strange or there have been some kind of worries in religious sort of domains that you require some kind of you know exorcism or there's sort of a long history of that in the past we understand the biology it's a basic science fact um and it's largely normal so so when someone experiences it what should they do just try to maintain calm and just wait for the body to wake up naturally and that's exactly right you will come out of it and try to if you can having heard this understand what's going on sometimes even i don't recognize what's going on when it's going on despite knowing what i know but gradually i get to the place where i realize what's happening and then i just relax and i say i'm just going to give it time and i may fall back asleep or i may continue with my you know runway jet propulsion and i hit escape velocity of both consciousness and physical paralysis and it'll be just fine but it's very disconcerting it really is a very strange scary right it's very scary very scary uh what about what are your what's the signs to talk about with promontory promontory dreams and is there any research on this of people able to kind of predict the future and have these dreams that then come true later in life or or things like that have you is there science and research on this there's some very interesting data where people have you know called let's say you know emergency um services or fbi or police to say look i had this dream that there was a plane that was going to you know undergo some kind of malicious you know attack and it was this particular you know airline and and then the next day something actually happens on that specific airline and you think okay this surely this is real not so so let's just play the statistics game so you probably go through three or four or usually about four to five cycles of dream sleep a night and let's just assume that you only have one dream for each one of those cycles you usually have more but let's just assume that so you're going to have five dreams per night and then that's you know six five six whatever the recent count is seven billion people in across the planet having seven billion times five dreams per night the statistical law of predictable averages would absolutely confirm that someone somewhere is going to have a dream that mimics something that happens the next day it's just chance it's just statistics working the way that they do and of course when we hear it as i first described it you think that has to be real but when you apply scientific rationale to the problem you realize in fact there should be many more of those things than are reported based on statistical chants alone interesting so there's no there's no science that backs that people can have dreams and they can predict events or things that happen no future forecasting that comes by way of dreams no really interesting okay what is the well not that we have of yet you know as a scientist you you always have to take that mentality i i think it's very important that scientists should never forget the following truth absence of evidence is not evidence of absence so it's potentially possible we just haven't don't have evidence scientifically that backs it yeah right now all i can do is operate in the realm of rational fact and i on that basis i can tell you we have no supportive evidence have you studied any like quantum physics or done any research with quantum physics and dreams and how like any of that plays in you know just kind of thinking a positive thought and then and then in the dream creating it and then manifesting your life as any of that kind of weirdness come to you or that you've seen so we've we've done a little bit of this that touches on the topic and what we've tried to do is for example manipulate people's emotions before sleep so firstly what we know is that your emotional and mental health are very intimately related to your sleep health and it's bi-directional and so i forgot to speak about the second benefit of dreaming but we'll come back to that which is creativity and memory uh in and sort of problem solving and insight solving but with emotions it works both ways so if you manipulate people's mood during the day or particularly during the last hour before bed mood and emotions will have an impact on your sleep and then conversely how well you've slept will change how emotionally reactive and pendulum like and emotionally irrational you are the following day so to come to your point we have which is sort of manifesting positive mindset or mood if we do a negative mood induction before sleep and we get people to say focus on something that was you know really difficult in your life think about it you know increase that sadness it has a deleterious impact on sleep whereas cultivating a positive mood before bedtime actually improves the quality of their sleep what we call their sleep efficiency and so that's about as far as we've got in terms of you know augmenting or changing your waking state before sleep to see if it can have either a beneficial enhancement or a blast radius consequence on your subsequent sleep at night and then we've done the opposite we've manipulated your sleep at night and then looked at how you become emotionally unhinged the next day right um as it were and you know that should be no surprise for you know a parent i i don't have children but you know it's often that idea of a parent holding a child the child is crying and they look at you and they say they just didn't sleep well last night yeah as if there's some universal parental knowledge that bad sleep the night before equals moodiness mood yeah emotional reactivity the next day the same is true for healthy adults yeah exactly have you ever heard about people that can have a dream and then connect with someone else in their dream and actually have like a conversation or share dream experiences is that a possibility i'm throwing out some weirdness here i'm just curious if this is any any studies of this or any research done where it's like okay me and you we're going to try to find each other in a dream and experience the dream together is that even possible we've got no good evidence for that again but the thing is i i don't think i don't know of anyone who's actually tried to to study that we're only now just trying to study cooperative brain activity in waking people so normally the way that we do experiments with in brain science is that we will put people inside of a brain scanner and we'll do lots of different things with them and we'll try to understand how their brain is accomplishing those things only recently because of expense in part and practicality if you get two brain scanners in one room you know next to the other and then you put two people in those brain scanners and you have them cooperate and perform at the same time let's say they're doing some kind of cooperative game play or they're going through the same emotional experience can you see similar coordinated brain activity that's going on does that mean that they are psychically or physically you know bonded through some connection that we can't see probably not it just means that when two brains are doing the same thing at the same time they express the same pattern of signature activity um but we've it's much more difficult to try to do that experiment with dreaming because most people can't you know it's hard for us to control what one person is dreaming about let alone coordinate the co-experience of two people at the same time and be measuring their brain activity so it's just a very difficult question and i suspect probably not i suspect most organisms inc including humans will retreat to a solo location and sleep is typically as a dream conscious experience a unique individual experience it's where we if anything stop processing external worlds and external events and people and we start to focus internally on the information that we've gathered during that day and start to ask based on everything that i've learned today how does it fit into all of my back catalog of autobiographical experience and this is where we come to the second benefit of dream sleep which is that dreaming is a form of almost um it's informational alchemy dreaming is a little bit like group therapy for memories that sleep gathers in all of this information and in this wonderful bizarre theater that we call dreaming at night it starts to collide different pieces of information together and starts to test whether they should be connected but it's not an obvious logical connection it's not when you're awake you do a google search gone right which is your brain calculates the associations and it puts you on page one when we're dreaming it does the opposite it takes you straight to page 20 which is some hyper-associative crazy link but i think that that's important because it's two different modes of processing logical convergent rational versus illogical divergent irrational and when you do that type of hyper associative processing you start to see patterns that you can't see while you're awake and what we've discovered is that the second benefit of dreaming is creativity that you go to sleep with the pieces of the jigsaw but you wake up with the puzzle complete and it's the reason that no one has ever told you to stay awake on a problem yeah they say sleep on it correct sleep on it before you make a decision sleep on it that's right yeah both from the emotional standpoint that it creates resolution so you're a more rational balanced emotional individual making the right choices and also from an ingenuity perspective as well from a creativity perspective you know we we end up seeing solutions to previously impenetrable problems lots of anecdotal evidence for that in the sciences in the arts and in music and then now in the laboratory we've been able to replicate that same effect i want to ask you about the impact of love and sleep when someone feels an overwhelming feeling of love connection intimacy with a partner does that support their sleep and improve the quality of their sleep does it hurt the quality of their sleep and is there a difference if they're actually hugging and feeling love and connection to their partner feeling that you know that heartbeat or that that warmth or whatever it might be that they're feeling is there a difference if they're just feeling it but they're not next to them in the same bed what's your thoughts on this topic i think the best answer is it's complicated but let me let me pick it apart firstly what we know is that couples who have a strong loving relationship typically have overall significantly better sleep both quantity as well as quality when that relationship deteriorates and there is conflict typically sleep is worse we also know that there's just a very strong relationship between sleep and sex for the following reasons firstly we know that your sex hormones are powerfully affected by sleep so if i take a healthy young man and i put them on four hours of sleep for one week they will have a level of testosterone which is that of someone 10 years their senior so a lack of sleep will age a man by a decade in terms of that critical aspect of wellness and virility you see exactly the same profile in women we see that insufficient sleep is linked to a reduction in estrogen in luteinizing hormone and also in follicle stimulating hormone all of which are critical for female sexual health and reproductive health as well what we've also found is that when for example a woman gets an extra hour of sleep her desire to be physically intimate with her partner increases by 14 percent guys need to listen to this so and you know and certainly when it comes to testosterone as well right right and what we've then found at the psychological relationship level is also interesting when couples aren't sleeping well firstly they have more conflict secondly not only do they have more conflict they don't resolve that conflict as well and part of the reason that they don't is because they lose empathy right they just empathize right they become more self-centered and less compassionate towards the other yeah so for all of those reasons you can see this this bi-directional relationship regarding sleeping together in the sense of physical sleeping in the same bed the data is very interesting what we know is that about 30 depends on what server you look at but about 30 of people surveyed anonymously and it usually has to be done this way will report not sleeping in the same bed of those who do sleep in the same bed a significant proportion of them up to 40 percent of them will report waking up in a different location for whatever reason and and this is what we've then because the stigma first is that if you're if you're not sleeping together then you're not sleeping together but the opposite seems to be true for those specific couples for whom it works when they start to sleep apart firstly because their sex hormones improve and their desire for each other increases typically their physical intimate relationship is improved by way of what we call that sleep divorce so a sleep divorce can actually help you prevent a real one in that sense but it's not a one size fits all it's i'm not suggesting that by any means for some people sleeping together works very well that overall what we know is that when people sleep together objectively the quantity and the quality of their sleep is worse on average it's worse i will sleep in the same bed objectively the quality and the quality and the quality of their sleep is worse however if you ask them what they felt their sleep was like in terms of their satisfaction with sleep on average they will say that they felt more satisfied by their sleep when they were sleeping together now that could just be because of this sort of stigma and this bias towards how we think we should sleep as couples but i want to give people the permission to undergo at least this exploration with your partner because there are many reasons sleep disorders such as sleep apnea snoring tossing and turning we know that when one partner starts to sauce and turn it has a knock-on effect like a domino causes the other to have a bad night of sleep so there are several ways that you can think about this firstly have a conversation and you don't have to admit it to the outside world if you don't want i've admitted to this um before um having a sleep divorce i would say that it's fine to tell people i love you i care for you i don't sleep well when we're together often and i think i would be a better partner if i could try to sleep in a separate location however the funny thing is most of us for the majority of that nighttime period we're non-conscious so we're actually not aware of the other partner what we miss i think is the book ends of sleep getting into bed saying good night having a cuddle awakening and then it's waking up and saying so you can you can kind of hack the system so whoever goes to bed first depending on chrono type morning type evening type somewhere in between and we can speak about that too whoever goes to bed first that it's the job of the other person to come through and as they they can send them a text and say look i'm about to turn the light off can you come through and you go through and you give them a case and a cuddle and you have your little sort of bedtime minute front end lovely and then on the back end whoever wakes up first they you know get to the kitchen and they start making their tea or coffee whatever it is and then the other person as they're waking up they text them and say i'm just waking up come through and you can go through to the bedroom and you can have your back end bedtime sort of uni union um when they they wake up it sounds like a lot of work but the the cost benefit that you get in terms of healthy sleep and how good you will feel and how much better the statistics tellers relationships are when couples are well slept i think is worthwhile at least exploring that so it's a not once it's not a one-size-fits-all i'm not suggesting that different people find different some people find it very safe to sleep with another partner because there is a degree of threat for whatever you know historical psychological reasons or they just feel better about having someone else there from a threat perspective which i totally understand too so just explore it with your partner what does the data say about animals pets in the bed with you you're gonna you're gonna you're gonna ruin every animal dog lover account you know i i often say i'm not a particularly popular person just by um my personality um and uh maybe nationality but uh this makes me even more unpopular which is sadly pets are not a good outcome they're not a good impact on your sleep um human beings will typically sleep worse when pets are in the bed so the advice is you know again but what if there's so much love you have this love in your heart you feel this connection and it allows you to peacefully restfully go to sleep as a pet person as well dogs and cats um and and other species um is that is that animals in bed is that emeralds in the room next to your bed does it matter in the room as long as they are trained not to wake you up for whatever reason don't bark they don't poke you they don't yeah right exactly not so bad but if they're in the bed not so good but i all i can tell you is the data and you know if we speak about alcohol caffeine drugs it is not my responsibility as a sleep scientist to tell anyone how to live their life right and i'm not going to tell anyone that they should or should not you know sleep in the same bed with their partner or have their animal their pet in the bed you know you should live life on your own terms and all i'm here to do is try to empower you with the science and the knowledge of sleep so then you can make an informed choice as to how you want to live your life i have no business telling anyone how to live their life let alone try to fix my own what does the the science say about the people that live the longest the people that live in the blue zones how are they sleeping what is the quality of sleep they get is there research around that it is interesting that when you look at some of the blue zone areas in some of those communities what we typically see is that they will have two bouts of sleep they will have a long bout of sleep at night and then they have a siesta-like nap in the afternoon and there is some evidence physiologically that maybe we were designed as a species to be napping during the day and we can speak about that in detail too but to your question there's a great island i don't know if it falls into one of the blue zones but it certainly should it's a greek island called icaria and there the people have a wonderfully healthy lifestyle but they also take naps during the day and i think um males there are almost um i could be getting this statistic wrong but they're almost twice as likely to reach the age of 80 as any male american in america and in fact the island has often been described as the place where people forget to die isn't that lovely wow well now now also i mean there's probably other factors they're probably outside in the sun more they're eating a certain lifestyle of food and so all of those factors is sleep a missing piece in the explanatory puzzle of the blue zone equation it's actually never been studied i should speak to dan buettner and sort of see if we can get some statistics on that um my guess is that it's if you add up all of the factors that they have right now nutrition social connection yep physical activity moving physical activity aware that i think yeah isn't it part of like the amount of sun sunlight or how close it is later exposure yeah yeah sort of those those things and having purpose in in life in a yeah that sort of community if you were to add up all of those factors and then say of when you combine them all how much of the variance in lifespan do you explain maybe you can explain 80 so you can predict with 80 accuracy you know the lifespan of an individual when you know all of these five things the blue zone things let's call them that means that there's 20 left on the table now is sleep going to accommodate and absorb some of that additional variance that we can't yet explain my guess is probably yes yeah and i'm guessing they're not sleeping three hours a night you know they're probably sleeping no seven eight usually sleeping right right yep six to seven hours of sleep at night and then they will have that siesta like activity in the afternoon making up exactly what we typically predict which is somewhere between seven to nine hours of sleep now is five hours of sleep plus a two or three hour nap acceptable is it six hours of sleep plus a one hour nap acceptable does it still transfer over or do you really need that seven hours minimum of kind of deeper sleep at night and then if you get an extra 30 to 60 to 90 minutes in the afternoon that's a bonus how does that work it's certainly probably not as large as the first example you gave sort of you know five hours at night then a three hour nap during the day that doesn't seem to be biologically physiologically how we were designed to sleep but if you look at some of the cultures that have been untouched by sort of modernity they especially during the warm summer months they can have a period where they'll have you know six and a half seven hours of sleep at night and then a short siesta like uh nap in the afternoon so certainly it seems to be for the full 24 hour period a minimum of seven hours is required usually in one large about of sleep at night and then perhaps one short sort of soups on little sampling of sleep in the afternoon in that nap-like behavior i would say with naps though they can be a double-edged sword and you have to be a little careful we and others have shown time and again that naps can have very powerful benefits for the brain and for the body they can improve your mood your emotions enhance your learning and memory they can lower blood pressure they can boost the immune system right but naps are potentially dangerous because during the day from the moment that you and i both woke up this morning a chemical has been building up in our brain and that chemical is called adenosine and the more of that chemical that builds up the sleepier you will feel and after about 16 hours of being awake you should feel heavy enough with that sleep pressure to fall asleep and stay asleep and then when we sleep what's beautiful is that sleep gives the brain the chance to evacuate all of that sleepiness all of that adenosine out of the brain so after about eight hours you have jettisoned 16 hours of sleepiness chemical of adenosine and you wake up naturally why is this related to nabs it's related to naps because if you take a nap that's too long or a nap that's too late into the day it's a little bit like a valve on a steam cooker that you remove some of that healthy sleepiness that sleep pressure so that when it comes time to fall asleep at night or try to stay asleep it's not as easy anymore because you've removed some of that burden so i think you know napping late in the day or napping for too long it's a little bit like snacking before your main meal it just takes the edge off your sleep appetite and hunger if that makes any uh sense what's the latest we should be napping and what's the longest we should be napping i would usually say cut naps off after about 2 p.m and assuming a standard prototypical bedtime of which you know it varies and then i would say try to limit your naps to probably no more than 20 to 25 minutes at max and the reason is because if you go longer than that you can start to go into the deeper phases of sleep and if you wake up after an hour your brain is in the deep stages and then when you come out of that nap you can typically feel worse you almost have what we call a sleep hangover right this technical term is sleep inertia where it takes you then about another hour and a half to kind of wake back up because you went too deep as it were so the best advice is the following if you are struggling with sleep at night do not nap during the day build up all of that healthy sleepiness give yourself the best chance to get to sleep and stay asleep but if you can nap regularly and you're not struggling with sleep naps can be just fine maybe cut them off you know depending on your bedtime 2 to 3 p.m and try to keep them to around 20 minutes i'm curious about diet and nutrition and food choices and how it impacts sleep and also alcohol i would put caffeine smoking cigarettes as another category maybe there's three categories but if someone is drinking a cup of coffee a day or multiple cups or they're having a few cigarettes or drinking alcohol any of those categories how does that affect the quality and the depth of the sleep that you have um so this is where i become even more unpopular lewis so let's start with caffeine first of which i've changed my tune actually over the years i will tell you drink coffee which sounds strange coming from uh you know a sleep cycle but just only drink it before a certain time i'm assuming right so the dose and the timing make the poison uh if there is a tag line for coffee that would be it with regards to sleep and it's the reason is is this firstly coffee has been associated with some wonderful health benefits and in fact people have often reached out to me and i'll soon release one of my podcast episodes on this explaining this in more detail but they would say look coffee is associated with lots of health benefits in fact many of the same health benefits that sleep is associated with and we know that caffeine is not great for sleep how do you reconcile that paradox it seems to be counterintuitive and there's a very simple one-word answer antioxidants right because the it turns out that the humble coffee bean has now had to carry the weight of infusing most people who eat a poor diet with their major source of antioxidants each day and in fact if you look at the american population and the same is true in many european countries because we don't eat in a holistic way in whole foods and get all of our nutrients and antioxidants the coffee bean is the principal source of most of our antioxidants so it's not the caffeine that causes the association between coffee being good for you it's the antioxidants and a good demonstration of this is decaffeinated coffee which still contains the antioxidants and is still associated with many of the same health benefits interesting so certainly most of us you know many people will like to wake up they will enjoy you know coffee or two in the morning and that's great definitely do that no problem be mindful of whether you're sensitive or not and it depends on your genes and a certain type of liver gene that dictates an enzyme they're called cytochrome p450 enzymes that degrade certain compounds and there is a gene that if you have one variant of it the gene is called cyp1a2 if i'm getting my nerd genes correct if you have one version of that you metabolize caffeine very quickly if you have a different version of it you metabolize caffeine very slowly unfortunately i am one of those individuals who is a slow caffeine metabolizer and i you know i can have one cup of i drink decaf but if i have one cup of coffee in the morning it for the most part it won't impact my sleep at night but let me come back to the dose in the poison part one of the problems with caffeine is that it has a half-life in the average adult of five to six hours which means that it has a quarter life of about 10 to 12 hours so in other words if you have a cup of coffee at midday then a quarter of that caffeine is still circulating in your brain at midnight no way so it would be the equivalent of a cup of coffee at midday would be the equivalent of getting into bed i sometimes sort of note and before you turn the light out you swig a quarter of a cup of starbucks and you hope for a good night of sleep and it's probably not going to happen so the first issue is the the duration of its action the second concern with caffeine though is some people will say look i can have an espresso with dinner and i fall asleep fine and i stay asleep so it's no no problem even if that's true what we've discovered is that caffeine can decrease the amount of deep sleep that you get and so that you wake up the next morning and you don't remember having a hard time falling asleep and you don't remember waking up and finding it hard to fall back asleep but you don't feel refreshed by your sleep and so you're now reaching for two cups of coffee rather than one in the morning and just to give you a context drop your deep sleep by 20 which is what caffeine can do at night i would have to age you by about 15 years or you can do it every night with a cup of coffee so if you're gonna have coffee drink it before what 10 a.m well i would say you know see how your sensitivity is certainly i would wish for most people assuming a typical bedtime again of cutting it off before midday try to limit yourself to maximum three cups two cups if you can what we do find by the way those health associations with cups of coffee once you get past sort of three or four cups it starts to go in the opposite direction that actually has you know it doesn't have those health benefits and if you're gonna do a cappuccino at night just do decaf just do decaf it's actually doesn't taste too bad in the end and it will save your sleep um yeah oh yeah and then i can come on to alcohol if you want yes really please put the nail in my um well i've never actually i most people know in my my my life and also on my show that i've never been drunk i've never uh i've had sips of alcohol in my life i you know i didn't have a sip in four years of college because i just made a commitment to be a better athlete and have better performance when all my teammates were drinking on the weekends and i could see that they were sluggish the next day in practice i was like this is my way and i just kind of was like why start after college uh i maybe have like a bailey's on ice once or twice a year let's just like sip on and that's lewis listen to me i know right and it's just like a little sweet milk or something but um i i've always felt like man people just don't seem to make good decisions or they don't wake up better after they have alcohol so it just you know i knew i needed advantages in my life somewhere when my vice is sugar so which is probably the next thing to talk about but um how does alcohol affect sleep and does it matter the the portion and the potion of when so i should admit right up front too i'm like you i'm not a big drinker which means i probably should have had my british passport taken away from me long ago because i think it's a birthright of many um but what we know is that alcohol will hurt your sleep in at least four different ways or it has four consequences i should say the first is that when people say look i have a couple of drinks in the evening and it helps me fall asleep the problem is that alcohol isn't a class of drugs that we call the sedatives and sedation is not sleep but when you've had a couple of drinks in the evening you mistake the former for the latter and sedation is where the brain simply the brain cells are switched off and they essentially you're not knocking out your cortex but when you go into deep sleep it's very different deep sleep is a time when hundreds of thousands of brain cells all of a sudden they coordinate in their firing and it's unlike any other time we see during the 24 hour period all of these brain cells fire together and then they all fall silent and then they all fire together and then they all fall silent it is this spectacular physiological ballet and that type of sleep is very different to sedation so that's the first issue the second issue is that alcohol will fragment your sleep so that you will wake up many more times throughout the night it will litter your sleep with many awakenings and lots of people sort of you know i wear the aura ring and i'm i'm related to the company too but a lot of people will say with their aura data you know after i've had a night of some drinking i just see my sleep is decimated i'm very punctuated with all of these awakenings and that's what we call sleep fragmentation that's poor quality of sleep and sleep quality is just as important as sleep quantity the third problem with alcohol is that it's very good at suppressing your rem sleep or your dream sleep which is what we've we've spoken about has many benefits by the way including other benefits down in the body we know that it's during dream sleep when the body releases in both men and women highest amounts of testosterone so if you're blocking your dream sleep and you're drinking particularly in athletic context you need that testosterone for recovery and restitution of muscle mass and muscle growth so and then the final thing coming back to muscle growth is that if you lace people with alcohol at night and the sleep disruption as a consequence at certain phases of sleep it can cause a 50 impermanent in the amount of growth hormone that's released 5-0 at night so again i want to back up though here and and i really think this is important i don't want to be puritanical and i don't want to wag my finger you know life is to be live to a certain degree of course live your life and don't let anyone tell you how you want to sort of live your life as long as you're not hurting anyone doing anything wrong live your life as you as you wish but understand the consequences that the data speaks to that people who do certain things tend to not live as long or tend to have worse quality sleep or age faster based on the data maybe some people can get away with certain things or live a little longer and have a glass of wine every night but they have everything else in their life going for them in you know or something you know and maybe the choice is that you say you know i would prefer to live a shorter life with less sleep right and you know that's that's you live it on my terms right and then what i wouldn't wish you to do right exactly is do it that way unwittingly or unknowingly once you're imbued with that knowledge and you still want to make that choice then i if that's the flag that you're hoisting i'll i'll salute it every single day but i just want you to at least have the evidence so that you can then do whatever you want with it that's all my job is i'm not here to tell what is the you know based on the data what would you say would be uh a suitable amount of alcohol someone could drink on a weekly basis where it wouldn't affect too badly their sleep but it wouldn't be the best thing but it'd be like okay this is doable is that a couple glasses a week is that a glass at night is that one glass a week like five shots at a time you know what is this we've even seen that one glass of wine at night we'll have an impact one glass of wine every night will have an impact what if it's well we've only we haven't actually done the studies where we repeat across multiple nights just one glass just one glass will change the composition of your sleep that night and if you do every night one glass that's probably going to have compounds may have deleterious consequences is the suspicion um you know and i think the politically incorrect advice that i never give uh on podcasts would be the following that you should go to the pub in the morning and that way the alcohol is out your system before the evening but i would never suggest that you know to uh it's just you and me here there's no one else exactly so if someone if someone did want to have a glass of wine over lunch let's say between 12 and 3 p.m and they went to bed at you know 10 or midnight how would that affect their sleep it's possible depending on how successful your liver and your kidneys are and what the strength of that alcohol is that it may be it may have been metabolized and cleared from the system sufficiently that it wouldn't have an impact on on sleep um but i don't know anyone who's tried to really do the dose response curves of that question which is you know let's start with this proof of alcohol you know 10 percent or spirits whatever it is 40 or beer what seven whatever it is and then let's do that and see the impact and then let's bring let's march that dose from the afternoon closer and closer and closer to sleep and see if the detriment to sleep is a linear relationship that the closer you get the worse the consequence of your sleep or is it more of a an exponential a sort of a a ramping up curve where it doesn't have too much effect in the afternoon but then it's really in the last two hours and especially in the last hour the last three hours when it climbs that's when you have a monumental impact on sleep and then it you know i don't know if that makes sense but i don't know that would be the study that i would want to do it's just immensely costly and probably no one wants to fund that right and what about the impact of uh cigarettes cigars or mushrooms or other type of drugs that are now becoming more popularized the mushroom kind of community the um yeah the not ayahuasca but whatever's in between mushrooms and ayahuasca kind of like those types of drugs how do those impact or even marijuana how does that impact sleep quality so we there is emerging evidence on cbd and thc i think the best evidence we have so far is on thc which is tetrahydrocannabinol which is the psychoactive component of marijuana that's the stuff that's the part that gets you high we know that that unfortunately is not good for sleep for at least two reasons firstly people will say it does help me fall asleep quicker and it does seem to hasten the onset of sleep the problem is that you develop a tolerance you develop a dependency very quickly and then when you stop using you have very horrific rebound insomnia and therefore you have to go right back to it so you develop a dependency on the drug so that's the first reason that we don't advise it the second is that it seems to thc seems to be very good like alcohol but through a different mechanistic pathway it seems to be very good at blocking your dream sleep your rem sleep so unfortunately thc is probably not advised from a scientific perspective cbd however is interesting i you know i'm not a medical doctor and i you know none of what i say here or anywhere else is you know prescriptive advice or medical advice but the scientific data on cbd is starting to become quite interesting many people have suggested that they use it and it helps their sleep if you look at some of the animal studies at higher doses cbd does seem to improve some aspects of deep sleep deep quality sleep the dose also is interesting though and this has not been spoken about widely in the community and i think it's a disservice at low doses cbd may actually be awake promoting it may keep you awake whereas at higher doses it may be more soperific maybe more some what we call somnogenic and increase sleep the question then to me is that if that data is real i'll start to believe it more if i can come up with a plausible physiological mechanism that underlies it and after doing a lot of research on this in this area and reading i think there are at least two non-mutually exclusive possibilities as to why cbd maybe and i don't think there's anywhere near enough data suggest that it it does but it may have an effect the first is that it seems to be a very powerful what we call anxiolytic in other words it decreases your anxiety and there's some great science around cbd and anxiety right now even within the brain you know we spoke before about how you become very emotionally irrational without sufficient sleep and in part it's because a deep emotional center called the amygdala erupts and becomes at least 60 percent more reactive when you're not getting sufficient sleep that same emotional epicenter the amygdala is actually quietened down by cbd some greats great studies there and we know we spoke about earlier on that anxiety is one of the roots to which you get to insomnia so i think it has an indirect potential benefit which is that it quiets the nervous system down it reduces anxiety and when you remove the roadblock of anxiety you enter into the richer world of sleep the second is a more direct mechanism and this comes onto something called temperature because your brain and your body need to drop their core temperature by about one degree celsius or around two to three degrees fahrenheit for you to fall asleep and stay asleep soundly across the night and that's the reason that you will always find it easier to fall asleep in a room that's too cold than too hot what's the what's the ideal temperature of the room it's different for different people you know men typically run hotter than women but on average what we found is that a bedroom temperature of somewhere between sort of somewhere between 62 to 65 degrees fahrenheit which is actually quite cold a little over 18 degrees celsius so now if you're worried about that no problem you can take a hot water bottle to bed you can put it at the end of the bed warm your feet worth thick socks but for the ambient temperature that seems to be ideal for the average 62 to 65 yeah wow um so one of the interesting things coming back to cbd however is that it seems to have what we call a hypothermic profile to it in other words it drops your core body temperature and by the way this is the reason that people will think look if i have a hot bath or a shower before bed at night i fall asleep faster and i seem to get a better night of sleep and part of the reason you think that is because you get out of the bath you're all warm and toasty you get under the covers and you fall asleep it's the exact opposite reason in fact what happens is that when you're in the bath or the shower all of the blood comes to the surface of your skin rosy cheeks kind of red hands red face and that means that you've charmed all of the blood out of the core of your body to the surface and when you get out of the bath that skin surface radiates the heat out of the core of your body so after a warm bath your core body temperature plummets and that's the reason why you sleep better in fact it's so reliable that we call it the warm bath effect in sleep science is it better to take a warm bath or a cold shower before bed cold is typically not because what that will do is usually the opposite firstly cold showers will activate you and sort of you know create usually a brain response including a neurochemical called norepinephrine which is an alerting activating chemical the second is that when you have a cold shower typically your skin will get whiter as a consequence and what will happen is that the the brain is doing what we call vasocon sorry the body is doing vasoconstriction it's you know locking down all of the blood vessels because it's trying to hold on to its heat so you withdraw the heat into the core of the body and you trap the heat so that you usually go for a warm bath or a shower you know when you are trying to get to bed at night that's usually the best prescription and what about nicotine the effects of nicotine whether it be vaping or cigarettes how does that affect sleep so nicotine is a very activating chemical it's a stimulant it's what we call a psychoactive stimulant and coffee is a psychoactive stimulant too but they work through very different mechanisms so nicotine will bind on to specific receptors in the brain that can activate the brain called nicotinic receptors and what we typically find is that smoking and smoking before bedtime will usually create sleep disruption and activate the brain so it will make it harder to fall asleep but the the hard part is when you're going through abstinence we also know with the same with many drugs when you're trying to quit sleep usually is disrupted as a consequence as you go through withdrawal and in fact what we found is that in for example we've done some studies with cocaine addicts we found that the severity of their sleep disruption during withdrawal predicts their relapse because they're like i need to just feel like i can sleep relax and sleep again yeah or or it's just that when they're not sleeping well they are predisposed to a making bad choices they become more impulsive and we've seen this in healthy individuals you sleep deprive them the dopamine circuits in the brain that are reward seeking impulsive risk taking those circuits of the brain become hyperactive and hypersensitive so when you're going through abstinence and your sleep is disrupted what's unfortunate is that you become more reward sensitive and more impulsive you lack self-control so no wonder it predicts relapse but the good thing that tells us is if that's the case can we use sleep treatment sleep therapy as a way to intervene during abstinence to see if we can shore up and bootstrap the system so it doesn't fall prey to relapse because of the abstinence-induced sleep disruption does that make any sense yeah of course yeah it does so is there if someone was vaping or smoking cigarettes would there be a cut off time they should stop during the day if they wanted to get better sleep or is it just if you're having nicotine at all and anytime during the day it's going to affect you at night the nicotine typically has a shorter half-life in terms of its activity so unlike caffeine which has quite a long sort of half-life and alcohol too nicotine has a shorter half-life so the sort of proximity to sleep that you may have to cut yourself off may be shorter as a consequence but just keep an eye out you know it usually is going to be an activating thing and we see it all of the time it can be a potent sleep disrupter and what about uh sugar and the standard american diet the sad diet how does this impact our sleep unfortunately it it's not great so um what we found and there's a there's a you know i seem to be like just the the the spencer i know i feel like eeyore and winnie the pooh everything everything's terrible but um there is a very strong link between your sleep and what you're eating and there is an equally strong link between what you're eating and how you sleep and we can maybe take both of those there's less evidence actually regarding your first question which is how does what you eat impact your sleep what we do know for certain is that diets that are high in sugar and low in fiber will typically result in worse sleep i'm part of especially if you're having sugar intake in the last couple of hours of sleep and part of the reason i believe this is true although we don't yet have the evidence is that sugar is a very good way to release energy and increase your core body temperature and what we've just spoken about is that when you go to sleep you need to drop your core body temperature and that can be one of the many i think consequences um so if you're gonna have sugar try to wait do it two or three hours before at the latest when you would be advise it yeah and don't don't have it at midnight and then wait three hours of sleep no that would be ill-advised as well from my scientific knowledge um and what about food in general is there a time where you should stop eating before you sleep great question and in fact that's kind of a bit of a myth when you look at the data that you could bust you know people will say you should really cut yourself off you know three or four hours before bed and that's the optimal if you look at the studies you can go as close as to one hour before bed eating and it doesn't seem to have an impact once you get closer than one hour it does seem to have a negative consequence also just be mindful of of acid reflux that's the other thing if you have a large meal and then you lie down a lot of people will get that reflux that will wake them up throughout the night and that's another reason a cost of eating too big too late interesting yeah i had a couple nights ago i had i hadn't had pizza in a long time and i'm a big pizza guy and i had a a pizza two it came like two hours late it was supposed to come like eight and then i had the delivery got messed up anyways it came like 11 30 i was like ah do i eat this now or do i just you know eat it tomorrow or something and i i kept i was like maybe let's have one piece and then i ate like almost the whole thing and uh the next morning i woke up and i felt like this acidity type of feeling and i was like huh it didn't wake me up in the middle of the night but i felt that though you don't remember that's the one of the downsides too is that you don't remember waking up but if we looked at your you know if we had a sleep tracking ring on you it's probably likely that you know we would have seen some of that restless sleep yeah that's true but i also felt it the next morning for a couple hours which was just uncomfortable you know i feel like that kind of acidy uh feeling so that's interesting yeah so timing you can we can sort of bust that myth a little bit um also time restricted eating which has been a big thing of late the studies there are great and you know intermittent fasting you mean or yeah sort of i would say it's time restricted eating rather than intermittent fasting because to really call it fasting you have to you know probably 36 hours past to say that you're in a fast but i think time-restricted eating there's some great work uh my good colleague sachin panderet um down in san diego the um uh the sulk has done some amazing work in animal models um david sinclair has got some great data too yeah yeah exactly these people are great but what's interesting is that i don't doubt the health benefits those health benefits are very clear on multiple metrics of body health and some brain health but when you look at the sleep data from what i can tell there are really only three studies so far that carefully controlled studies two of out of the three were in obese populations one out of the three was in healthy weight individuals and what they found was that time restricted eating offered no benefits to sleep now it's not that time restricted eating gave any or caused any detriment to sleep it just didn't offer any benefit that doesn't mean that i'm advising against time-restricted eating in fact i do time-restricted eating but in terms of sleep unfortunately it doesn't seem to it's funny you hear people who intermittent fast or time-restrictive do time restrictive eating say you know i sleep like amazing you know when i you know i sleep so great when i do it so maybe it's just a placebo effect or something or it's i mean i think there's an individual variability of course too and for some people i have no doubt that it probably creates objectively good sleep but i should also make the point as you did the placebo effect is the most reliable effect in all of pharmacology right exactly or also it's maybe you're not you're also not eating later at night because you're not eating in general and maybe your body just isn't like metabolizing something when you're right about to go to bed and you're i don't know maybe it's not working as hard the body and so you're able to get cooler temperature i don't know but um that's interesting restricted yeah it's but we can turn the tables then that's sort of the impact of food on your sleep the impact of sleep on how you eat is incredibly well resolved so if you get a lack of sleep does that mean you tend to go after the things that want to give you more energy the sugary carby type things and then it's never enough and you keep eating more of it that type of stuff i say you should be a sleep scientist so you've nailed it um so firstly what we find is that your appetite regulating hormones go in opposite and bad directions when you're not sleeping well so firstly so there are two key appetite regulating hormones leptin and ghrelin that i know i think you've had discussed on the show before leptin is the satiety hormone and it signals to your brain that you're full and that you're satiated and therefore you typically don't want to eat more you're satisfied with what you've eaten ghrelin on the other hand is the hunger hormone that will say no i'm not satisfied with my food i want to eat more and when you are insufficiently slept the levels of leptin which is the satiety signal the i'm full i'm comfortable with my food that drops away and if that weren't bad enough levels of ghrelin actually increase so you lose the signal of feeling full and you increase the fee the signal of hunger and no wonder then as a consequence insufficiently slept individuals will typically be eating somewhere between two to three hundred extra calories each day and you can add that up you know day after day week after week month after month and depending on your you know how you calculate it it could be you know 40 000 extra calories every year which could be somewhere in the region of you know four to seven pounds of obese mass that you add on each year because of insufficient sleep the second thing that we found is that you it's not only that you eat more but what you want to eat changes just as you described so your food preferences not only shift to just eating more but you eat more of the things that are what we call more obesogenic right so when you are underslept you start to reach out for simple sugars and the stodgy heavy-hitting carbohydrates rather than the sort of the protein rich yeah yeah food vegetables fruits and nuts exactly so now you're reaching for this sort of ice cream in the cookies rather than the leafy greens and the handful of nuts so that's a second problem with insufficiency the third problem that we've discovered is dieting it's really fascinating if i take an individual who is not sleeping enough and they're dieting they're trying to lose weight and manage what they eat unfortunately 70 percent of the weight that they lose will come from lean muscle mass and not fat so in other words without sleeping properly without seating properly so when you are short sleeping a set of individuals this is what we see in other words when you're not getting sufficient sleep but you're dieting you hold on to what you want to lose which is the fat and you lose what you want to keep oh man which is the muscle does that make sense it makes sense it makes me sad i know i'm bloody depressing aren't i this is why i tell you i'm just so unpopular i'm a nightmare we need this information intended yeah exactly we need this information to help us improve the quality of our life and that's my mission to serve people with the right information with the right data with the right science uh that can help them if they could do one thing better to improve you know even just a little bit that'll help them overall maybe they're not gonna be able to apply all these strategies but it's like what would you say if there were three things someone could do to improve their sleep tonight only three things what would those three things be for you i think beyond what we've spoken about which is sort of the alcohol and the caffeine and being mindful of that i would say um firstly regularity if there's one thing that you take from this this podcast regarding sleep it's regularity go to bed at the same time and wake up at the same time no matter whether it's the weekday or the weekend really regularity is king and i don't like giving rules people don't respond to rules people respond to reasons not rules and so i'll try and explain the rule as it were the the reason is because your brain has a master 24-hour clock inside of it sits right in the middle of your brain it's called the suprachiasmatic nucleus and it expects regularity and thrives best under conditions of regularity including regularity of your wake sleep schedule and if you give it regularity regularity is king and it will anchor your sleep and improve the quantity and the quality of your sleep okay i think the second piece of advice i would have is have a wind down routine you know many of us think of sleep almost like a light switch that we are racing around during the day we're desperately busy we jump into bed we switch the light out and we think that sleep should be like that same light switch sleep is much more like landing a plane it takes time for your brain to descend down onto the terra firma that we call good sleep at night and we do this with kids of course you know we have to go through the routine you know yeah we sort of give them a bath and then we sort of get them out and they put them into bed then we read to them and then gradually and if you deviate from that routine from that wind down routine bad things are gonna uh usually jumps higher how long should yeah how long should that routine be is that can that be 10 minutes can be at an hour i mean what's does it matter i would say find what works for you i would say usually try to think about some kind of a 30 to 20 minute routine whether that's taking a bath i've found meditation to be incredibly powerful i really enjoy the the app headspace and i know you've had andy on the show before too fantastic wonderful individual doing great things so meditation before bed you know stretching some kind of a wind down routine the other thing you can do is have a worry journal um just sit down and usually two hours before bed don't do it right before bed with a pattern of paper and a pencil write down everything that's on your mind and it's catharsis and it's just like vomiting out all of your anxiety onto the page right and that's sleeplessly yeah so you don't sleep with it so you can have that as part of your wind down routine find something that works for you but a wind-down routine is critical yeah the last piece of advice i would give the third piece is that after a bad night of sleep or if you're struggling with a bout of insomnia the very best advice that i can give you is do nothing and what i mean by that is don't wake up any later don't go to bed any earlier don't nap during the day and don't drink more coffee and i'll explain each of them yeah so if you wake up later in the day because you think well i had such a bad night of sleep i need to sleep in a little bit to compensate because you're waking up later when it comes time to your normal bedtime later that evening because you've only been awake for less time you've been awake for less time than you would do normally you're not as tired so what happens you get into bed because you think i had a bad night of sleep and i want to sort of make this one a good one and now you're tossing and turning and you have another bad night because you woke up too late in the morning the same is true for going to bed too early you think well my bedtime is normally you know let's say it's 11 o'clock in the evening i'm going to get to bed at 10 o'clock tonight because i had such a bad night of sleep resist don't do that because your circadian rhythm your natural 24 hour rhythm will not typically want you to go to bed until 11 but you get into bed at 10 and then you're wide awake and now you have another bad night of sleep napping we've already spoken about just takes that edge off your sleep desire and then don't obviously try to compensate with caffeine because you'll just have more caffeine in the system which means that following night you're going to be more alert and more awake so it sounds strange to say but after a bad night of sleep stay the course just do what you normally do and by the way the other tip as a strange one many of us have a wake-up alarm why don't we have a tibetalon you mean like an alarm that tells us time to go to bed yeah just you know set it for you know 30 minutes before bed and interesting and that's your wind down time yeah and that's your wind down routine and even if it just means that two out of the seven nights a week you end up just being nudged to go to bed a little bit earlier or on time i should say then that is a great hack the other thing too is i would say remove all clock faces in your bedroom because if you wake up and you're having a bad night of sleep knowing what time of night is it is is not going to help at all it's not going to change anything you know and so removal clock faces have a to bed alarm the other thing you can do by the way is get ready for bed you know most people finish up their netflix and then they start brushing their teeth they'll you know take their makeup off get changed instead before you sit down for television brush your teeth floss get changed get ready for bed and then what's great is that when you feel sleepy on the couch and you turn the television off you go straight to bed and you've already hacked back 10 or 15 minutes of extra sleep add that up night after night month after month it's like compounding interest on the loan so even just small sort of nibbles of extra sleep can have a compounding benefit long term do you see does that make some sense it makes a lot of sense and i'm assuming also you know what about light is it if there's any light in the room yeah make sure you have blackout shades how does that impact you great question yeah another tip that i would usually give is darkness we are a dark deprived society in this modern era and we need darkness at night to trigger the release of a hormone called melatonin yes so in the last hour before bed dim down half of the lights in your house and you will be surprised at how sleepy that actually makes you feel and you can go even further you can dim you know three quarters of those lights then try and stay away from screens the data on screens has actually taken a twist of late if you look at it at first we thought you know the blue light from those leds was bad and it is bad it's the worst form of light in terms of blocking melatonin you know the yellows and the red wavelength of light that isn't as harsh on blocking melatonin the cool blue light that's the lower sort of wavelength spectrum of light that's especially harmful to melatonin but what we've started to realize some great studies coming out of australia have found that perhaps it's not so much the light it's that these devices are activating those devices are designed for attention capture correct gamification gamification you know get me on the activate my brain so you are perfectly sleepy and you would be fine to get into bed and fall asleep but because you're using the device the device asks sorry acts as a masking agent and it stimulates you awake despite you underlying having a strong desire to sleep and that's one of the reasons why those devices can have such a deleterious impact but again unlike some sleep folks you know that genie of technology is out the bottle and it's not going back in any time it's not it's not yeah so there's no point in me saying you know has sleep become an enemy of you know has the invasion of sleep into the of sorry technology into the bedroom hurt our sleep i think it has however i actually think that technology can become a salvation to bring us back in line with our sleep and you know there's a whole separate episode we could do on sleep and technology but so to come back to your point though darkness at night is key and then keeping it dark at night try to block out any of those small little lights in your bedroom blackout curtains are great if you can't accomplish that wear an eye mask ear plugs are great to help dissipate sound and noise interruption from a noisy environment all of those things are great okay i love this this is powerful i've got a couple final questions for you i could i could continue for a long time on this because i think it's fascinating but when you're in la next we'll have to do another one in person but um i would love to i'd love to sit down for those that want more you've got a you've got a new podcast the matt walker podcast and you've got an amazing book why we sleep unlocking the power of sleep and dreams and i highly recommend people subscribe to your show and follow you over on social media and get the book for yourself or your friends you're also sleep diplomat.com and uh dr matt on twitter you can find me right yeah uh sleep diplomat and on instagram which is usually the best place to connect with me it's dr matt walker d-r-m-a-t-t perfect yes um a couple final questions for you before i wrap things up this is called the three truths question hypothetical scenario i'd love for you to imagine it's your last day on earth many years away from now you've slept your way to 200 years young and uh done all the right things and you have accomplished all your greatest dreams in life um you've seen everything come true that you want to have come true matt and for whatever reason all of the content you've created and put out into the world yeah it has to go with you or it goes to another place but no one has access to the information anymore it's hypothetical scenario but you have a piece of paper in a pen and you get to write down three things you know to be true the big lessons you learned in your life that you would leave behind and this is all we would have as information that you would leave behind what would you say would be those three truths for you i would say acceptance over denial i would say questions over advice and i would say self-compassion over self-brutalization those are powerful ones very bad i've probably been guilty of all of this yeah probably all been guilty and i think that's why it's so important to see the other side of the coin and how important it is to let go of those things and be more aware so those are those are still not perfect in any way shape or form on those but yeah those would be it but you're aware you're practicing it so that's beautiful trying i would acknowledge you matt for showing up and being obsessed with this science and this data and making this a mission of yours to learn how we can heal learn how we can live better longer healthier lives and giving us the data giving us the science and making this your part of your life's mission to help people live better i think it's you know you're the one who's saying sleep except for oxygen sleep is the key factor towards productivity towards health towards mood towards happiness towards longevity so i appreciate you constantly in the the research constantly looking for more ways that we can optimize especially as technology advances and more challenges and complications and distractions and poor food nutrition and drugs come into play giving us the research and the science to help us hopefully make better choices with our life so i really acknowledge you for everything you're up to and uh i stand on the shoulders of some wonderful pests um all of my colleagues and sleep scientists i'm just trying to do a tiny little bit um to hopefully reunite humanity with the sleep that it's so desperately bereft of absolutely absolutely um again i want to make sure people subscribe get the book check you out on social media make sure to let uh dr walker know what your thoughts are about this leave comment below over on youtube or message them over on instagram and twitter if you're listening to the audio and uh my final question for you is what's your definition of greatness astonishing service to others there you have it dr matthew walker thank you so much for being here i appreciate it thank you so much for having me it's just privilege and a delight to speak with you lewis thank you learning to control your heart rate and thereby your mind using your breathing so it goes breathing heart rate mind in that sequence so if your mind isn't where you want it to be don't start with the mind start with your breathing then which will control your heart rate which will then allow

Channel: Lewis Howes

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Keywords: Lewis Howes, Lewis Howes interview, school of greatness, self help, self improvement, self development, personal development, success habits, success, wealth, motivation, inspiration, inspirational video, motivational video, success principles, millionaire success habits, how to become successful, success motivation

Id: VNcCo9G2Bs8

Length: 119min 2sec (7142 seconds)

Published: Wed Sep 01 2021