Sleep Expert REVEALS How Caffeine DESTROYS Your Sleep & Productivity! | Matthew Walker

just one dose of caffeine in the evening decrease the amount of deep sleep by 20 now you would have to normally age by about 15 years to produce that type of a deficit in your deep sleep or you can do it every single night by having a cup of coffee [Music] how much of a sleep disrupter is caffeine but caffeine is a misunderstood drug certainly right you use it that's interesting it is a drug um it's what we call a psychoactive stimulant um everyone knows that caffeine can help alert you and sort of keep you awake that's the thing that's most known um caffeine if you look at some data is probably the second most traded commodity on the surface of the planet after oil which i think says everything about our sleep-deprived state the other thing about caffeine however that most people don't realize is the time that it is in your system so most drugs have what we call a half-life the amount of time it takes for half of that drug to be essentially excreted out your system caffeine has a half-life of about six or seven hours and it's a little dependent on what type of gene that you have to sort of metabolize the caffeine but on average it's about that but what's interesting is that caffeine has a quarter life of about 12 hours what this means is that if you have a cup of coffee at noon a quarter of that caffeine is still circulating around your brain at midnight so to put that in context it would be the equivalent of getting into bed and just before you turn the light out you swing a quarter of a cup of starbucks and you hope for a good night of sleep it you know you would never do that because you know but that's exactly unfortunately what people do you know um completely innocently by drinking caffeine you know still too late in the afternoon yeah it's a huge problem it it's it's a i think it's a big problem in society if you i mean another way to quantify this is if you just look and i've checked out the data from the financial times the number of starbucks coffee houses that have arisen over the past 30 years is just like an exponential increase and i think that is an expression of how we're self-medicating our state of sleep deprivation in developed nations you call it a drug i agree with you it is a psychoactive substance that we you know we use liberally we let our children have it we you know we're not even you know we often don't think about the implications of that and so many patients of mine tell me that doctor actually i know you know if caffeine can be a problem for some people i'm not one of those caffeine is fine for me but more often than not when they either reduce their intake or cut it out completely the seat quality goes up and um and you know sachin panda um professor panda who you know i know you know very well you both sort of follow each other's research he was on the podcast a few weeks ago and you know he was saying routinely every year he will he will have a bit of a detox from caffeine he'll go off caffeine and he says well i'd do that yeah i have a headache for a few days but my sleep always improves i've got more energy and my productivity dramatically increases and i think that says it all really it does and i you know a number of points that you made that i'd love to circle back around to firstly caffeine is the only psychoactive stimulant that we do give to our children readily which you know is i think a concern and i'm not trying to be sort of you know finger-pointing or finger-whacking again i think it's just that parents probably don't understand the impact of caffeine in that regard um i think the the second point comes on to your comment of some people say look i'm one of those people who can drink a cup of coffee in the evening have an espresso after dinner and i fall asleep fine and i stay asleep now even if that's true there was an alarming study that was done where they gave people just one single cup of coffee a dose of 200 milligrams of caffeine standard cup of coffee and then they measured the quality of their deep sleep by tracking these big powerful brain waves these glorious beautiful deep brain waves that bathe all of our brain during deep sleep at night and it helps also restore the body and what they found was that just one dose of caffeine in the evening decreased the amount of deep sleep by 20 now you would have to normally age by about 15 years to produce that type of a deficit in your deep sleep or you can do it every single night by having a cup of coffee and what's interesting is that those people will wake up the next morning they won't remember waking up because they may not have woken up but the quality of their deep sleep was so poor that they will still then feel unrestored and unrefreshed by their sleep i need more caffeine and and so that here is the irony that now they're starting to reach for two cups of coffee rather than one and so develops this dependency cycle this sort of addiction spiral as it were so i think people are perhaps unaware of the the true impact of caffeine how long it sticks around within your system and even if you feel that you're immune to that evening cup of coffee how it will still impact your sleep even though consciously you know nothing about it well i think you know you raised a really important point there matthew about you know knowledge and awareness you know none of us are pointing fingers you know we you know i understand caffeine is everywhere you know i probably used to over drink caffeine and i've altered my behavior as i've learned more and more about the research and i think what we're trying to do is raise awareness of you know caffeine is a sleep disruptor there's just no question about that and you know we can dress it up any way we want but it is a sleep distress i said if anyone is listening to this if that story that matthew just mentioned resonates with you i'd really sort of encourage you to have a little think about your caffeine usage and just see if can you can you wind it down a little bit can you see you know bit by bit if by reducing it it improves your quality of sleep the recommendation i make here in my book is enjoy your caffeine before noon and i say enjoy because i get it i people love it i love a good cup of coffee but i will not have caffeine after midday yeah and i you know i've now actually done what sachin has done i i would i routinely go through sort of a caffeine detox but you know i too would enjoy that cup of coffee or a nice strong cup of you know um yorkshire tea i have no relationship with them by the way in the mornings and i also love the the coffee culture as well you know i go out with friends and we grab coffee all the time and i love that and i want people to embrace it because i think it's fantastic that there's a social movement sort of circulating around that um all i would say though is that you know caffeinated coffee is is actually really quite good and i would struggle i'd love to do the sort of you know the coke pepsi challenge with decaf and caffeinated just in terms of the taste you will probably notice that it wouldn't give you sort of the shakes or that sort of slightly anxious state and you probably know the difference but i've really become enamored with decaffeinated coffee and all of its flavors and i love the cafe bar culture so love to embrace that but i do like what you're saying about your sort of patience just thinking a little bit about caffeine and considering it and just trying to try the experiment you know sort of set yourself the task give it a go and see if it works for you yeah i remember about a month after my book came out uh someone tweeted me and said i i never ever thought that caffeine was a problem for me but i've read your book i've taken a recommendation i've how i now only have two cups of coffee and i have it before noon and i've never slept this well in over 30 years and it was just incredible how such a common thing that people are doing day to day may be impacting our sleeping i think you make a really good point that it's like a self-fulfilling prophecy the more caffeine you drink the more you need the more dependent you become the less good your sleep is and it just continues i think we also have to highlight we're talking about coffee but i think tea yeah would be similar because it contains caffeine green tea you know a herbal tea that often people switch to when they're not having tea or coffee is also a highly caffeinated drink so may affect you you know as you became more and more aware of all this sleep research what was the biggest thing in your own lifestyle that you changed on the back of your research i think it was probably caffeine i think just seeing the data and then doing those types of studies ourselves and particularly the the finding that we discussed were even if you're asleep the quality of that sleep is just not as deep that really got me concerned and that's when i really started to pay attention to my to my caffeine content are you tea turtle now with caffeine or are you so right now yeah i am i drink decaffeinated tea and i drink decaffeinated coffee um i sometimes you know i've ebbed and flowed between sort of having coffee in the morning because i do feel it's it's alerting benefits but you know we didn't necessarily evolve to be medicated with caffeine and i think anyone who's you know drinking caffeine at 11am which on the basis of your circadian rhythm if you listen to the wonderful podcast with uh sachin panda that you did you know your peak of your circadian rhythm is right around sort of the 11 o'clock period that's when it should be almost impossible for you to fall asleep but yet you know i sometimes look around on an airplane when i'm leaving and people half the plane is asleep at 11 o'clock yeah um and if you're self-medicating um your sleep deprivation at 11am with caffeine it usually means that you're perhaps just not getting enough sleep and that's probably been one of the greatest um i think influential factors that and the impact on my productivity i think that was the the most underrated and it actually forced me to start doing a lot of research on sleepless and productivity that maybe on a second podcast because we can get into yeah but you know my ability to maintain focus and produce high quality output work is dramatically dependent on the sleep that i've been having at night that absolutely echoes what professor panda said a few weeks ago on this podcast when he goes off caffeine his product service he goes up so guys look no one's asking you guys to to cut out caffeine you know i know how much you guys love it i have certainly had my own love-hate relation well more love of a relationship with coffee in the past but i have dramatically reduced it and i'm feeling better than i've ever felt really hope you enjoyed that conversation please do think about one thing that you can take and apply into your life inspiration is not enough you need to take action 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Channel: Dr Rangan Chatterjee

Views: 1,354,471

Keywords: Matthew walker sleep, Dr Chatterjee sleep, Better sleep, sleep better, healthy sleep, sleep tips, sleep advice, why sleep is important for health, sleep and caffeine, caffeine effects on sleep, caffeine and productivity, how caffeine affects productivity, sleep, health, wellbeing, Matthew Walker, Dr Chatterjee, Feel Better Live More, feel better live more podcast

Id: k5BMGmf1ai0

Length: 11min 0sec (660 seconds)

Published: Sun Mar 21 2021