SLEEP EXPERT Reveals How To Optimize Your Sleep To LIVE LONGER! | Matt Walker

right now the recommendation is for most adults get seven to nine hours of sleep and to get by the way to get seven hours of sleep you probably need at least a seven and a half hour sleep opportunity i think that's what many people miss in recommendations from sort of experts they say get your seven hours of sleep so people think that means you know well if i go to bed at you know 11 p.m and i wake up at 6 00 a.m then i've got my seven hours of sleep that's not true you probably will have only logged about sort of six hours and 40 minutes and and that's that's not enough so you need to think about the sleep opportunity time as being probably around about eight hours optimally what we also know is that once you get below seven we can start to measure objective impairments in your body and in your brain as well the problem is that most people don't realize that they're sleep deprived when they're sleep deprived this is a big problem with sleep loss and you know the analogy i guess would be um a drunk driver at a bar you know they've had a couple of pints maybe a few shots and they pick up their car keys and they say to you you know look i'm fine to drive home and you say no i know that you think you you're fine to drive home but trust me you're not you are objectively or impaired it's the same way with a lack of sleep that our subjective sense is a miserable predictor of objectively how well we're doing with a lack of sleep and i think that's one of the um one of the issues that i try to sort of help dismiss in terms of a notion i think the other thing that's problematic too about getting too little sleep is that your baseline level of how you think your health and your wellness is just becomes chronically low and you accept that as if that's just where i am in life this is just me this is as good as it can be and people don't realize that if you're to change something like sleep or stress or diet or physical activity there's actually a better form of you waiting on the other side of those things absolutely it just requires perhaps you know some knowledge and an invitation to go there matthew i i call this podcast feel better live more for a reason and it really just echoes what you what you just said then you know when we feel better by you know prioritizing sleep by you know looking at these other pillars that i talk about we get more out of life we're a better version of ourselves we have better relationships we have you know much deeper more meaningful interactions with the world around us when we're feeling better and i guess you would argue that when we sleep better we live more we do i mean firstly that data is very clear that if you look across epidemiological studies millions of individuals in these studies a very simple truth comes out which is that the shorter your sleep the shorter your life that short sleep predicts all-cause mortality wow and so you know i think i think we just need to stop and just let let that sink in for a minute depriving ourselves from sleep will shorten our life yeah yeah i mean that's the the powerful data that you know the global sleep loss epidemic that is underway right now which i believe is probably one of the greatest public health challenges that we now face in the 21st century it is a slow form of self-euthanasia that's very powerful statement one that i absolutely would agree with um have we as a society i thought it over prioritizes the right words but yeah let's go with overpriced hours have we let have we put too much focus on the right food and the right physical activity at the expense of sleep yeah it's a great question i've thought about this a lot um i i don't think we've done it at the expense of sleep perhaps but i do resonate with your comment that i think sleep has perhaps been the neglected stepsister in the health conversation of today and i think it's been left out in the cold there's probably a number of reasons for that the first is just because scientists like me are to blame what i mean is that we have not adequately communicated to the public or to medicine or to health care professionals in general how critical the importance and necessity of sleep is you know and i liken where we are with sleep with where we were for smoking 50 years ago you know all of the science was there but it hadn't trickled down into the public knowledge base or even into medicine that's what you do so great with your book is you're bringing that awareness to the general public all over the world which is fantastic and that was part of the motivation for the book you know i could see the disease and sickness and ill health that was caused by insufficient sleep and there wasn't you know um there wasn't a blueprint guide there wasn't some kind of a manifesto for sleep and so that was part of the reason to write the book but i think to come back um you know to why sleep is being left out in the cold i think part of it is people like you know well at least my fault um i think the other thing too is that unlike diet and exercise sleep has an image problem you know i think nobody feels ashamed about saying i went out for a run at lunchtime or you know i i went i had a great run this morning nobody necessarily feels ashamed about you know putting salad on that plate you know and making a really healthy meal but i do think people feel sometimes ashamed by saying well i i need at least eight and a half hours of sleep a night you know and sometimes i've heard the reaction of people saying really and that really has a hint in it to suggest that if you're getting sufficient sleep and i choose that word carefully sufficient then you must be lazy that you're slothful because we've tagged and we've associated this thing called necessary sleep with that luggage of you know something to be ashamed about and in fact if anything it's what happens is that people have this braggadocio attitude this almost sort of sleep machismo attitude that you're very proud to tell people how little sleep that you're getting as though it's you know a badge of honor i see that in some people not all not all people but some people so i think to change that part of the sleep discussion and bring it in to the health equation we need to destigmatize sleep uh in a way too i think those are at least two of the reasons why it's being left out in the cold yeah yeah absolutely i mean i you know i've shared this before on the podcast that a few years ago for me it was probably when i had kids actually because my kids were early risers and you know that's that's the understatement of the year that there were early risers but i realized that if i didn't alter my going to bed time i was going to be exhausted every single day which is what was happening and i sort of altered my whole sleep schedule a few years back and it's something now that i really do prioritize you know i will have a shut up time in the evening after which i'm not on my computer i'm not working i will wait because i know that if i don't do that the next day i won't be performing at anywhere near the level i want to um and it actually reminds me that that facebook conversation we had the facebook live chat we did yeah so guys we were trying to schedule this chat for a little while and i love this here we we bought a date in and then uh matthew had to move move the time and i got an email i think from your publicist saying you know can we move this time and i thought that's 9 p.m uk time man that's really late because you know i've just i've just written a book saying how important sleep is as well i'm i'm you know trying to educate and inspire my audience that actually these things are really important so i actually declined your very kind invitation to do it at night i just actually asked to see if we could change the time i said yeah i certainly wouldn't have suggested yeah i said guys look if we chat between nine and ten and we talk about how detrimental sleep is and you know that you know and all the problems associated with it yet we're doing it late in the evening for my uk audience um we're ex i'm going to expose everyone to blue light in the evening right on my devices emotionally work them up before beds i thought actually you know what let's just decline that and do it another time so i thought that was quite yeah that was great wasn't it yeah it was just you know for someone to embrace you know sort of uh and practice what they preach and you know and i think for the two of us you know a lot of people of course will ask me also how much sleep do you get and i will tell them that i do honestly get a non-negotiable eight-hour sleep opportunity every night and it's i'm not trying to be you know a poster child for sleep i'm not trying to just sort of promote the book if you knew the data as i do and as i hope people will after reading the book honestly you just would not choose to do anything else and you know i don't want to live a shorter life and i don't want to live a shorter life that is filled with with disease or sickness and from everything i can tell sleep is perhaps one of the most democratic freely available efficacious forms of um of health insurance that you could ever wish for and as a consequence the reason i get that much is because for selfish reasons you know i just want to be alive and well for as long as possible and i think you know it's interesting hearing you say why you prioritize it you know again it's selfish is the wrong word but it's for self-preservation reasons um and one of the things i actually if i if you don't mind i know this is your podcast and you're interviewing me but talk about whatever you want but but i would love to just ask you the question because you know when i saw the title of of the book you know and i saw that you know there on the front cover was this word called sleep and it was on your on the front cover of your book there was this thing called sleep relax eat move and sleep and i well imagine that the first three would be there of course from you know an eminent clinician but i was surprised by the fall i was lovely excited it was wonderful but tell me you know where did that decision come from to include sleep you know where did you get the awareness from where did you get the sensitivity to sleep you know was it boots on the ground with patients was it in a medical curriculum was it personally tell me i'd love to know yeah i think matthew that's it's a great question really i mean my i guess my journey into this um i've really been keen to promote lifestyle comes from a you know a real feeling that in medicine we've lost our way a little bit now we're not putting blame on anyone yeah but but i sort of feel that the medical system is set up around acute diseases acute problems that respond very well to our magic bullet pharmaceutical interventions but i think the health landscape even in my career and i've nearly been seeing patients now for about 20 years even in my career i have seen the health landscape of the patients that i see change dramatically whereas now the bulk of what i see in my daily practice you know i say 80 percent of it is in some way driven by a collective modern lifestyles and so i've been delving deep for a few years now in terms of you know what are those lifestyle factors that i can leverage with my patients to get a better outcome and of course when i first started going on this journey was all about food right you know it's like okay you know it's all about diet you know if we were having this chat five or six years ago i would be saying you know most of what happens to us you know most of our health determinant is is basically foods but i disagree now you know because i think when you know the science when you have seen the science um as you detail so beautifully in your book the case is compelling you can't really ignore sleep so i'm a doctor who wants to get my patients better like every other doctor i want to do this in as harmless a way as possible and i also get very tired of suppressing downstream symptoms so i want to go upstream as far as possible see what lever can i turn this can have all these downstream consequences and food is one of those things that you know food isn't just calories you know it's not just fat and carbs it's information it changes our genetic expression so it's information for the body in a similar way physical activity can change hormones can change genetic expression all these kind of things and you know so obviously um that's food that's movements relaxation is a whole piece about stress you know which you know some research is showing that up to 90 of what we see in primary care may have stress as a factor which is incredible and but i always thought i was missing one piece off the puzzle and you know i would see like if we take autoimmune disease for it as an example when i see my patients i often do what's called a timeline and i look you know i say okay you've got symptoms here today but let's look at your whole life let's see what's been happening sequentially because i don't think a lot of these chronic conditions just happen overnight there's been a build up for a period of time for a period of years and i would often see with autoimmune conditions that you know just a few months sometimes just one month before the onset of symptoms i would see either either well not either i would often see a really stressful episode happen that would reduce the quality of people's sleep and then i see symptoms come on yeah there was adults i always want to learn from my patients so you know your question is where does this come from well primarily it's come from listening to my patients and listening to the stories that they tell me because you know you're you know one of the world's eminent researchers of sleep i love research but i also love real life what happens at the cold face when i'm seeing patients what did they tell me is working what did they tell me they're struggling with that also influences a lot of my recommendations as well as the science you know if you can marry those two together i think that's when we can make a real difference with people and i also went to a conference in uh san diego about two years ago and the whole conference was on sleep and relaxation and and rest and and i think it was uh phyllis zay do you know phillips yeah yeah she gave a couple of keynotes there um and i thought god this really is wetting my appetite it's really reinforcing what i'm seeing in my practice as i say when you look at the research i thought well how can i write a lifestyle book that is that is to empower people to take control of their health and not cover sleep you know i can't do it i i just i just can't see what's so interesting about that is you know you had you know all of this time at medical school in practice you know and it took a conference yeah you know that you you know through your own sheer interest and just my own money my own sort of annual leave to go and do this yeah because i'm interested that's where you got your sleep education you know that that strikes me as so you know unfortunate you know i want to think i want to work with medical systems to try and increase you know a sleep education component because wouldn't it be wonderful if all of our primary care physicians here in the united kingdom were you know as sleep aware and sleep motivated as you are and i'm sure they would be delighted to receive that information you know i know i have lots of friends here who are who are doctors and you know i know that they would embrace that and would love to try and increase wellness in their patients but there's just no pathway that we've engineered in the medical system to gift them with that knowledge and dispense wellness to their patients because sleep really is the tide that raises all of the other health boats it's just as you said it's the superordinate node that if you manipulate it you know it's like the archimedes lever you pull that everything else you know can start to come into play you get the sleep pad it affects your brain affects your hormones it affects your genetic expression it affects all these sort of things that we might be looking for drugs to to affect those individual pathways but you can improve a lot of them by giving your sleep yeah you know and it's no we think well that sounds almost too good but don't forget you know it took mother nature 3.6 million years to evolve this necessity of eight hours of sleep in place which i should note by the way that if you look at the data back in the 1940s the average adult was sleeping about 7.9 hours of sleep now that number here in the united kingdom is closer to 6 hours and 30 minutes in other words within the space of 100 years which is a blink of an evolutionary eye we've lopped off almost 20 of our sleep need you know how could that not come with demonstrable health and disease consequence so i think you know there's that component there but i love what you're saying that you know in medicine we're often or even in research and pharmaceuticals we're often trying to sort of manipulate one pathway in one area of the metabolic system on one aspect of the immune system or one feature of the cardiovascular system and you know sleep affects all of those and we can you know i'll give you an example firstly we know that after if you get a patient and you have them um sleeping just six hours for one week this is someone let's say who is healthy at the end of that one week of short sleep their blood sugar levels are disrupted so significantly that they would be pre-diabetic that you would diagnose them as being in a state of pre-diabetes just from sleep deprivation we control all of the factors you can also speak about sleep loss and the cardiovascular system and all it takes is one hour of lost sleep because there is a global experiment that's performed on 1.6 billion people across 70 countries twice a year and it's called daylight savings time and it turns out that when you look at that data in the spring when we lose an hour of sleep we see a subsequent 24 increase in heart attacks as a result it's just incredible but in the autumn you know when we gain an hour of sleep we see a 21 percent reduction in heart attacks so so the base is there when on a global level it's striking you know and you can even think you know you speak a lot about um you know the immune system it's so key for our health so what do tell us what does sleep do for the immune system so firstly we can look on both sides of the coin what happens when we don't get enough sleep firstly we know that people who are sleeping five hours a night are four times more likely to catch a cold than those people who are sleeping eight hours or more striking study very well controlled study we also know that it doesn't take one week of you know short sleep deprivation one night is enough what we've found is that if you take healthy individuals and then we limit them to just four hours of sleep for one single night what we see is a 70 drop in critical anti-cancer fighting immune cells called natural killer cells which are these wonderful sort of immune assassins that you know help decrease our you know sort of you know cancer risk yeah and help with spice infections and fighting part of that critical innate immune response flip the the sort of the side of the coin and now what we find is that when you get sleep there is a change in what we call the autonomic nervous system which is sort of this automatic part of our nervous system and that automatic nervous system is split into two branches one that is sort of like the accelerator pedal that gets us revved up triggers the fight or flight response the other is the brake that sort of calms us down and when we go into deep sleep we apply that break to the nervous system and everything quiets down heart rate decreases deep sleep is the most wonderful form of natural blood pressure medication that you could ever wish for but one of the other things is that we see as that nervous system quiets down levels of things like cortisol drop down that stress-related chemical and it's during that time that the body goes into an immune stimulation mode and it's where essentially you're going to restock the armament of your immune army so that when you wake up the next day you can battle and fight infection what's also fascinating i love this data and this tells you just how critical sleep is to a fighting for our health if you look at people who become infected or you actually infect them in the experimental laboratory let's say with sort of a cold vaccino you immediately trigger increased sleepiness and increased amounts of deep sleep and it turns out that the infection indicates to the immune system that you're under attack and the immune system will actually signal to the sleep system within the brain we need more sleep sleep is the best battle force that we have right now to combat this assault and so that's why when you're sick all you tend to want to do is just curl up in bed and go to sleep the reason is because your body is trying to sleep you well that's an appropriate response to what's going on exactly it's bodies are pretty clever right they are remarkably clever you know again mother nature has figured this out and so she brings up this thing called sleep which i would argue is probably like the swiss army knife of health you know whatever ailment you are facing it is more than likely that sleep has a tool in the box to try and help fight it that's so key whatever ailment you're facing guys if you're listening to this whatever you're suffering from whether it's you know a lack of energy on a day-to-day basis or whether it's that you're worried about your risk of developing a chronic disease such as type 2 diabetes or heart problems as you get older you know what matthew is saying what professor walker is saying is that sleep improving your quality of sleep is going to help you with all these different facets it's going to help reduce your risk it's going to help increase your energy it's also going to reduce your risk of actually getting disease in the future which is just absolutely incredible i mean we are going to move on to um tips because i know many of you be thinking okay this is all great you know i'm sort of hearing about all these things that sleep does but how do i get more so we're gonna we're gonna come to that shortly but there's so much i want to talk to you about matthew i mean i think we could easily make this like a full day podcast i'm that fascinated in this i'd love to return at some point should you wish me yeah well 100 but i think you know what you said about um medical school training i think i think it's very important because pretty much everything that i put in here and then the last quarter of the book is on sleep i'm not convinced that any of that came from my medical school training really so that was all self-taught from you know spending hours on pubmed reading research going to conferences trying to learn more because i wanted to help my patients more i thought you know i need to know more about this so i can actually do my patients you know and give them a better service um so you're saying that you know maybe medical students um may may get maybe two hours or so and you'd love to sort of try and help that and get you know maybe a sleep curriculum into medical schools and this really you know i think one of the reasons we get on so well there's so much synergy in our in our viewpoint in terms of how we think this needs to change so what i've done over the past six months is um is develop a brand new course with a colleague of mine dr panchaya called prescribing lifestyle medicine and it's a one-day master class to teach health care professionals but primarily doctors on the basics of you know lifestyle medicine if you will as a term you know so we go into sleep and we we teach this framework while they can simply apply these these four pillars with their patients to start to actually you know implement lifestyle medicine i'd love to you know i'd love to maybe collaborate with you and show you the slices yeah i'd love to and i've got you know i teach a whole course at uh at the university of california berkeley the science of sleep so i've got lots of uh slides i'd love to just share and do whatever i could to try and help sort of perpetuate that movement that you've got going it is wonderful that's exactly what we need yeah and then maybe we can talk about how we get that into medical schools and you know yeah i was going to actually ask you you know you know how could we you know um even collectively you know think about trying to you know approach sort of medicine here in the united kingdom and see if we could we'll talk about that off the off air from the podcast that could be a great collaboration um matthew i know you're short on time and again we could just go on for so long i was going to ask you about um sleep and stress but i think you know guys for those of you listening to this i cover that in quite a bit detail i think with you on my chat that's on my facebook page which is facebook dot com forward slash so guys you can actually check it out there but everything that matthew and i talk about including that lancet paper that he mentioned is going to be in the show notes which is going to be at doctorchastity.com forward slash why we sleep there's going to be links there to everything matthew talks about some of matthew's articles his book all kinds of things so guys do check that out after the podcast and you can do a bit of further reading on those topics that interest you um so yeah where to go to next i mean one thing that we do talk about on that course and i think we've not spoken about this yet is about sleep and its role in mental health and you know what's interesting you mentioned bi-directional relationships before and how a lack of sleep can increase our risk of problems but also sleep can be a treatment as well for various things and i wonder if you could talk about that in relation to mental health problems such as anxiety and depression and maybe from then just move briefly onto alzheimer's if possible yeah so we've done a lot of work in this area of sort of sleep and mental health i think the first point to note is that we have not been able to discover a single psychiatric condition in which sleep is normal wow and i think sleep has a profound story to tell in our understanding in our treatment maybe even ultimately at some point our prevention of grave mental illness and i don't say that flippantly firstly we've done some work where you can take healthy individuals and you can deprive them of sleep for a single night and then you place them inside an mri scanner and you look at how their brain has changed and what we find is that these deep emotional brain centers erupt when your sleep deprived you become a lot more emotionally reactive impulsive there's a deep brain center called the amygdala which is one of the centerpiece regions for the generation of strong emotions that part of the brain is up to sixty percent more reactive when you're sleep deprived relative to when you've had a good solid night of sleep and we've also found your mouth it's a sixty percent it's very difficult to usually see that type of a change in the brain without some kind of pathology or drug and i think i think deprivation on an intuitive level most people recognize that when they haven't slept well you know they're just a little bit more reactive to things that that email from a boss from their boss for example can be easily misinterpreted you know are they annoyed at me they you know you suddenly start to see things that aren't there and i i've just i mentioned this before i've just completed my second book called the stress solution which is going to come out in january and i cover a little bit of this that you're talking about in that to really try and show people that you know lack of sleep is a stress on our body and 60 that's incredible changing the brain yeah and i think it really comes you know you you're absolutely right many of us have a sense that you know i just snapped dot dot dot you know those are the words that usually follow a you know bad night of sleep or when you've not got enough sleep and we know it all the way down sort of the the age chain you know you think about a parent holding a child the child is crying and they look at you and they say well they just didn't sleep well last night as if there's some universal knowledge that bad sleep the night before equals bad mood and emotional reactivity the next day and it doesn't stop in infancy or childhood or adolescence it's true when we are adults as well and we've seen this data what i think is concerning is that that neurological signature that we discovered in that uh study is not dissimilar to numerous psychiatric conditions and in fact we're now finding significant links between sleep disruption and depression anxiety including ptsd schizophrenia and most recently and tragically suicide as well in fact a short sleep duration is usually predictive of either suicidal ideation suicidal thoughts suicide attempts and tragically suicide completion so i think that the skill the scope through which sleep is impacting mental health disease i think is considerable we used to think in psychiatry that the psychiatric disease was perhaps causing the sleep disruption i think now we've been forced to change our minds it's not as though it's completely in the opposite direction it's not that every psychiatric condition is a sleep disorder that's not true either but is it a two-way street i think that that's probably more tenable in fact is it is the dominant flow of traffic perhaps more in one direction than the other i think that's also reasonable to see him on the basis of the data right now as well so i think it's you know there's clearly an intimate relationship between our mental health and our sleep health matthew these you know the implications of what you just said i think are so profound we've got to accept in the 21st century not only do we not prioritize sleep enough we are a chronically sleep deprived society we're now going through a mental health epidemic you know mind the charity here in the uk say that about one in four people in the uk now in any given year are going to be diagnosed with a mental health problem right now that's incredible then when you hear about that research we think chronically supervised society mental health problems on their eyes yes there are other factors okay i don't know we're not trying to say it's all to do with sleep but what we are trying to say is that sleep is a critical part of the equation and one that we can no longer afford to ignore um so i find that research fascinating if you enjoyed that conversation i think you are really going to enjoy one that i had with esther perel all about relationships it's right there so give it a click and let me know what you think this notion sometimes that people have that you have to know yourself first you have to love yourself first and then you can go and be in a relationship never made sense to me because

Channel: Dr Rangan Chatterjee

Views: 67,559

Keywords: the4pillarplan, thestresssolution, feelbetterin5, wellness, drchatterjee, feelbetterlivemore, ranganchatterjee, 4pillars, drchatterjee podcast, Matthew walker, Matthew walker impact theory, matthew walker sleep, matthew walker joe rogan, How to sleep better, why sleep is more important Than diet, how to live longer, how to optimize sleep, matthew walker ted talk, matthew walker why we sleep, age in reverse, health theory, health tips, improve health, sleep hacks, sleep tips, self help

Id: eC_yKw7VC08

Length: 31min 12sec (1872 seconds)

Published: Mon May 03 2021