Stop Waking Up at 3AM - Huberman's Tricks for Longer Sleep

the other thing is that many of the people waking up after four or five hours were supposed to go to bed earlier remember melatonin puts you to sleep but doesn't keep you asleep so many of these people might be going to bed at 11 o'clock waking up at three or four a.m here i am again when actually they need to go to bed at nine it seems common at least among people that i know that they can fall asleep like right away almost instantly but then four to five hours later they're wide awake you sort of mentioned depression what else is going on there what goes through your mind in terms of uh how to handle that yeah so a couple things one is they might not be getting enough physical activity during the day or they're getting too much they're over trained um you know that there's a i don't want to get the exercise gurus on my back because they're they're some of the most the nutrition and exercise folks online or you know they come after you with with pitchforks or whatever um with forks um but you know you can if you train too much and too often uh you'll find that you can't get enough sleep and you're always tired if you train too intensely you'll often find that you um you'll you'll have this uh waking up um agitated now that's that's i wouldn't get too bogged down in that but it's something to keep an eye out for people that are doing tons and tons of miles on the road and then they're always exhausted well your body's just not recovering and likewise with work if you just work work work you're just burning yourself down but i think people who are waking up after um four or five but sorry i should close that out and say that but an appropriate amount of physical exercise each day is going to help you get the appropriate amount of sleep and the rule of thumb from the literature is about 150 to 180 minutes per week of zone 2 cardio so this is um cardiovascular exercise of any kind where you could have a conversation but you're a little bit strained you'd prefer to be quiet to keep it going um zone two cardio 150 to 180 minutes a week approximately um broken up into various sessions and then it's very clear that the body and brain and the skeletal system in the muscular system benefit from any from a minimum of six sets per body part per week just to maintain muscle i'm not talking about people building muscle i'm talking about people like my mom who's in her you know late 70s should be doing six sets a week of quadricep work um and the intensity of that and so forth is a full discussion that we don't have time for but you know people would need to maintain their strength um so six sets would be the minimum and of course if people are doing you know sets to failure and drop sets and assisted reps and all that that's a different business right because then you know i'm talking about the typical person that that will help sleep the 150 to 180 minutes of zone two cardio and getting resistance exercise you know three or four times a week you're going to be a much more fuel efficient better sleeping more focused system without question there's tons of science to support why that's the case in fact there's this really cool study i'll just mention that was done at stanford recently by my colleague tony weiss corey where they take the blood from exercised individuals and they infuse it into non-exercise individuals and all sorts of aspects of brain function improve there's actually stuff secreted from the muscles that then go off to the other organs this makes total sense when you hear about it because you think well how could that be but the rationale is that the other organs of the body don't know what the other organs in the body are doing so they need to receive signals so when the muscles are working the brain says oh i need to keep the neurons that are responsible for motor function and memory assad improvements in memory and alzheimer's patients in this study really amazing so there's that there's the exercise and effort component i don't think we were designed to just think and um and scroll and text i think we were designed to move and that's vitally important provided we don't do do it to excess the other thing is that many of the people waking up after four or five hours were supposed to go to bed earlier remember melatonin puts you to sleep but doesn't keep you asleep so many of these people might be going to bed at eleven o'clock waking up at three or four a.m ah here i am again when actually they need to go to bed at nine now there's this weird asymmetry in the way that our system is built in that we can push through fatigue but it's very hard to make ourselves fall asleep so some people need to discover that they actually were meant to go to bed earlier i i know people think about night owls and morning larks and this kind of thing that's a big uh idea in industry and to some extent it's true there are genetic polymorphisms that relate to these things but for the most part most people were you know evolved in under conditions where they went to sleep shortly after the sun went down so i'm with age i'm going to bed earlier and earlier i realize there's some lifestyle factors too but i do think that there is something powerful about going to bed a little earlier there i keep asking matt walker if there's any science to support this and he tells me no but i find and many people find that every hour of sleep before midnight recharges them more deeply than the hours after midnight and i don't know what this is um but i find if i go to bed at nine o'clock and i'll sometimes wake up at midnight i'm like ah it's only midnight what am i gonna do but then i fall back asleep i'll wake up at three or four a.m and i'm ready to go and and that's that's great i mean you can get so much done in the hours between you know four and seven a.m fewer distractions your focus can be very high the problem is most people are going to bed late they're waking up at four or five hours later then they're scrolling on their phone because it's a very kind of passive sensory input they're trying to get themselves back to sleep it doesn't work and then throughout the day they're working at about 75 capacity so i would encourage those people to start going to bed earlier um i i didn't finish up with melatonin earlier i'm not a fan not a fan of melatonin supplementation dosages are much too high it's a hormone that interacts with the other hormone systems of the brain and body mostly the dosages are much too high what you take in terms of one milligram melatonin very small dosage is something like 100 times what you naturally secrete i get really concerned about this especially in kids because melatonin is actually the hormone that suppresses the onset of puberty um i don't have any direct data in myself but i'm not interested in taking a hormone uh exogenous hormone that suppresses the uh sextorian hormones which are testosterone and estrogen powerful hormones in men and women um for all sorts of things and i know that a lot of people just think oh testosterone men estrogen women that's not the way it works they're present in both and actually having sufficient levels of estrogen for for men provides not too high is important for brain longevity and health it's actually really important for libido a lot of people that um get on hormone replacement men that get on hormone replacement will take things like an astrozole and they'll start crushing their estrogen and they run into serious sexual side effects so you want these things working naturally um hormone therapy or not and melatonin just it causes all sorts of problems so i i know that the melatonin supplement uh manufacturers probably don't like that i say this but melatonin is sh i don't think should be just taken the way that people take it like m ms maybe occasionally for jet lag but don't rely on this powerful hormone it disrupts a number of other systems

Channel: The Knowledge Project Podcast

Views: 1,161,565

Keywords: Shane Parrish, Farnam Street, The Knowledge Project, Farnam Street Podcast, Mental Models, andrew huberman sleep, andrew huberman shane parrish, andrew huberman interview, andrew huberman how to sleep better, advice from andrew huberman

Id: PpIg5V0QBWQ

Length: 7min 40sec (460 seconds)

Published: Thu Jul 14 2022