Matthew Walker: The World’s No.1 Sleep Expert (The 6 Sleep Hacks You NEED!)

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0:00:32 When you’re struggling with sleep in the middle of the night
0:00:35 and you’re wide awake, in the last hour before bed,
0:00:38 try this experiment.
0:00:40 I’m sold.
0:00:43 Matthew Walker, neuroscientist and best-selling author
0:00:47 and one of the world’s leading researchers in sleep science.
0:00:49 It’s going to blow your mind.
0:00:51 There is a global sleep loss epidemic shaped
0:00:53 by this thing called the modern world.
0:00:56 What society wants is that you’re either producing
0:00:57 or you’re consuming.
0:01:00 In fact, the CEO of Netflix, his statement
0:01:02 was that we ought to commit war against sleep.
0:01:05 We have this mentality in business.
0:01:07 Less sleep equals more productivity.
0:01:08 That is just not true.
0:01:15 Insufficient sleep costs most nations about $411 billion.
0:01:17 Your rates of obesity, cardiovascular disease,
0:01:20 mental health conditions, all of these things escalate.
0:01:23 If that wasn’t bad enough, if you’re not
0:01:26 getting sufficient sleep, then 60%
0:01:28 of all of the weight that you lose
0:01:33 will come from lean muscle mass and not fat.
0:01:34 Not the muscle.
0:01:38 How would you redesign society to help us to sleep better?
0:01:40 So first, I would–
0:01:44 It feels like caffeine is a miracle drug with no apparent cost.
0:01:46 Was I wrong or was I right?
0:01:46 Wrong.
0:01:50 Caffeine will hurt your sleep in three ways.
0:01:51 Most people are not aware of.
0:01:55 So if you have a cup of coffee at midday, what happens is that–
0:02:09 Matt, I have spent the longest time trying
0:02:11 to sit down with you on this podcast.
0:02:15 So I’m very, very happy to spend some time with you today.
0:02:19 And that is because your work is now world renowned.
0:02:22 And it’s very, very important work.
0:02:25 But as is the case with a few of the recent episodes
0:02:28 on this podcast, I wanted to start by asking you,
0:02:32 in your view, what is it you do?
0:02:36 And why is it so important in your mind that you do it?
0:02:40 Well, firstly, thank you so much for having me here
0:02:41 and having this conversation.
0:02:46 It’s an incredible privilege to sit with you.
0:02:48 Why do I do what I do?
0:02:51 And why do I think it’s important?
0:02:55 Sleep, I would argue, is the single most effective thing
0:02:59 that you can do to reset your brain and body health.
0:03:01 And I don’t say that flippantly.
0:03:04 It’s not as though I’m dismissing exercise or diet.
0:03:07 Those two things are absolutely critical.
0:03:09 But if I were to take you, the individual,
0:03:12 and deprive you of exercise for a day,
0:03:17 deprive you of food for a day, deprive you of water for a day,
0:03:21 or deprive you of sleep for a day, 24 hours.
0:03:23 And I would to map your brain and body in permits.
0:03:25 It’s not even a competition.
0:03:29 That one night of lost sleep relative to those other things,
0:03:33 it dwarfs– the only thing I lose out against is oxygen.
0:03:34 If I deprive you of oxygen, you’re
0:03:37 going to pop out of existence a little bit
0:03:40 quicker than you will with a lack of sleep.
0:03:45 So sleep, to me, I think, is the elixir of life.
0:03:47 It is your life support system.
0:03:50 And as best we can tell, I would argue
0:03:54 it’s Mother Nature’s best effort yet at immortality.
0:03:57 And so in that regard, that’s why when
0:04:00 I look across all of the studies and all of the data,
0:04:02 it’s so compelling to me.
0:04:04 And part of the reason I think it’s–
0:04:07 I’ve desperately tried, and I haven’t done a good job,
0:04:11 but I’ve tried to offer some public mission of reuniting
0:04:15 humanity with the sleep that it’s so bereft of,
0:04:16 is because it does appear that there
0:04:18 is a global sleep loss epidemic.
0:04:20 If you look at the numbers, people
0:04:24 are struggling so desperately with their sleep.
0:04:26 So we have all of this knowledge, this incredible knowledge
0:04:28 of sleep and how important it is.
0:04:30 And it’s a perfect storm colliding
0:04:34 with this great sleep depression in modern society.
0:04:37 And for that reason, I just felt as though,
0:04:42 what can I do to try to help offer this voice and this science?
0:04:45 And I am but a scientist, and I stand
0:04:47 on the shoulders of all of my colleagues
0:04:49 and all of these giants in the field.
0:04:50 I’m just a researcher.
0:04:53 So that’s a little bit about, I guess, who I am,
0:04:56 but more about why I do it and why I think it’s important.
0:04:58 If I were to try and define your sort of–
0:05:00 and I hate doing this because it requires
0:05:02 the application of some kind of narrow label.
0:05:06 If I was to try and define what your title is
0:05:07 in your own words, what would that be?
0:05:11 So I’m just a professor of neuroscience of brain science
0:05:14 at the University of California Berkeley.
0:05:18 I am not a medical doctor, just FYI for all of the things
0:05:20 that we will talk about in this conversation.
0:05:22 So I’m just a PhD.
0:05:23 Just a PhD?
0:05:24 Yeah.
0:05:27 You know, that’s incredibly humble of you.
0:05:30 But I would assert that you’re, without a shadow of a doubt,
0:05:37 the leading author, scientist, commentator voice
0:05:39 as it relates to the topic of sleep.
0:05:44 And my question from that is, where did that begin?
0:05:46 Like, where did that start in your life,
0:05:47 in the journey of your life?
0:05:52 When did sleep become the thing?
0:05:55 It occurred to me or happened to me, I should say.
0:05:59 When I was doing my PhD, I was studying people with dementia.
0:06:03 And we were trying to understand what type of different
0:06:05 dementia that they had very early on
0:06:07 in the course of their disease.
0:06:10 And we were looking at patterns of brainwave activity.
0:06:12 So I was placing electrodes all over the head
0:06:14 and I was measuring them.
0:06:16 And I was trying to differentially diagnose them
0:06:17 very early on.
0:06:19 And I was getting no good data.
0:06:20 What server is miserable?
0:06:23 Nothing was landing.
0:06:26 And one day I went home at the weekend
0:06:29 and sort of with all of my printed journals.
0:06:31 And I go to my doctor’s residence
0:06:34 and have this sort of igloo of journals around me
0:06:36 that I would sit and read at the weekend.
0:06:38 And I was, which probably tells you everything
0:06:40 about my social life at the weekend,
0:06:41 if that’s what I was doing.
0:06:43 But so I was reading these journals
0:06:46 and it occurred to me that some of these dementias
0:06:49 were eating away at the sleep centers in the brain
0:06:51 and others would leave them untouched.
0:06:54 And at that moment I realized I’m measuring my patients
0:06:56 at the wrong time.
0:06:58 I’m measuring them when they’re awake.
0:07:01 Should be measuring them when they’re asleep.
0:07:04 Started doing that, got amazing results.
0:07:06 And at that point I wanted to ask the question,
0:07:09 well, I wonder if their sleep problems
0:07:13 are not simply a symptom of the dementia.
0:07:17 I wonder if it’s a potential cause of the dementia.
0:07:19 And at that point I started to think,
0:07:22 well, so then what is this thing called sleep?
0:07:26 And what I learned is that some of the greatest minds
0:07:29 in the past 100 years had tried
0:07:31 to answer a very simple question.
0:07:33 Why do we sleep?
0:07:36 And 30 years ago, in fact,
0:07:41 the crass answer was that we sleep to cure sleepiness.
0:07:43 Which tells you nothing about it.
0:07:46 It’s like saying, I eat to cure hunger.
0:07:49 Well, no, that’s not the right answer.
0:07:54 Now 30 years later we’ve had to upend the question.
0:07:55 And we now have to ask,
0:07:58 is there any physiological system in your body?
0:08:01 Is there any operation of your mind
0:08:03 that isn’t wonderfully enhanced when you get sleep
0:08:07 or demonstrably impaired when you don’t get enough?
0:08:09 And the answer seems to be no there.
0:08:12 So my journey into the science of sleep
0:08:14 really was an accident.
0:08:16 But at that moment in time,
0:08:18 when I started reading about sleep,
0:08:22 I utterly fell in love with the topic.
0:08:26 And it is a lover fur that has lasted me over 20 years.
0:08:30 I think it is the most beguiling topic in all of science.
0:08:32 I’m biased, of course.
0:08:35 And I will never study anything different.
0:08:36 I know that now.
0:08:38 I’ll study it to the end of my career
0:08:39 and until the end of my life.
0:08:41 – Wow.
0:08:44 I’ve never heard anybody say to me on this podcast
0:08:47 that they would study the same topic
0:08:48 for the rest of their life.
0:08:49 And you’re a young man.
0:08:51 That’s a, you’ve got a long way to go.
0:08:52 Especially the amount you’ve been sleeping.
0:08:53 – That’s very kind of you to say.
0:08:57 I wish I’m moving into the foothills of middle age rapidly.
0:09:02 But no, I’m so fortunate in what I do to have found it
0:09:06 or for it to have found me.
0:09:10 If I won all of the money in the world tomorrow,
0:09:15 I would genuinely, genuinely not do anything different.
0:09:18 I am so fortunate.
0:09:21 Well, I probably start trying to fly like business class
0:09:22 or first class, that would be nice.
0:09:26 But other than that, I would do nothing different.
0:09:28 And I am very mindful of that
0:09:30 because that sounds very privileged.
0:09:35 And I know a lot of people enjoy what they do for a living
0:09:39 rather than enjoy what they do for a living.
0:09:42 And I know how lucky I am.
0:09:45 So I don’t mean to be dismissive of people in that regard.
0:09:47 I just know how much I love what I do.
0:09:49 – You asked a question now, which is,
0:09:52 you posed a question which many people have tried to answer.
0:09:54 You gave the answer from 30 years ago
0:09:56 about why do we sleep?
0:10:00 And it dawned on me, as you said that,
0:10:03 that I’ve never asked myself that question.
0:10:05 I’ve never even pondered the thought of why I sleep.
0:10:07 I mean, I know what happens when I sleep,
0:10:11 but do I know why my body can’t just find another way?
0:10:13 Why can’t my body stay awake for the 24 hours?
0:10:15 I know some animals, they sleep half their brain
0:10:18 and then the other half kind of hasn’t happened, whatever.
0:10:21 Why do we sleep?
0:10:22 – It’s a puzzling question
0:10:23 because when you think about it
0:10:26 from an evolutionary perspective,
0:10:28 it makes no sense whatsoever.
0:10:32 Sleep is utterly idiotic
0:10:34 because when you’re sleeping,
0:10:36 firstly, you’re not finding a mate.
0:10:38 You’re not reproducing.
0:10:40 You’re not foraging for food.
0:10:42 You’re not caring for your young.
0:10:45 And worst of all, you’re vulnerable to predation.
0:10:48 Now, on any one of those grounds,
0:10:51 but especially all of them as a collective,
0:10:53 sleep should have been strongly selected
0:10:56 against during the course of evolution.
0:10:58 But from best we can tell,
0:11:03 sleep evolved with life itself on this planet
0:11:06 and it has fought its way through heroically
0:11:09 every step along the evolutionary path.
0:11:13 And what that has told us is that sleep must be essential
0:11:17 at the most basic of biological levels.
0:11:19 And now we understand that Mother Nature
0:11:21 didn’t make a spectacular blunder
0:11:23 with this thing called sleep.
0:11:27 Sleep, for example, will restock the weaponry
0:11:29 in your immune arsenal
0:11:32 and it will make you a more immune sensitive individual.
0:11:36 So you’re more immune robust when you wake up.
0:11:39 We also know that it regulates your blood sugar levels.
0:11:41 It controls your appetite hormones.
0:11:44 It also regulates your sex hormones,
0:11:46 testosterone, estrogen.
0:11:48 Sleep upstairs within the brain
0:11:52 will fixate memories and help you learn and remember,
0:11:55 sleep will de-escalate anxiety.
0:11:59 It will reduce your emotional difficulties and traumas.
0:12:01 Sleep will actually cleanse away
0:12:05 the Alzheimer’s toxic proteins that build up in the brain.
0:12:07 The list is endless.
0:12:12 These are all of the reasons that we need to sleep.
0:12:15 – But why can’t I just do what those animals do
0:12:17 where they, half of their brain falls asleep,
0:12:18 half of the brain stays awake?
0:12:21 Is that at all linked to the fact that we live in tribes?
0:12:22 So we are essentially,
0:12:25 although there might be 10 people in the tribe,
0:12:28 we’re all 10% of the tribe.
0:12:29 So we can rest at different times
0:12:32 and kind of cover each other’s backs or…
0:12:33 – Gosh, yeah.
0:12:35 So actually there are two nested,
0:12:37 very insightful questions there.
0:12:40 The first is this notion of what you’re describing,
0:12:43 which is what we call unihemispheric sleep,
0:12:45 which is just a fancy way of saying,
0:12:47 you can sleep with one half of your brain
0:12:49 and the other half is wide awake.
0:12:52 Now there are only a few species that can do this.
0:12:56 For example, aquatic mammals, dolphins are a great example.
0:13:00 We can place actually electrodes on their heads.
0:13:03 And you can see that one half of their brain
0:13:04 will be fast asleep.
0:13:07 It will be in deep, deep non-rem sleep.
0:13:11 The other half of the brain will be frenetic, wide awake.
0:13:12 And in part for them,
0:13:15 the reason is because they need to maintain
0:13:16 aquatic mobility.
0:13:19 You know, they need to keep surfacing for air otherwise,
0:13:21 you know, that’s not going to be a good outcome.
0:13:26 We also know that birds or many avian species
0:13:30 will have unihemispheric sleep.
0:13:31 And you can actually see this,
0:13:33 there’s some great YouTube videos online
0:13:37 where they will film one half of the sort of the side
0:13:40 of the bird’s face and the eye is closed.
0:13:43 And what it means is that the other half of the brain,
0:13:45 ’cause the brain is actually the left half controls
0:13:47 the right side, the right side controls the left side.
0:13:50 So that left side is now fast asleep,
0:13:52 which is the right eye closed.
0:13:54 And then you kind of pan around
0:13:56 and all of a sudden the other eye is wide awake
0:13:58 and it’s clearly looking about.
0:14:01 Now, this is obviously not for aquatic surfacing to gain air.
0:14:03 This is for a different reason.
0:14:05 What happens is that in a flock,
0:14:10 a bunch of birds will all land on a branch.
0:14:12 Now, all of the folks in the middle,
0:14:14 they get to sleep with both halves of their brain.
0:14:17 They can sleep with both halves or just one half.
0:14:18 All of the folks in the middle,
0:14:20 they get to sleep with both halves.
0:14:24 The unfortunate girl or guy who sort of lands at the end,
0:14:27 the far end, they will actually sleep
0:14:29 with one half of their brain.
0:14:32 So one half of the flock, the entire flock,
0:14:37 has one eye, 180 degrees of sort of half panoramic view out.
0:14:41 The other bird on the other end
0:14:43 will have the other half of the brain asleep
0:14:45 with the other eye awake,
0:14:50 giving the other 180 degree view of protection vision.
0:14:55 And therefore the entire tribe has a 360 degree assessment.
0:14:58 Now, you would think in fairness
0:15:02 that once those guys or girls at the end have done their duty,
0:15:04 they get to move into the middle
0:15:06 and they get to sleep with both halves.
0:15:07 No, that’s not what happens.
0:15:10 What they will do after a while is that they will stand up,
0:15:14 they will turn around 180 degrees, sit back down
0:15:17 and switch the other sides of the brain.
0:15:21 So to just be clear,
0:15:25 the complexity of wiring and architecture
0:15:28 that has to happen for one half of the brain
0:15:31 to be deep in sleep and the other half to be wide awake
0:15:34 is astronomically hard.
0:15:37 I mean, it’s incredibly difficult to create that wiring.
0:15:41 What that tells me is that if sleep was dispensable,
0:15:43 if it was negotiable,
0:15:46 then Mother Nature would have just found a different way
0:15:48 for us to get all of these brain and body benefits
0:15:51 and not gone to all of the evolutionary trouble
0:15:55 of figuring out this fancy wiring for half brain sleep.
0:15:58 In other words, you just can’t get away from sleep.
0:16:00 You have to sleep.
0:16:04 But your second question I think is even more fascinating,
0:16:08 which is us as a tribe, because we are a tribe species.
0:16:13 Now, there is something else that we call your chronotype.
0:16:16 Are you a morning type, evening type or somewhere in between?
0:16:19 And by the way, you don’t get to decide.
0:16:21 It’s not your choice, you know,
0:16:24 this notion of these go getter type A’s
0:16:27 who say everyone has to be awake at five in the morning.
0:16:29 You know, you go to the gym,
0:16:31 you blast out a workout for an hour
0:16:34 and you’re at the desk by six a.m.
0:16:37 You have no choice.
0:16:38 If you’re an evening type, you’re an evening type.
0:16:39 It’s hard coded.
0:16:42 We know that right now there’s at least 22 different genes
0:16:45 that dictate what you are morning type, evening type,
0:16:46 or somewhere in between.
0:16:50 And it’s about a third, third split across the population.
0:16:52 Why is it a split?
0:16:55 Why are we nicely spread out across our chronotypes?
0:16:58 For exactly the reason you described,
0:16:59 because when we’re in a tribe,
0:17:01 if we all sleep at the same time,
0:17:04 we’re all vulnerable for eight hours.
0:17:07 But if you were to insert some genetic variability
0:17:10 into when people have a desire to sleep,
0:17:15 you’ve got the morning types who maybe go to bed at nine p.m.
0:17:17 and are waking up, let’s say at five a.m.
0:17:20 And then you’ve got all of the extreme evening types
0:17:22 who are going to bed at two a.m.
0:17:26 and waking up at maybe 11 or midday.
0:17:30 So that way, everyone gets their eight hours of sleep.
0:17:33 But the entire tribe, the nucleus of this group
0:17:37 of Homo sapiens themselves is only vulnerable
0:17:39 for maybe just two or three hours.
0:17:43 So it’s a clever solution that Mother Nature has come up with
0:17:46 to say everyone gets their eight hours.
0:17:48 But as a species, you’re only going to be vulnerable
0:17:50 for two to three hours, Max,
0:17:53 when everyone at least as a collective is sleeping.
0:17:54 Absolutely genius.
0:17:56 I used to think it was a load of nonsense,
0:17:58 though this chronotype thing.
0:17:59 It was actually on this podcast
0:18:00 where I learned about its existence.
0:18:02 And then I went on YouTube to learn more
0:18:05 and your video came up if you’re explaining it.
0:18:08 Because I thought, I always pondered why my partner
0:18:11 goes to bed super early, wakes up super early.
0:18:13 I go to bed late, wake up late.
0:18:16 I’m going to ask you this question actually,
0:18:18 ’cause I’ve wondered this.
0:18:20 In that situation where I’m sleeping in bed
0:18:22 by the partner that has a different chronotype,
0:18:26 it can have an impact on my sleep, right?
0:18:28 Because of the way that our sleep cycles work
0:18:29 and the REM sleep in the stage one,
0:18:30 deep sleep, et cetera, et cetera.
0:18:34 If she’s waking up when I’m pulling into REM sleep,
0:18:36 if she’s waking up at 5 a.m., but at 5 a.m.,
0:18:37 because I’ve gone to bed late
0:18:40 and my REM sleep has just begun,
0:18:43 that has quite a significant impact on me, right?
0:18:44 – If she is waking you up.
0:18:46 – Yeah, if she wakes me up.
0:18:47 – Then it’s non-trivial.
0:18:49 And likewise, if you’re waking her up
0:18:53 as you’re getting into bed on the front end of sleep.
0:18:54 So it’s very difficult.
0:18:59 One of the things that couples will cite if they break up
0:19:02 firstly is usually about a third of them
0:19:05 will cite sleep difficulties or sleep issues
0:19:08 as a cause of their breakup,
0:19:11 or at least as a contributing factor to that breakup.
0:19:12 – One third.
0:19:15 – Yeah, that it’s at least one of the factors.
0:19:18 When you go then in and when you double click to say,
0:19:21 “Okay, then what is this about this sleep
0:19:24 “kind of tension between the two of you?”
0:19:27 One of those things is a mismatch in chronotype.
0:19:30 And you can see this when, you know,
0:19:33 people I think this, you know, on dating profiles now,
0:19:35 someone was telling me, people will even say like,
0:19:37 “I’m a morning type or I’m an evening type.”
0:19:39 As if you’re stating up front,
0:19:42 this is part of my identity and just FYI before warned
0:19:45 because maybe it’s been an issue for them in the past.
0:19:50 This is why I often speak about the notion
0:19:54 of what’s called a sleep divorce to prevent a real one.
0:19:57 Now, it’s not for everyone.
0:20:01 A sleep divorce is where you sleep in separate locations.
0:20:06 And when we’ve surveyed people both from the sleep council
0:20:07 in the United Kingdom
0:20:10 and also the National Sleep Foundation here in America,
0:20:12 the data is about the same.
0:20:14 One in four people will say
0:20:17 that they sleep in different locations with their partner.
0:20:21 So almost a quarter of people in relationships
0:20:23 will sleep in different locations.
0:20:26 We think it’s potentially an underestimate
0:20:29 because if you survey people anonymously,
0:20:33 then a third of them will report waking up at least
0:20:36 in a different location the next morning.
0:20:40 And part of the reason that it’s a taboo
0:20:42 is because people think, well,
0:20:44 if we’re not sleeping together,
0:20:46 then we’re not sleeping together.
0:20:48 The exact opposite is true.
0:20:51 That when a couple is sleeping well,
0:20:54 we know that the sex hormones are improved,
0:20:56 testosterone in men, estrogen,
0:21:00 and lysinizing hormone in women.
0:21:05 We also know that your desire to be intimate
0:21:07 with your partner has increased.
0:21:10 What we found is that for an hour of extra sleep,
0:21:12 if a woman gets an hour of extra sleep,
0:21:16 her libido desire to be intimate with her partner
0:21:19 increases by 14%.
0:21:21 Now, to give you some context,
0:21:25 the FDA drugs for improving or increasing libido in women,
0:21:28 drugs such as Vylici here, clinical drugs,
0:21:31 they will increase it by about 24%.
0:21:33 And that’s a pharmacological agent.
0:21:36 But here, just the added non-pharmacological benefit
0:21:39 of one hour of extra sleep will get you more than 50%
0:21:41 of the way there.
0:21:44 So I want to just remove that notion
0:21:49 of the stigma of that if you’re not sleeping together,
0:21:49 you’re not sleeping.
0:21:52 It’s usually quite the opposite.
0:21:58 I would say that part of the challenge though
0:22:03 is that if we look at all objective measures,
0:22:08 if I measure your sleep and the sleep of your wife,
0:22:09 if when you’re sleeping separately
0:22:11 versus when you’re sleeping together,
0:22:13 it’s very likely that objectively
0:22:15 you will both be sleeping worse
0:22:16 when you’re sleeping together.
0:22:18 That’s what the science tells us.
0:22:21 However, what’s interesting is that
0:22:22 when you survey people and say,
0:22:25 how satisfied are you with your sleep?
0:22:27 Which is a subjective measure.
0:22:31 People will say, I’m actually more satisfied with my sleep
0:22:35 when I’m with my partner than when I’m sleeping alone.
0:22:36 So there’s a mismatch here.
0:22:38 Objectively your sleep is better,
0:22:41 but subjectively you still prefer that.
0:22:43 And of course it’s natural.
0:22:46 There is safety, there’s security and co-sleeping.
0:22:51 There is this sort of connection that we get.
0:22:53 You can approach it if you want,
0:22:56 just be honest with yourself
0:22:58 and be honest with your partner.
0:23:01 And you can start by saying, look, this isn’t forever.
0:23:06 I just want to say, let’s do an experiment for a week.
0:23:10 10 days, let’s just try it and see how it goes.
0:23:12 It doesn’t need to be permanent
0:23:16 because what you actually miss are the bookends of sleep.
0:23:19 For the most part, the two of you are not conscious
0:23:22 for most of the experience of sleeping together.
0:23:23 It’s really getting into bed
0:23:26 and sort of having a kiss or a cuddle
0:23:27 and sort of waking up together in the morning
0:23:31 and sort of now obviously when you’re mismatch chronotype,
0:23:33 that’s also can be a challenge too.
0:23:36 So you can still have a sleep divorce,
0:23:39 but you can set up a system where you will go in
0:23:40 and you’ll say you’re good nights
0:23:42 and you’ll kind of get into bed, have a kiss and cuddle
0:23:45 and then you retreat to a separate location
0:23:47 and you can repeat that same process.
0:23:52 So I don’t want to sort of belabor the point
0:23:56 of a sleep divorce, but people can certainly explore.
0:23:58 There is something called a halfway house
0:24:01 which is called the Scandinavian method
0:24:04 which sounds far more salacious than it actually is.
0:24:06 It’s simply that you buy two beds
0:24:09 and you put them side by side in the same room
0:24:13 and therefore the amount of disruption, physical disruption
0:24:17 that happens by way of sheets and movement is decreased.
0:24:19 But that doesn’t solve it all.
0:24:22 Sometimes there is snoring, sometimes there is sleep talking.
0:24:27 Those things are not obviated by the Scandinavian method.
0:24:28 – When you think about where society is,
0:24:31 I was going to ask you, you said you wanted to do the work
0:24:34 you’re doing now for the rest of your life.
0:24:35 So do you think the work you’re doing now
0:24:38 is going to become increasingly more important
0:24:43 and relevant, i.e. is the problem going to get worse?
0:24:45 Or is it going to become less significant
0:24:47 and less relevant based on the trajectory
0:24:48 of society as you see it?
0:24:53 – You know, I’m mixed.
0:24:58 I think when I wrote the book, I started writing a book
0:25:02 that was called Why We Sleep, back in probably about 2014 or 15.
0:25:05 And at that point, sleep was the neglected stepsister
0:25:08 in the health conversation of that day.
0:25:10 You know, we were speaking a lot about diet and exercise,
0:25:15 which was wonderful, but there was no voice of sleep.
0:25:16 And I was so sad about that
0:25:19 because I could see so much disease and suffering
0:25:23 that was coming so clearly by way of a lack of sleep.
0:25:27 But it wasn’t there on the public buffet menu
0:25:29 for consumption of knowledge.
0:25:32 And so that was part of the motivation
0:25:34 for trying to write the book.
0:25:38 So I would say now, and this is not because of me
0:25:40 or the book or anything like that,
0:25:43 but is sleep more of a conversation in this day and age
0:25:46 than it was six or seven years ago?
0:25:48 I think I would say yes,
0:25:52 there is a greater awareness of sleep.
0:25:58 But with that awareness,
0:26:03 I think one can still question the pragmatics,
0:26:07 meaning just because we’re talking about it more
0:26:10 does not mean that people are still failing
0:26:13 to either get the sleep that they need
0:26:17 or that they are unable to get the sleep that they need.
0:26:18 And those two things are different.
0:26:20 One is that you are healthy
0:26:22 and you can generate the sleep that you need,
0:26:24 but you don’t give yourself the opportunity time
0:26:26 or life, I should say sometimes,
0:26:27 ’cause it’s sometimes not your choice.
0:26:30 Life does not give you the chance to get sleep.
0:26:32 And if only you had the chance, you could sleep.
0:26:33 That’s one version.
0:26:34 The second version is,
0:26:38 no, I’m giving myself the right opportunity to sleep,
0:26:41 but because I’m anxious or because of other issues,
0:26:43 I am not able to generate sleep.
0:26:46 I suffer from insomnia and sleep problems.
0:26:49 So those two things I don’t see
0:26:53 having changed since, you know,
0:26:54 I think this public movement,
0:26:57 this increasing movement of sleep conversation
0:26:58 came on the table.
0:27:03 So in that regard, I’m more pessimistic than I am optimistic.
0:27:05 And I think it will only get worse
0:27:08 if you look at rates of insomnia, for example,
0:27:09 they’re only increasing,
0:27:12 they’re only escalating rates of anxiety disorders,
0:27:13 the very same thing.
0:27:17 And those two things are intimately intertwined.
0:27:22 So I think I wish my mission was extinguished
0:27:24 within the next couple of years
0:27:27 because society started sleeping wonderfully well.
0:27:29 I don’t think that’s going to be the case.
0:27:32 So I think I’ve got my work cut out for me
0:27:34 to try and help people with better sleep.
0:27:39 – So we’re getting worse at sleeping?
0:27:43 – I think modernity is making it
0:27:47 so much more difficult for us to sleep.
0:27:48 – Modernity, what’s that?
0:27:50 – I think when you think about,
0:27:54 we often think about sleep as a biological process
0:27:55 and it very much is.
0:28:00 And, but also it’s so environmental
0:28:03 as well as biological.
0:28:06 Meaning when you were to say, you know,
0:28:07 how did you sleep last night?
0:28:11 Think about all of the external factors that changed it.
0:28:13 Well, I had to be up at this time,
0:28:15 I had to catch a flight this time,
0:28:16 my partner went to bed at this time
0:28:18 and she woke up at this time.
0:28:20 There was this noise that sort of happened.
0:28:22 I’m now sleeping in a hotel room.
0:28:26 You know, there are countless externalities.
0:28:28 And those externalities are shaped
0:28:31 by this thing called the modern world.
0:28:34 And in the modern world, if I could really be cynical
0:28:36 and I’m not someone, I’m very optimistic
0:28:37 and I’m very non-cynical,
0:28:40 but you could argue from a capitalistic standpoint
0:28:43 that society does not want you sleeping.
0:28:45 Because what society wants
0:28:47 from a capitalistic point of view
0:28:51 is that you’re either producing or you’re consuming.
0:28:52 And when you’re sleeping,
0:28:55 you’re neither producing and you’re neither consuming.
0:28:58 And so there are lots of ways
0:29:02 that I think society and the modern world
0:29:07 has conspired willfully or not conspiratorially or not
0:29:13 to decrease and try to diminish sleep.
0:29:18 In fact, I think the CEO of Netflix several years ago,
0:29:20 and I’m sure that YouTube comments will correct me
0:29:23 if I’m wrong here, but I believe his very statement was
0:29:28 that we are deciding to commit war against sleep.
0:29:30 That was their goal.
0:29:33 And it just stunned me
0:29:35 that we’re going to go to war with sleep.
0:29:38 We’re going to remove you from your sleep.
0:29:41 So there are lots of ways in which I think society
0:29:44 does not help us light is another good example.
0:29:47 We are a dark deprived society in this modern era
0:29:49 because we’re exposed to light.
0:29:53 We are not giving ourselves the right temperature cues.
0:29:57 We go into an office where it’s 20 degrees,
0:30:00 70 degrees Celsius, whatever it is, stock stable.
0:30:03 Then we come home and we regulate our temperature at home
0:30:05 to be the same thing.
0:30:09 We take on board probably too much caffeine in this day
0:30:11 and age, although I am actually an advocate
0:30:14 of drinking coffee and I can explain why too.
0:30:19 But anxiety, as I said, is a huge issue.
0:30:21 All of these things are preventing
0:30:24 and classic roadblocks to sleep.
0:30:28 – How many of us are getting the sort of recommended
0:30:32 daily allowance of sleep as a percentage, do you know?
0:30:37 – It seems to be about one third of most modern civilizations
0:30:41 are failing to get the recommended seven to nine hours
0:30:42 of sleep a night.
0:30:46 – One third, roughly 35%, 33% roughly.
0:30:47 – Yeah.
0:30:49 – And does that have geographic variants?
0:30:51 In some countries it’s worse, in some countries it’s better.
0:30:53 I’m thinking about the UK versus the US
0:30:55 or Japan or whatever.
0:30:56 – Yeah, it is.
0:31:00 And in fact, let me give numbers to the three countries
0:31:01 that you’ve described.
0:31:05 Here in the United States, the average amount of sleep
0:31:10 that people are getting is six hours and 29 minutes.
0:31:17 In the UK it’s not much better, six hours and 49 minutes.
0:31:22 Japan was the worst, six hours and 22 minutes.
0:31:27 Now, to be clear, that’s the average.
0:31:30 What that means is that there is still a large proportion
0:31:32 of that bell-shaped distribution
0:31:37 of people getting even less than that amount.
0:31:40 Now, there are some countries that you look at
0:31:43 that are actually sleeping much better than that.
0:31:47 I think, let me, Mexico, for example,
0:31:51 is doing very well if you look at Mexico City.
0:31:55 People are actually sleeping not too far off from eight hours.
0:31:59 So there is variability and we can try to understand why.
0:32:00 Which, by the way, just brings me back
0:32:02 while I think about it to your comment of,
0:32:04 will my work be done?
0:32:06 Not from the, because I’m a scientist and I do,
0:32:09 I have a run a big sleep center at UC Berkeley,
0:32:13 but the work I do is hopefully a public advocate for sleep.
0:32:17 Why I don’t think it’s going to change anytime soon
0:32:22 is because governments aren’t really doing much about it.
0:32:24 And I’ve tried as best I can.
0:32:25 And if there is any government out there
0:32:27 that listens to this that wants to work with me,
0:32:28 I’d be delighted.
0:32:31 I don’t remember and maybe you can,
0:32:36 but any major first world nation government
0:32:39 that has had a public health campaign regarding sleep.
0:32:43 And it stuns me because those same governments
0:32:47 have had public health campaigns regarding eating,
0:32:50 regarding smoking, regarding drunk driving,
0:32:55 regarding risky behaviors, safe sex, loneliness,
0:32:58 mental health, suicide.
0:33:04 Where is sleep in that equation?
0:33:06 And it’s such a fundamental ingredient.
0:33:08 And in fact, almost all of those things
0:33:11 that I’ve just described,
0:33:14 I have an intimate relationship with sleep.
0:33:16 I mean, suicide, especially we,
0:33:17 we’re starting to do a lot of work with this,
0:33:19 although it’s been hard to get funding.
0:33:22 But what we found is that insufficient sleep
0:33:25 is a precursor to suicide.
0:33:28 That sleep disruption seems to predict
0:33:32 both suicide ideation, in other words, suicidal thinking,
0:33:37 suicide planning and tragically suicide completion as well.
0:33:40 So if we were to try to have governments
0:33:42 create a public health campaign
0:33:46 to pull this Archimedes lever on better sleep,
0:33:49 there are so many other health benefits.
0:33:53 Sleep is the tide that rises all the other health boats.
0:33:57 It’s almost like a, it’s like a mixing deck in a studio,
0:33:59 you know, in those sound studios where you’ve seen it.
0:34:00 And then there’s that one button
0:34:02 all the way to the end, the white button,
0:34:04 sort of that when you move it up,
0:34:06 sort of all of the other dials,
0:34:08 the sort of the red, yellow, orange, green dials,
0:34:10 they all move up at the same time as well.
0:34:12 There’s this sort of one mess,
0:34:14 there’s like one ring to rule them all.
0:34:17 Sleep is that Archimedes lever.
0:34:20 So if governments could only execute on that,
0:34:22 the health benefits would be manifold
0:34:24 in terms of their consequences.
0:34:25 – It begs the question, you know,
0:34:28 if I were to make you today,
0:34:32 president, prime minister, whatever of the world,
0:34:33 and you had to do, you know,
0:34:38 just a few things to really fix the lack of sleep epidemic,
0:34:41 there you go, I’ve diagnosed it.
0:34:43 What would those things be if you were in charge?
0:34:47 How would you redesign society to help us to sleep better?
0:34:50 – Gosh, it’s such a good question.
0:34:55 And I’ve thought a lot about this almost in reverse,
0:34:59 which is to say, why is it that we are struggling
0:35:02 to get sleep, and there is no single answer.
0:35:04 There are so many different reasons,
0:35:06 and that’s why it’s actually a very challenging problem
0:35:07 to solve.
0:35:11 I would go through a descending level of steps.
0:35:14 So first I would start at the government level,
0:35:16 and we would get those public health campaigns in order.
0:35:21 Next, I would go to the professional level,
0:35:24 because there we have this mentality in business
0:35:29 that, you know, sleep is for the soft among us,
0:35:34 that less sleep equals more productivity.
0:35:36 And that is just not true,
0:35:38 and I can provide you with all of the evidence.
0:35:42 So we need to get rid of this sort of sleep machismo attitude
0:35:45 in the workplace, where we were our badge of honor
0:35:47 of sleep deprivation on our arms.
0:35:50 We need to get companies to actually start embracing sleep,
0:35:52 and I can guarantee you,
0:35:54 and I can give you all of the evidence
0:35:57 as to why if as a company, as a CEO,
0:36:02 if you start prioritizing the sleep of your employees,
0:36:04 you will be far better off as a company.
0:36:06 You will be more product based,
0:36:09 and you will be more profitable and revenue generating.
0:36:12 Sleep is the very best form
0:36:15 of physiologically injected venture capital
0:36:17 that you could ever wish for.
0:36:18 And in fact, the RAND Corporation,
0:36:20 which is an independent survey corporation,
0:36:23 what they found is that at a national level,
0:36:26 insufficient sleep costs most nations
0:36:29 about 2% of their GDP.
0:36:33 So here in America, that number was $411 billion
0:36:36 of lost profit caused by insufficient sleep.
0:36:39 In the United Kingdom, it was over $50 billion.
0:36:41 In Japan, it was over $120 billion.
0:36:45 If I could solve the sleep loss crisis in the workplace,
0:36:47 I could perhaps double the healthcare benefit
0:36:48 for many of those countries,
0:36:52 or I could halve the education deficit in those countries.
0:36:56 So the next level I would target is at business.
0:36:59 Then next step down would be medicine.
0:37:01 Medicine is a classic demonstration here.
0:37:03 We have junior doctors, or here in America,
0:37:06 they have doctor residency programs,
0:37:10 where people are working 20, 30 hour shifts.
0:37:14 And so already doctors are inculcated into the mindset
0:37:19 of the uselessness of sufficient sleep.
0:37:21 Across numerous countries,
0:37:24 and I think it was maybe over eight different countries,
0:37:26 we looked at the medical curricula,
0:37:28 and we asked how many hours of education
0:37:31 do doctors get about sleep?
0:37:33 And what’s strange is that often doctors,
0:37:34 when you go in and you’ll have an appointment,
0:37:36 they’ll say, okay, how are you eating?
0:37:39 And what’s going on with the bathroom?
0:37:40 How’s the toilet?
0:37:41 And then how are you sleeping?
0:37:45 As if sleep is one of these universal health barometers.
0:37:48 But what we found is that most doctors will only be given
0:37:52 about an hour to an hour and a half of sleep education
0:37:56 during their entire medical school education,
0:37:58 which blows my mind
0:38:01 because it is one third of their patient’s lives,
0:38:05 but they’re only given about 90 minutes of education.
0:38:08 So no wonder your doctors aren’t treating
0:38:11 your sleep problems, thinking about your sleep problems,
0:38:13 understanding your sleep, it’s not their fault.
0:38:15 And plus, they’re sleep deprived anyway
0:38:17 when they’re being trained.
0:38:21 Ironically, by the way, doctors, junior doctors
0:38:23 who’ve worked a 30 hour shift,
0:38:25 when they finish that 30 hour shift
0:38:27 and get back in their car,
0:38:31 they are 168% more likely to get into a car accident
0:38:33 because of their lack of sleep
0:38:35 and end back up in the emergency room
0:38:38 from where they were just working, but now as a patient.
0:38:43 I mean, the paradox, the irony just stuns me.
0:38:46 So I next moved down to the level of medicine.
0:38:48 Then I would go to education
0:38:52 because we don’t get taught about sleep in schools.
0:38:54 I never got one of those special classes.
0:38:58 You know, I got sort of sexual education classes,
0:39:00 classes about drugs.
0:39:03 No one came in and told me about the benefits of sleep.
0:39:05 Why aren’t we doing that?
0:39:08 Then next I would move down into the family
0:39:11 because there is prejudice in families with sleep.
0:39:16 It’s this notion of parents of teenagers.
0:39:18 And these teenagers, by the way, it’s not their fault.
0:39:21 They have a shift in their chronotype,
0:39:23 in their circadian rhythm
0:39:24 that when they go through puberty,
0:39:26 when they’re going through adolescence,
0:39:28 they get fast forwarded in time.
0:39:30 So when they were eight or nine years old,
0:39:34 they would be going to bed sort of early in the evening.
0:39:37 But now as teenagers, they seem to be stubborn
0:39:39 and they’re staying awake,
0:39:42 staying awake until midnight 1 a.m.
0:39:44 and they won’t get into bed.
0:39:46 It is not their fault
0:39:50 because they have a biologically wired shift
0:39:52 in their tendency of when they want to wake up
0:39:54 and when they want to sleep.
0:39:56 Why am I bringing this up about this sort of
0:39:58 mismanagement in the home?
0:40:00 Because parents at weekends,
0:40:02 they’ll go into the room of the teenagers,
0:40:05 they’ll pull open the curtains,
0:40:06 they will pull the covers off and they say,
0:40:09 “You’re wasting the day.”
0:40:10 And firstly, what they’re doing
0:40:13 is probably trying to sleep off a debt
0:40:16 that we’ve lumbered them with during the week
0:40:19 because of this incessant model of early school start times
0:40:20 which I’ll come back to.
0:40:26 But within the home, if you ask parents of teenagers,
0:40:29 what percent of parents think that their teenagers
0:40:30 are getting sufficient sleep?
0:40:32 And about 70% of them will say,
0:40:35 “Yes, my teenager is getting sufficient sleep.”
0:40:38 When you look at the data, only about 15% of teenagers
0:40:41 are actually getting the sleep that they need.
0:40:44 So what happens is a parent-child transmission
0:40:46 of sleep neglect.
0:40:48 They’re saying, “You’re lazy, you’re slothful.”
0:40:49 So then what happens?
0:40:52 Well, in 15, 20 years time,
0:40:56 now that teenager has got a teenage child.
0:40:57 What do they do?
0:40:59 They go back in the room,
0:41:00 they rip the curtains open,
0:41:01 they say, “You’re wasting the day,”
0:41:03 because that’s what they were told.
0:41:05 So we need to break that down too.
0:41:07 And then finally, we need to come to the individual
0:41:09 and we need to solve the individual’s sleep problem.
0:41:12 So it’s a very long answer.
0:41:14 And I’m desperately sorry to a very big question
0:41:17 as to what I would do if I was off for a day.
0:41:22 But I hope that gives you some sense of the depth
0:41:23 that I think we need to go to.
0:41:25 I’ve tried to think about the question a lot.
0:41:27 It’s not particularly well executed.
0:41:28 I don’t think I was very eloquent there,
0:41:29 but I hope that gives a sense.
0:41:31 – It sounded perfectly eloquent to me.
0:41:32 It sounded like a manifesto.
0:41:35 So hopefully if there are people listening from governments,
0:41:38 which I’m sure there are because I hear about that sometimes,
0:41:39 which is quite bizarre,
0:41:43 but I’m sure they’ll be getting in touch with you very quickly.
0:41:47 Going back to the top of that stack on the company level,
0:41:50 so as a CEO or a CFO or an employee or whatever,
0:41:52 there are some companies
0:41:54 that are incentivising their team members to sleep, right?
0:41:58 Is there any data showing the efficacy of that?
0:42:01 – There is data that we have
0:42:03 and it’s bi-directional,
0:42:07 both the efficacy of when you increase sleep
0:42:11 and also the detriment when you don’t allow sleep.
0:42:16 So a great example was NASA back in the 1980s.
0:42:24 They were looking at using NAPS in the astronaut program,
0:42:27 because when you’re up and you’re orbiting Earth,
0:42:32 you will actually be cycling Earth really quite quickly
0:42:35 and you will get to see, depending on the orbit,
0:42:40 maybe somewhere between 10 to 15 sunrises every 24 hours,
0:42:43 which sounds amazing and remarkable,
0:42:48 but trust me, in terms of your sleep, it is very dislocating.
0:42:52 So they were looking at how to use NAPS strategically
0:42:54 to improve performance,
0:42:56 because the weakest link on any space mission,
0:42:59 and we’ve done some work with NASA,
0:43:02 is the human being themselves,
0:43:04 and they can cause catastrophic failure.
0:43:06 Now, if you make an error at work
0:43:09 and you’re here terrestrially on the ground,
0:43:11 it’s probably non-trivial.
0:43:14 Make an error when you’re up in space,
0:43:15 it can be a big deal.
0:43:16 So they were looking at that.
0:43:19 And what we found was that these NAPS,
0:43:22 anywhere between 20 minutes to an hour,
0:43:27 could increase productivity on these different tasks
0:43:32 by about 34% and increase general alertness by over 50%.
0:43:34 And in fact, the data was so powerful
0:43:36 that it ended up being transmitted
0:43:39 to all of the terrestrial workers on the ground
0:43:40 that NASA would start to,
0:43:42 it was what was called NASA NAPS.
0:43:44 It was a NASA NAP culture.
0:43:48 Now, NASA isn’t desperately compassionate by any means,
0:43:49 it’s a great organization,
0:43:53 but they just like companies like Google or Facebook,
0:43:57 they understand the pounds and pennies sense,
0:44:01 you know, the dollars and the cents version of productivity.
0:44:03 So anything that returns productivity,
0:44:04 they will invest in.
0:44:05 And some of those companies,
0:44:10 you know, I did some work at Google during a sabbatical
0:44:12 and there on their campus,
0:44:13 they will have these NAP pots
0:44:17 and they will have these what are called shrooms,
0:44:20 where you can go and you can take a nap.
0:44:22 So think about 20 years ago,
0:44:25 you would never imagine a company
0:44:27 paying you to sleep on the job.
0:44:28 If you have caught sleeping on the job,
0:44:30 you’d probably be fired.
0:44:32 Now companies are incentivizing it,
0:44:35 not because they are thinking compassionately
0:44:37 or empathetically about the health
0:44:39 or the wellness of their individuals.
0:44:40 It is because they understand
0:44:43 that it transacts marked productivity.
0:44:45 So NASA was a good example when you give sleep,
0:44:46 you get something back,
0:44:49 but I can go back to the reverse of that.
0:44:52 Why we think that a lack of sleep
0:44:54 does not equal more productivity
0:44:56 is for at least five reasons.
0:44:57 First, when you survey
0:45:00 and we can do these studies in the laboratory too,
0:45:03 when you under sleep employees,
0:45:06 they will choose less challenging problems.
0:45:08 So if you give them an array of work problems,
0:45:11 they will just simply, you know, check email,
0:45:12 they’ll listen to phone messages.
0:45:14 They don’t dig into deep project work.
0:45:19 Second, of the problems that they do take on in their work,
0:45:23 they will produce fewer creative solutions.
0:45:26 And after all, creativity and ingenuity
0:45:27 are supposed to be the two engines
0:45:30 that drive businesses forward
0:45:33 in terms of their productivity and their revenue.
0:45:36 The third interesting finding that we’ve discovered
0:45:38 is that when under slept employees
0:45:40 start working in teams,
0:45:43 they will slack off, they won’t do their work,
0:45:45 they will let other people do their work.
0:45:47 It’s what we call social loafing.
0:45:50 So they ride the coattails of other people’s hard work,
0:45:53 which won’t breed a good atmosphere in your company.
0:45:54 You know, trust me.
0:45:57 The fourth thing that we found
0:46:00 is that under slept employees are more deviant,
0:46:03 that they’re more likely to fudge data in spreadsheets.
0:46:06 They’re more likely to falsely claim money
0:46:09 for reimbursement that was inappropriate.
0:46:12 The final thing is that a lack of sleep
0:46:14 will go all the way to the top of the business chain.
0:46:17 What we found is that the more or less sleep
0:46:19 that a business leader has had
0:46:22 from one night to the next to the next,
0:46:25 the more or less charismatic
0:46:28 that employees will rate that business leader
0:46:30 from one day to the next to the next.
0:46:32 Even though the employees themselves,
0:46:35 they know nothing about the sleep
0:46:37 that that CEO has been getting.
0:46:42 It’s evidential in how charismatic that CEO is.
0:46:46 So you can add all of these things up and no wonder,
0:46:51 if you don’t snooze you lose in the case of business
0:46:53 in that regard, that’s why I can produce,
0:46:55 I think a non-trivial case for business.
0:46:59 By the way, the other aspect that is hugely costly
0:47:01 to businesses and when I go and speak to businesses
0:47:04 about why they should value sleep,
0:47:08 if you offer it on the grounds of again,
0:47:10 sort of compassion or mental health,
0:47:12 you probably don’t want to listen.
0:47:15 When you convert it into the cost of the company
0:47:18 and how much it’s fleecing them in terms of their profits,
0:47:19 then they start to pay attention.
0:47:24 Underslept employees will take on average
0:47:29 about 11 more days, sick days throughout the year
0:47:31 relative to well-slept individuals.
0:47:34 So you’re essentially just paying people additionally
0:47:37 for 11 days of work that they will never give you
0:47:39 when you are undersleeping them.
0:47:43 Secondly, the utilization of healthcare resources
0:47:45 increases by about 80%.
0:47:48 So the cost to either you, the company here in the US
0:47:50 where your company is paying for your healthcare
0:47:52 or the cost to the government, for example,
0:47:56 in the United Kingdom is astronomical.
0:48:01 And also then, what we call comorbid diseases,
0:48:05 your rates of obesity, diabetes, cardiovascular disease,
0:48:08 mental health conditions, all of these things escalate
0:48:10 as underslept employees continue
0:48:13 to get even more underslept.
0:48:18 So there is no strong case that I’ve seen
0:48:21 that leads me to think businesses
0:48:25 should foster the mentality of insufficient sleep,
0:48:26 quite the opposite.
0:48:28 So that’s hopefully an answer to your question.
0:48:29 We can look at it bi-directionally.
0:48:31 When we give sleep back, do you get productivity?
0:48:33 Yes, when you take sleep away,
0:48:35 do things implode rapidly?
0:48:37 Yes, and is it costly to your company?
0:48:37 Very much so.
0:48:40 – On that point of naps, and you know,
0:48:43 Google sleep pods, naps and things like that,
0:48:45 there was a point in my life where I,
0:48:47 because I learned about REM sleep
0:48:48 and the importance of REM sleep and deep sleep,
0:48:52 and that happens a little bit further on into my,
0:48:53 you know, the 90 minute look at me
0:48:56 trying to tell a sleep expert side of this amount.
0:48:57 – Oh, I love it.
0:48:57 – But do you see what I mean?
0:48:59 – This is my monkey brain.
0:49:01 So I didn’t understand the subject matter very well.
0:49:02 Still really don’t, to be honest,
0:49:06 but in the first, it takes me a significant amount of time
0:49:09 to get to deep sleep into REM sleep.
0:49:12 How long on average would you say it takes for some, you know?
0:49:15 – Yeah, so you will probably go into light sleep
0:49:17 in the first 10 to 15 minutes.
0:49:19 Then you’ll go down into deep sleep.
0:49:22 You’ll stay there for about 30, 40 minutes.
0:49:24 Then you’ll start to rise back up
0:49:27 and you’ll pop up and you’ll have a short REM sleep period.
0:49:30 And then you complete the non-REM to REM cycle
0:49:33 after about 90 minutes and back down you go again,
0:49:35 down into non-REM and up into REM.
0:49:39 So on average for human beings, it’s 90 minutes.
0:49:43 – So I therefore assumed that napping really does nothing
0:49:44 because I thought, well, it takes me so long
0:49:46 to get to REM sleep and to deep sleep
0:49:50 that if I’ve got 15 minutes, 20 minutes to nap,
0:49:52 it’s just a waste of time.
0:49:53 – Right.
0:49:55 – Was I wrong or was I right?
0:49:58 You were understandably wrong.
0:50:00 – Okay, good.
0:50:03 I’m happy because I’ve always rejected naps
0:50:04 because I thought they don’t matter
0:50:05 because it takes me so long
0:50:08 to get to a restorative state anyway, so.
0:50:10 – So we’ve done lots of different studies with naps.
0:50:12 We and other colleagues too.
0:50:15 And what we found is that naps can transact
0:50:16 some fantastic benefits.
0:50:18 They can improve cardiovascular health,
0:50:20 lower blood pressure.
0:50:24 They can improve your learning and memory abilities.
0:50:29 They can reset the emotional north
0:50:31 of your magnetic compass in a good way
0:50:34 where you can de-escalate negative emotions
0:50:37 and increase positive emotions.
0:50:40 So naps certainly are a good thing,
0:50:43 but with a big caveat that I’ll come back to.
0:50:46 Yes, you’re right in the sense that
0:50:51 to get a full cycle of sleep and to get into REM sleep,
0:50:54 you would probably have to make that nap about 90 minutes.
0:50:57 And in fact, a lot of the studies that we do,
0:51:00 we will use a 90 minute nap duration of time
0:51:02 so that the brain can cycle through
0:51:05 all of those different stages of sleep.
0:51:09 But you don’t need to nor would I suggest that you do.
0:51:12 What we found is that different stages of sleep
0:51:14 perform different functions for the brain
0:51:17 at different times of night.
0:51:19 There are actually four separate stages,
0:51:22 stages one through four, increasing in their depth of sleep.
0:51:25 So stages three and four are those really deep stages
0:51:26 of non-REM sleep.
0:51:29 Stages one and two, that’s the lighter form of non-REM.
0:51:31 And then you have rapid eye movement sleep
0:51:33 or what we think of as dream sleep.
0:51:34 And people will sometimes say to me,
0:51:38 how do I get more REM sleep or how do I get more deep sleep?
0:51:40 And my response to them is,
0:51:42 why do you want to get more REM sleep?
0:51:45 And their answer is, well, isn’t that the good stuff?
0:51:48 And it turns out that there is no good stuff.
0:51:50 It’s all good stuff.
0:51:52 And maybe with the exception of that light,
0:51:54 stage one non-REM sleep, that shallow sleep
0:51:57 when we typically don’t like to see too much of that.
0:52:00 But stage two non-REM sleep, three and four,
0:52:02 they all have their different functions
0:52:05 that we’ve discovered and REM sleep has its functions.
0:52:06 So you need all of them.
0:52:09 You can’t short change any of them.
0:52:14 But for a nap, what we found is that you can get nice benefits
0:52:17 for things like your learning and your memory
0:52:21 and it can even reduce some level of anxiety
0:52:22 up to about 20 minutes.
0:52:24 You can, in fact, you can nap.
0:52:26 I think the study, one of the studies,
0:52:30 they brought a nap down to about nine minutes in duration.
0:52:32 And there was still some basic improvements
0:52:34 for your sort of general level of alertness
0:52:35 and reaction time.
0:52:39 For example, if you’re an athlete, that’s non-trivial.
0:52:44 So the reason I would say be careful with naps
0:52:48 is for two main sort of suggestions.
0:52:52 The first is try not to nap for about longer than 20 minutes
0:52:54 because once you go past 20 minutes,
0:52:57 you really start to go down into those deeper stages
0:52:58 of non-REM sleep.
0:53:02 And if you wake up after about 45 minutes or 60 minutes,
0:53:04 it’s not a problem.
0:53:07 I’m not suggesting that you shouldn’t or you couldn’t.
0:53:09 I’m just saying be aware because when you come out
0:53:12 of that deep sleep and you wake up from that deep sleep,
0:53:14 normally that’s not how you wake up.
0:53:17 You will usually wake up out of lighter stages of sleep
0:53:18 or out of REM sleep.
0:53:20 It’s rare that we wake up out of deep sleep.
0:53:23 But if you nap and you snap for about 40 minutes,
0:53:26 you’ll probably go down into deep sleep.
0:53:30 And at that point, if you wake up and your alarm goes off,
0:53:33 then you’re going to feel almost miserable and worse
0:53:35 than you did before the nap
0:53:37 because you have what’s called sleep inertia,
0:53:39 which is essentially a sleep hangover,
0:53:42 where the brain is still sort of pulled back
0:53:45 into that deep sleep state.
0:53:47 And it can take you almost an hour
0:53:50 before you feel like you’re back up to operating temperature
0:53:52 and you’re up to motorway speed.
0:53:54 So I would say keep it to 20 minutes
0:53:57 and you don’t suffer too much of that inertia.
0:53:59 You still get some nice benefits.
0:54:03 Also don’t nap too late in the afternoon.
0:54:06 Also the final part is if you are struggling
0:54:09 with sleep at night, if you’re someone who has insomnia
0:54:13 or sleep difficulties, do not nap during the day.
0:54:16 It’s the worst thing that you can be doing
0:54:18 because when we’re awake during the day,
0:54:21 we build up a sleepiness chemical in our brain.
0:54:23 It’s called adenosine.
0:54:24 And the longer that we’re awake,
0:54:26 the more adenosine that builds up,
0:54:28 the more adenosine that builds up,
0:54:31 the sleepier and sleepier that we feel.
0:54:33 And when we sleep, the brain gets the chance
0:54:37 to clear away all of that adenosine, all of that sleepiness.
0:54:39 And somewhere between seven to nine hours
0:54:41 after sleeping a full night,
0:54:46 the brain has evacuated all of that sleepiness chemical,
0:54:47 all of that adenosine,
0:54:49 so that then we should wake up
0:54:51 and we should feel refreshed and restored
0:54:54 and not needing caffeine to function.
0:54:57 Why is that relevant to naps?
0:54:58 Well, it’s relevant to naps
0:55:01 because when you take a nap,
0:55:04 you’re essentially, it’s like a pressure valve on a cooker.
0:55:07 You’re just releasing some of that healthy sleepiness
0:55:08 that you’ve been building up.
0:55:11 And therefore, if you are struggling with sleep at night
0:55:13 and then you nap during the day,
0:55:16 it’s terrible because you’re taking away
0:55:19 all of that healthy good weight of sleepiness
0:55:22 that we’ve been trying to build up on your shoulders
0:55:25 to give you the best chance of a good night of sleep.
0:55:28 That’s why I would say if you are suffering from insomnia,
0:55:30 don’t nap during the day.
0:55:33 Also, even if you don’t struggle with sleep at night,
0:55:38 try not to nap after about 3 p.m. in the afternoon or 2 p.m.
0:55:42 Napping late in the afternoon or in the early evening,
0:55:45 it’s a little bit like snacking before your main meal.
0:55:48 It just takes the appetite off your sleep hunger.
0:55:49 So try not to do that.
0:55:51 But naps, for the most part,
0:55:54 if you don’t struggle with sleep, they are wonderful things.
0:55:56 Just keep in mind the 20-minute sort of idea.
0:55:58 – You mentioned caffeine there,
0:56:02 the topic I’ve mulled over over and over again on this show.
0:56:07 Because as I’ve said to maybe three or four of my guests now,
0:56:10 it feels like caffeine is a miracle drug
0:56:12 that comes with no apparent cost.
0:56:14 When I think about things like anxiety
0:56:16 and shallow sleep states,
0:56:18 I’ve always pondered that maybe caffeine
0:56:19 is playing a role in that.
0:56:21 You said you’re a pro caffeine,
0:56:23 you’re a caffeine drinker yourself.
0:56:26 – So I am not a caffeine drinker myself,
0:56:28 but I am pro coffee.
0:56:29 – Oh, okay.
0:56:32 – And I’ll tell you why I’m very thoughtful
0:56:35 about my wording between caffeine and coffee there.
0:56:38 And to your point, it’s another astute one,
0:56:43 which is, is it a miracle drug with no cost?
0:56:50 In biology and medicine, there is almost no free lunch.
0:56:57 And that is true when it comes to caffeine and sleep.
0:57:02 So perhaps I’ll give the skinny on caffeine
0:57:03 and how it impacts your sleep,
0:57:05 but then circle back around
0:57:07 to what seems an oxymoronic statement for me,
0:57:10 which is why I’m still pro coffee.
0:57:16 Caffeine will hurt your sleep in probably at least three ways,
0:57:20 some of which you, most people are not aware of.
0:57:23 The first issue is the duration of its action.
0:57:26 So caffeine has what we call a half life
0:57:29 of about five to six hours.
0:57:31 In other words, after about five to six hours,
0:57:34 half of that caffeine is still in your system.
0:57:37 What that means is that caffeine has a quarter life
0:57:40 of somewhere between 10 to 12 hours.
0:57:44 So if you have a cup of coffee at noon at midday,
0:57:49 a quarter of that caffeine is still in your brain at midnight.
0:57:51 So having a cup of coffee at noon,
0:57:54 and it’s hyperbole in truth, probably,
0:57:56 or it’s a little bit hyperbolic,
0:57:59 but it’s almost the equivalent of a coffee at noon
0:58:00 is the equivalent of, you know,
0:58:02 tucking yourself into bed.
0:58:03 And just before you turn the light out,
0:58:05 you swig a quarter of a cup of coffee
0:58:07 and you hope for a good night of sleep.
0:58:10 And it’s probably not going to happen.
0:58:11 So that’s the first thing to keep in mind
0:58:13 is the timing of caffeine.
0:58:18 The second is that caffeine is a stimulant.
0:58:19 Now, everyone knows this.
0:58:20 Everyone knows that caffeine
0:58:22 can make you more alert and more awake.
0:58:24 By the way, how does it do that?
0:58:26 It comes back to adenosine,
0:58:27 which is the chemical that we spoke
0:58:29 about the sleepiness chemical.
0:58:31 It’s no coincidence that those two things
0:58:33 sound the same at the end of the name,
0:58:35 caffeine and adenosine.
0:58:38 Caffeine will actually race into your brain
0:58:41 and it will latch onto the adenosine receptors,
0:58:43 the welcome sites in your brain.
0:58:45 And it has very sharp elbows
0:58:49 and it will force away the adenosine from those receptors
0:58:51 and it will hijack those receptors.
0:58:53 Now, at this point, you may be thinking,
0:58:54 well, hang on a second,
0:58:58 if it’s latching onto those sleepiness chemical receptors,
0:59:01 shouldn’t caffeine make you more sleepy?
0:59:03 And the answer is no because what it does
0:59:05 is it just latches onto the receptor
0:59:08 and it inactivates it essentially.
0:59:11 So it masks the receptor.
0:59:14 What caffeine does then is race into your brain.
0:59:18 You’ve got all of this sleepiness at 9 p.m. or 10 p.m.
0:59:20 You have an espresso ’cause you’re trying to power through
0:59:23 and finish the report or the presentation
0:59:27 for your pitch deck for your startup company.
0:59:29 And that caffeine races in,
0:59:32 it latches onto the adenosine receptors
0:59:35 and blocks the signal of adenosine.
0:59:37 So now your brain was thinking,
0:59:39 I’m starting to get tired, it’s 10 p.m.
0:59:42 But now, all of a sudden, that signal is blocked.
0:59:46 And caffeine is like hitting the mute button
0:59:48 on your television remote controller.
0:59:50 It just mutes the signal of sleepiness.
0:59:53 So now you think, well, no, I don’t feel sleepy anymore.
0:59:56 And here’s the danger that even though,
0:59:58 well, when the caffeine is in your system
1:00:00 and it’s latched onto the receptors,
1:00:01 that adenosine is still there.
1:00:03 It’s not going away.
1:00:04 In fact, if anything,
1:00:07 during the course of the caffeine in your system,
1:00:09 it continues to build and build.
1:00:12 And now when the caffeine finally gets metabolized
1:00:13 and excreted out of your system,
1:00:16 not only do you go back to the sleepiness
1:00:18 that you had many hours before,
1:00:21 it’s that plus all of the adenosine sleepiness
1:00:24 that’s been building up during that time in between
1:00:28 so you get hit with this huge tsunami wave of sleepiness.
1:00:30 And that’s what we call the caffeine crash.
1:00:34 So one of the issues,
1:00:36 so that’s sort of caffeine in terms of how it works
1:00:37 in its timing.
1:00:41 Another issue is that it creates anxiety just as you said.
1:00:45 And anxiety is probably one of the greatest enemies of sleep.
1:00:48 It’s one of the principal reasons that underlies insomnia
1:00:50 is a physiological state of anxiety,
1:00:53 that your fight or flight branch of the nervous system
1:00:54 is ratcheted up.
1:00:55 That’s what caffeine will do.
1:00:58 It needs to do the opposite for you to fall asleep.
1:01:00 That’s why you can have what we call the tired
1:01:04 but wired phenomenon where you say I’m so desperately tired.
1:01:07 I am so tired, but I’m just so wired
1:01:08 that I can’t fall asleep.
1:01:11 It’s because your nervous system is too amped up.
1:01:14 Caffeine will trigger that amping up.
1:01:16 Then at that point, if you’re struggling to fall asleep
1:01:18 ’cause you’ve got too much caffeine on board,
1:01:20 it is what we call angiogenic.
1:01:23 So now you start to worry.
1:01:25 And the last thing you need to do
1:01:28 when your head hits the pillow for good sleep is worry.
1:01:31 Because when you start to worry, you start to ruminate.
1:01:35 And when you ruminate, you catastrophize.
1:01:36 And when you catastrophize,
1:01:38 you’re dead in the water for the next two hours
1:01:39 when it comes to sleep.
1:01:44 Because we have this sense that things at night,
1:01:46 in the darkness of night,
1:01:51 are so much bigger than they are in the brightness of day.
1:01:53 And we start worrying, in this modern era,
1:01:56 we’re constantly on reception.
1:01:59 And very rarely do we do reflection.
1:02:02 Unfortunately, the only time when we typically do a reflection
1:02:05 is when we turn off the light and our head hits the pillow.
1:02:08 And that is the last time you wanna be doing reflection.
1:02:10 So that’s the second problem with caffeine.
1:02:12 It’s angiogenic and it only makes you
1:02:14 sort of almost like the Woody Allen neurotic
1:02:16 of the sleep world.
1:02:19 The final part of caffeine is that it’s very good
1:02:21 at blocking your deep sleep.
1:02:23 So we’ve done a number of these studies
1:02:25 where we’ll give people a standard dose of caffeine,
1:02:28 let’s say 150 milligrams, 200 milligrams,
1:02:31 which is probably a cup and a half of good, strong coffee.
1:02:33 And then we put you to bed
1:02:35 and we look at the amount of deep sleep.
1:02:37 And it will strip away your deep sleep
1:02:41 by about somewhere between 15 to 30%.
1:02:44 Now, to put that in context,
1:02:46 to drop your deep sleep by 30%,
1:02:51 I’d probably have to age you by about 40 years, 40.
1:02:54 Or you could do it every night with an espresso with dinner.
1:02:56 And that’s one of the problems people will say to me,
1:02:59 look, I’m one of those people who I can have
1:03:01 two espressos with dinner
1:03:03 and I fall asleep fine and I stay asleep.
1:03:05 So no harm, no foul.
1:03:08 Well, not necessarily because even if you fall asleep
1:03:11 and you stay asleep, you’re not aware of the lack
1:03:13 of the deep sleep that you’re not getting
1:03:15 because of the caffeine.
1:03:16 And so now you wake up the next day and you think,
1:03:19 well, I don’t remember having a hard time falling asleep.
1:03:21 I don’t remember waking up.
1:03:24 But now I’m reaching for two or three cups of coffee
1:03:26 the next morning rather than my standard one cup of coffee
1:03:29 because I don’t feel refreshed and restored by my sleep
1:03:31 because I was lacking the amount of deep sleep.
1:03:33 – And deep sleep, what does that rub us of?
1:03:34 The lack of deep sleep.
1:03:37 – So lack of deep sleep, deep sleep is critical
1:03:39 for regulating your cardiovascular system.
1:03:42 It’s the time when we do replenish the immune system.
1:03:45 It also regulates your metabolic system.
1:03:48 So it controls the hormones such as insulin
1:03:49 that will regulate your blood sugar
1:03:52 and you will become blood sugar dysregulated
1:03:53 without sufficient deep sleep.
1:03:56 Upstairs in the brain, deep sleep will strengthen
1:04:00 and consolidate and secure new memories into your brain.
1:04:03 They will prevent those memories from being forgotten.
1:04:05 Deep sleep is also the time when we cleanse the brain
1:04:08 of metabolic toxins, particularly the toxins
1:04:10 that are related to Alzheimer’s disease.
1:04:12 So getting a lack of deep sleep is,
1:04:16 I would say a non-trivial thing in that regard.
1:04:22 But I don’t want to be also puritanical here
1:04:25 and this is where I’m going to change my title tune.
1:04:30 I am not here to tell anyone how to live their life.
1:04:33 I have no right to tell anyone how to live their life.
1:04:35 I’m just a scientist.
1:04:38 All I want to try and do is gift you the science
1:04:40 and the knowledge of sleep so that you can make
1:04:42 an informed choice.
1:04:45 And after all, and the same is true for alcohol too
1:04:50 and sleep, life is to be lived to a certain degree.
1:04:54 No one wants to be the healthiest guy in the graveyard.
1:04:55 I don’t want to be that way too.
1:04:59 I want to live life just with moderation.
1:05:04 The reason I don’t drink caffeine is not because
1:05:05 I’m so puritanical.
1:05:07 I want to be the poster child of good sleep.
1:05:11 I love the smell of freshly ground coffee in the morning.
1:05:12 And it’s a great ritual.
1:05:14 It’s just that I’ve run my genetics
1:05:17 and I am one of the slow caffeine metabolizers.
1:05:20 So you can do these genetic kits online
1:05:21 and they will tell you,
1:05:24 are you a slow metabolizer or a fast metabolizer?
1:05:26 So that’s the variability.
1:05:27 That’s why some people will say like,
1:05:29 I’m pretty immune to caffeine.
1:05:31 Others will say, no, I’m not.
1:05:34 Why do I now favor coffee?
1:05:39 I was actually quite anti-caffeine in coffee
1:05:40 when I first came out with the book,
1:05:42 just looking at the studies.
1:05:45 But now the data is immensely compelling.
1:05:50 The health benefits associated with coffee are undeniable.
1:05:51 Study after study after study.
1:05:53 And we can put them all together
1:05:55 in this big what we call a meta-analysis study.
1:05:58 And it is so strikingly clear that coffee,
1:06:00 drinking coffee is a good thing for you
1:06:02 from a health perspective.
1:06:06 Two things to say about that.
1:06:11 The first is that it’s got nothing to do with the caffeine.
1:06:14 And a lot of people have sort of rightly challenged me
1:06:18 to say, look, you say how problematic sleep can be
1:06:20 when you’re drinking too much caffeine.
1:06:23 But yet coffee is associated
1:06:25 with many of the same health benefits
1:06:27 that sleep is associated with.
1:06:30 But coffee is supposed to hurt your sleep.
1:06:34 How do you reconcile those two, Matt Walker?
1:06:38 And the answer is very simple, antioxidants.
1:06:40 Because it turns out that the coffee bean
1:06:45 contains a whopping dose of antioxidants.
1:06:47 Things such as, it’s what’s got other things
1:06:49 such as Caffeostyle,
1:06:52 but it’s got a bunch of incredible antioxidants.
1:06:54 Probably the most powerful of them
1:06:55 in terms of the coffee bean
1:06:58 is something called chlorogenic acid.
1:06:59 Now don’t worry, it’s not chlorine.
1:07:00 It’s not chloride.
1:07:02 It’s not bleach.
1:07:04 Chlorogenic acid is very different.
1:07:07 And what’s happened in the modern world
1:07:12 is that we have and struggle with our diet so much
1:07:16 because we don’t eat enough, whole foods, et cetera.
1:07:21 So what’s happened is that the coffee bean
1:07:25 has been now asked to carry the Herculean weight
1:07:29 of all of our antioxidant needs on its shoulders.
1:07:34 And where most people get the majority of their antioxidants
1:07:36 is by way of drinking coffee.
1:07:38 That’s why coffee is associated
1:07:41 with so many health benefits and it’s not the caffeine.
1:07:43 Case in point, if you look at the studies
1:07:44 with decaffeinated coffee,
1:07:48 you get very similar health benefits.
1:07:50 Again, it’s not the caffeine, it’s the coffee itself.
1:07:55 So the bottom line here is drink coffee,
1:07:59 but I would say the dose and the timing make the poison.
1:08:04 So try to limit yourself to about two cups of coffee,
1:08:05 three cups of coffee maximum,
1:08:08 because if you look at the health benefits, by the way,
1:08:10 it’s not a dose response where it’s linear,
1:08:12 where the more and more coffee you drink,
1:08:14 the more and more healthy you become.
1:08:16 It peaks at about two to three
1:08:17 and then actually starts to go down
1:08:20 in the opposite direction for lots of reasons
1:08:21 that we can speak about.
1:08:23 So dose and the timing make the poison
1:08:24 when it comes to coffee.
1:08:25 – So you drink decaf?
1:08:27 – So I do drink decaf.
1:08:30 So I will drink coffee just because I love the smell
1:08:32 and I do enjoy the taste of it,
1:08:35 but I drink decaffeinated coffee.
1:08:38 I would love to drink caffeinated coffee too,
1:08:42 ’cause I’m sure it would be interesting
1:08:44 ’cause I work out every day and I work out every morning
1:08:47 and so many of the health coaches that I speak with
1:08:49 and health professionals say,
1:08:51 you know, you should definitely get a shot of caffeine
1:08:52 and it boosts your workout.
1:08:55 And actually the data on that is pretty clear too,
1:08:58 that you’re lifting, for example, in the gym
1:09:00 and your metabolic activity is stronger
1:09:03 when you’ve had pre-caffeine doses.
1:09:05 – But it’s also stronger when you sleep.
1:09:06 – But exactly, and that’s the problem.
1:09:10 So, and sleep is, I would argue,
1:09:13 much more beneficial to health.
1:09:14 And if you’re trying to work out
1:09:18 or you’re trying to be an athlete or perform,
1:09:21 sleep will trump caffeine five ways till Tuesday.
1:09:25 I mean, sleep is probably the very best
1:09:28 legal performance enhancing drug that we know of
1:09:30 that not enough athletes are abusing.
1:09:33 – One of the other sort of ongoing stereotypes
1:09:34 that I’ve always wondered if it was wrong or right
1:09:37 or whatever, now I get a chance to ask you,
1:09:40 is about this culture of sleep medication.
1:09:43 So I’ve got some friends who might have,
1:09:45 I don’t know, prescribed sleep medication,
1:09:47 but I’ve got a lot of friends also that use
1:09:49 what they call sort of natural,
1:09:50 they always use the word natural,
1:09:54 natural something, so it’s like natural sleep tablets.
1:09:56 What’s your perspective on this culture
1:09:59 of humans taking sleep tablets
1:10:02 to get them to feel sleepy and go off to sleep at night?
1:10:05 – Usually when people ask me that question personally,
1:10:07 the first thing I ask them is,
1:10:10 why is it that you think you’re not able to sleep?
1:10:13 And try to reverse engineer the question from there.
1:10:15 Before we even start thinking about
1:10:18 sticking band-aids on wounds,
1:10:21 I firstly want to ask what’s causing the infection
1:10:25 because we can keep bandaging it for all we like,
1:10:26 but if it keeps festering,
1:10:29 it’s probably not going to go away anytime soon.
1:10:31 – Is there a problem to keep bandaging it?
1:10:32 – It is a problem.
1:10:35 Right now, we don’t typically advocate sleeping pills
1:10:38 as the first line defense agent against,
1:10:41 or for insomnia as a treatment.
1:10:43 In fact, in 2016, the American color,
1:10:46 and again, this is me simply describing the science.
1:10:49 This is me being descriptive of the science,
1:10:52 not prescriptive in terms of medicine
1:10:54 ’cause I’m not a medical doctor.
1:10:59 But in 2016, the American College of Physicians,
1:11:01 they had an expert panel
1:11:02 who surveyed all of the literature
1:11:04 on classic sleeping pills.
1:11:07 And what they suggested was that sleeping pills
1:11:12 must no longer be the first line treatment for insomnia.
1:11:15 It has to be cognitive behavioral therapy for insomnia
1:11:18 or we call CBTI, which is a psychological intervention
1:11:19 that we can speak about.
1:11:22 But their recommendation was that they found,
1:11:25 I think their wording was small
1:11:28 and of questionable clinical importance
1:11:31 in terms of the benefits of sleeping pills.
1:11:34 Now, there is a time and a place
1:11:37 in clinical medicine for sleeping pills,
1:11:39 but usually as an adjunct
1:11:42 in combination with cognitive behavioral therapy,
1:11:45 they are not advocated for long-term use,
1:11:49 but so they’re usually advocated for short-term use weeks.
1:11:51 Most people have been on them for months,
1:11:53 if not years, these classic sleeping pills.
1:11:56 And that’s a problem because those sleeping pills
1:12:00 are in a class of drugs that we call the sedative hypnotics
1:12:03 and sedation is not sleep.
1:12:05 For some subset of some people,
1:12:10 there are some of these quote unquote sleep supplements
1:12:11 that may benefit,
1:12:14 but overall the studies are very clear,
1:12:17 none of them are efficacious.
1:12:20 And when you think about it, it makes sense.
1:12:23 If there was some cheap sleep supplement
1:12:25 that you could buy on Amazon,
1:12:27 that was the Shangri-La of good sleep.
1:12:30 That was this miracle sleep drug.
1:12:32 Don’t you think that a pharmaceutical company
1:12:34 would have patented it 20 years ago
1:12:36 and be making billions of dollars from it?
1:12:39 That alone tells you all that you need to know
1:12:42 about these natural sleep supplements.
1:12:45 – Cognitive behavioral therapy for insomnia though,
1:12:47 seems to be the kind of the front line
1:12:50 of prescribed defense against a lack of sleep
1:12:52 in so many conditions.
1:12:55 What exactly is that therapy aiming to do?
1:12:57 What does it do for somebody?
1:12:58 – Great question.
1:13:03 So in some ways the title tries to suggest what it does,
1:13:06 but not particularly well perhaps.
1:13:09 So it focuses on cognitive aspects
1:13:12 and it focuses on behavioral aspects.
1:13:14 So for the cognitive aspects,
1:13:16 when we do cognitive behavioral therapy,
1:13:17 working with the patient,
1:13:20 we’ll try to focus on thoughts and beliefs
1:13:23 and ideas around sleep.
1:13:24 Do they have anxiety around the bedroom?
1:13:26 Most of them do.
1:13:27 – I can’t sleep.
1:13:28 – Because I can’t sleep.
1:13:30 So every time I walk into the bedroom,
1:13:31 my bed is the enemy.
1:13:34 And I look at the bedroom and I look at the bed
1:13:36 and I just know that that means
1:13:38 I’m gonna have a bad night of sleep.
1:13:40 So what’s happened is that at that point,
1:13:42 your sleep controls you
1:13:47 and you’ve lost all confidence in your ability to sleep.
1:13:49 And we need to course correct that.
1:13:51 So one of the things we do in cognitive behavioral therapy
1:13:53 is that we lower that anxiety and we say,
1:13:56 “Look, everyone has a bad night of sleep,
1:13:58 “even a bad couple of nights of sleep.”
1:13:59 In fact, I will tell you,
1:14:02 I don’t sleep perfectly well all the time too.
1:14:04 I’ve had at least two very severe bouts of insomnia
1:14:05 in my life.
1:14:08 We all have a bad night of sleep.
1:14:10 It doesn’t mean that tomorrow
1:14:12 you’re going to wake up with depression
1:14:14 or Alzheimer’s disease.
1:14:17 Don’t worry, you’re not going to get cancer,
1:14:18 just because you’ve had a bad night of sleep.
1:14:22 So we start to change people’s misbeliefs about sleep
1:14:24 and we try to get them back
1:14:27 from being catastrophic about this idea of my not sleeping.
1:14:31 So that’s the cognitive aspect.
1:14:33 We start to lower their anxiety around the bed
1:14:35 and the bedroom.
1:14:37 We start to try to build confidence back.
1:14:40 We start to reduce their expectations
1:14:42 about what is reasonable sleep?
1:14:45 Well, right now you’re getting four or five hours of sleep
1:14:46 and we can do better,
1:14:50 but don’t start thinking that you need to get eight hours
1:14:51 of sleep straight out the box.
1:14:52 Let’s just manage it.
1:14:54 – That’s just because it’s going to stress you out, right?
1:14:55 – It’s only going to make matters worse.
1:14:57 – Right, okay.
1:14:58 – When you’re struggling with sleep
1:15:00 in the middle of the night and you’re wide awake.
1:15:01 – You’re laying in bed and you’re thinking,
1:15:02 “Oh my God, I’ve got five hours left
1:15:04 “before I’ve got to go to work.”
1:15:08 – It’s a little bit like trying to remember someone’s name.
1:15:11 – The harder you try, the further you push it away.
1:15:14 – So would you say, what do I do in that situation?
1:15:15 It’s two a.m. in the morning.
1:15:16 You’ve got to be up at seven.
1:15:19 There’s a flight you’re getting on, so whatever.
1:15:20 What should one do?
1:15:23 ‘Cause from what I was reading in chapter 14,
1:15:26 I was hearing that maybe I should get out of bed
1:15:29 or not just sit there and ruminate
1:15:30 into the early hours of the morning
1:15:33 or do I stay in bed and do something?
1:15:34 What does one do?
1:15:37 – The prototypical recommendation
1:15:40 is that after about 30 minutes of time awake,
1:15:41 you should get out of your bed
1:15:42 and you should just go to a different room
1:15:45 and do something like read a book
1:15:47 or listen to a podcast.
1:15:50 Don’t eat ’cause it then trains your brain to wake up
1:15:51 to do that.
1:15:54 Don’t start working or getting in front of a computer screen.
1:15:55 I said, listen to a podcast.
1:15:58 Sure, just make sure your phone’s in.
1:16:00 You don’t start scrolling anymore than that,
1:16:04 but you can do relaxing things, stretch, meditate.
1:16:06 The reason is because if you start to spend
1:16:08 a lot of time awake in your bed,
1:16:11 your brain is an incredibly associative device.
1:16:13 And very quickly it will start to learn
1:16:15 that this thing called your bed
1:16:17 is this place where I’m always awake.
1:16:19 And therefore you start to learn
1:16:23 through this repeated loop of behavior
1:16:25 that I’m always going to be wide awake in bed
1:16:27 and we need to break that association
1:16:28 and that’s why we say get out of bed
1:16:29 after about 30 minutes.
1:16:31 ‘Cause you’re just training your brain
1:16:33 to think that this thing called my bed
1:16:34 is the place where I’m never asleep
1:16:36 and we want to break that.
1:16:39 And only return to bed when you’re sleepy
1:16:41 and there’s no time limit for that.
1:16:42 And that way gradually it’s much better
1:16:44 because you will relearn the association
1:16:47 that your bed, just as when you were young,
1:16:49 is guaranteed that your bed is this place
1:16:50 where you will always be asleep.
1:16:53 The problem with that is many people don’t want,
1:16:54 you know, it’s the middle of the night, it’s dark,
1:16:58 it’s cold, I’m just not going to get out of bed.
1:17:01 So what’s your other, what else have you got
1:17:03 in your toolbox, Matt?
1:17:07 At that point I would say, okay, that’s reasonable.
1:17:10 The first thing I would suggest is meditation.
1:17:12 You know, I am a hard-nosed scientist
1:17:15 and when I was researching the book,
1:17:18 I was, you know, I just thought this sounds all a bit woo-woo
1:17:22 and I live and work in Buckley, California,
1:17:25 which is kind of, you know, the free speech,
1:17:27 you know, flower power movement, San Francisco,
1:17:29 flowers and you have business.
1:17:31 I just thought this is all a bit, you know,
1:17:34 holding hands and singing come by our hands.
1:17:37 This is not for me, this meditation stuff.
1:17:39 I couldn’t get away from the strength of the data.
1:17:42 It was immensely powerful regarding sleep
1:17:44 and its benefits on insomnia and sleep.
1:17:49 So I started meditating and now I meditate
1:17:52 for 10 minutes before bed every single night.
1:17:54 I’ve been doing that for about four years.
1:17:57 So I would say, even if it’s in the middle of the night
1:17:58 and if I wake up in the middle of the night,
1:18:01 I’ll start to try to walk myself through a meditation.
1:18:06 – You referenced there listening to podcasts,
1:18:07 et cetera, et cetera, you know,
1:18:09 doing something else to stimulate the brain.
1:18:11 I, when I go to bed, I have to have something playing.
1:18:14 I say have to, I shouldn’t be that definitive.
1:18:16 I like to have something playing,
1:18:18 some kind of sound or noise, whatever.
1:18:21 And much to my partner’s dismay,
1:18:26 my content of preference is serial killer.
1:18:28 (laughing)
1:18:32 Podcasts or documentaries or just like something
1:18:34 which is really going to grab hold of my brain
1:18:36 and focus me.
1:18:38 So something like, it has to be really interesting to me
1:18:40 for me to be able to focus on it.
1:18:41 My partner is the opposite again.
1:18:45 She likes silence.
1:18:48 Why do I listen to serial killers?
1:18:51 – It’s different for different people’s constitutions
1:18:55 and likeologies and, you know, I can pathologize you
1:18:57 or you like if you would wish me to.
1:19:01 But I would say it, what’s fundamentally going on here
1:19:05 with meditation, and I’ll come back to an alternative too,
1:19:09 but the reason why some meditation apps as well
1:19:11 have now started to do what’s called sleep stories,
1:19:14 which in some ways is what you’re doing a version of
1:19:19 with your podcast, is harks back to when we were kids.
1:19:23 For many parents, they would just read a book to their kid.
1:19:26 You know, the children’s books, good night books
1:19:29 because you would read the child to sleep.
1:19:33 And for some reason, we as we developed into adults,
1:19:37 we thought, well, we no longer benefit from having a story
1:19:39 read to us to help us sleep.
1:19:40 No, it’s not true.
1:19:41 We benefit hugely.
1:19:46 In fact, the meditation company, Calm, was saved
1:19:49 by the introduction of sleep stories into their app.
1:19:52 They were doing pretty well as a meditation app,
1:19:54 but then they started to do sleep stories
1:19:58 and it became a unicorn company in terms of its valuation.
1:20:00 It broke a billion dollars.
1:20:04 And it was on the back of sleep stories.
1:20:06 And what they realized is that people were self-medicating
1:20:09 their insomnia by way of meditation.
1:20:12 So they latched onto that and then they found that
1:20:14 these stories, sleep stories were great.
1:20:16 And you’ve got now wonderful people,
1:20:18 people who you’ve interviewed on the show.
1:20:21 So what you’re doing and what those sleep stories are doing
1:20:25 and what meditation is doing, it’s all the same thing.
1:20:29 Which is that it is taking your mind off itself.
1:20:32 Because when you are struggling to sleep,
1:20:34 or you’ve woken up in the middle of the night,
1:20:39 what you don’t want to be doing is focusing on either
1:20:42 what you, what did I do today?
1:20:43 What did I not do today?
1:20:44 What did I do poorly?
1:20:47 Oh my goodness, what have I still got to do tomorrow?
1:20:50 And at that point, things are just a disaster.
1:20:51 You’re wide awake.
1:20:55 What all of the things that we’ve just discussed do
1:20:59 is they take your mind off itself.
1:21:02 And at that point, then you start to allow sleep
1:21:04 to come back naturally.
1:21:07 That’s why one of the other suggestions is take yourself
1:21:09 for a mental walk.
1:21:11 So don’t count sheep by the way, that doesn’t work.
1:21:13 A colleague of mine at UC Berkeley did the study,
1:21:15 actually takes you longer to fall asleep
1:21:17 if you’re counting sheep.
1:21:20 What she found at Dr. Allison Harvey was that
1:21:23 if you just close your eyes and you think about a walk
1:21:26 that you take frequently, let’s say it’s a walk with the dog,
1:21:30 and you think about it in high fidelity detail.
1:21:32 So I close my eyes, I go out the door,
1:21:33 I take a left down the steps,
1:21:35 then I’m going to go up the street,
1:21:37 I take the first left past that pine tree.
1:21:39 That’s the level of detail.
1:21:42 If you just walk yourself on that mental walk,
1:21:45 sure enough, people fall asleep in about 50% less time,
1:21:46 half the time it takes.
1:21:48 – This is the thing with sleep stories
1:21:50 and also my serial killer documentaries
1:21:53 or serial killer podcast that I listened to, detail.
1:21:54 – Exactly.
1:21:59 – You get, even I’ve listened to calm sleep stories before
1:22:02 and the attention to detail in the sort of descriptive nature
1:22:04 of what they’re saying is so apparent.
1:22:08 They’ll say things like the cold, wet windowsill
1:22:13 saw the rain drops like tapping against it one by one
1:22:15 by one by one.
1:22:18 And that sounds very similar to my serial killer documentaries
1:22:19 when I hear about the serial killer
1:22:22 coming in through the window at night time.
1:22:25 And I wondered why the descriptive nature of it,
1:22:28 the detail matters for dozing us off.
1:22:29 – And because it prevents, I mean,
1:22:32 you’ve got limited bandwidth in terms of cognitive capacity.
1:22:35 And if you’re consumed and you saturate your bandwidth
1:22:37 with that level of detail,
1:22:39 it’s very hard for any of these other things
1:22:42 called our worries and our anxieties
1:22:44 to start entering into our mind.
1:22:46 The other thing I would note, by the way, though,
1:22:49 is if you are, if none of these things are working for you,
1:22:53 if the fictional notion of serial killing
1:22:54 is not working for you,
1:22:56 if meditation is not working for you,
1:23:00 if going on a mental walk is not working for you.
1:23:02 This is the final suggestion I have.
1:23:04 If you’re lying there awake,
1:23:06 firstly, by the way, if you’re struggling with sleep,
1:23:08 remove all clock faces from your bedroom.
1:23:11 It’s one of the best pieces of advice I can give you.
1:23:15 Knowing what time of night it is is no favor.
1:23:19 So knowing now that it’s 3/23 a.m. in the morning
1:23:21 and I’m still struggling to fall asleep,
1:23:25 and then I look back at the clock and it’s now 4/03 a.m.
1:23:28 And I’ve still been awake and now it’s 4/27
1:23:30 and I’ve got to wake up at 6/30 a.m.
1:23:34 Knowing that has no utility for you.
1:23:38 Remove all clock faces from your bedroom.
1:23:39 It is a gift.
1:23:41 But coming back to the final suggestion,
1:23:43 if you don’t want to get out of bed,
1:23:45 if you don’t want to listen to a podcast,
1:23:48 the final thing I would say is just accept and say,
1:23:50 “Look, it’s okay.
1:23:52 Tonight is not my night.
1:23:54 It is not the worst thing in the world.”
1:23:57 And instead of trying to sleep,
1:24:00 all I’m going to do here is lie in bed
1:24:03 and I’m just going to rest.
1:24:05 Because wouldn’t it be lovely if someone came to you
1:24:07 in the middle of your work day,
1:24:08 you’re just stressed and someone says,
1:24:10 “By the way, just come into this room.
1:24:11 There’s a bed here.
1:24:15 Just lie down and just rest for an hour.”
1:24:16 Wouldn’t it be lovely?
1:24:19 Just have a good old rest for an hour.
1:24:20 Just rest there.
1:24:24 And I would say that if you can’t sleep,
1:24:26 just lie in bed, stop worrying about sleep
1:24:28 and not being able to get it.
1:24:29 Stop worrying about the next day.
1:24:34 Just lie in there and enjoy a nice good old rest.
1:24:37 And by the way, usually what happens is that
1:24:39 after you start thinking, “Okay, I’m going to rest,”
1:24:41 the next thing you remember is the alarm clock
1:24:43 going off at 6.30, because finally,
1:24:46 you stop trying and sleep happens.
1:24:47 – Of course.
1:24:49 – You know, prolonged, one of the things I’ve also,
1:24:52 I wonder if this is, if I’m wrong about this,
1:24:54 is I sometimes thought that, you know,
1:24:56 I could go Monday to Friday
1:24:57 and kind of sacrifice my sleep.
1:24:59 This was specifically when I was really in the height
1:25:01 of like running big businesses, et cetera.
1:25:04 And then on the weekend, I’ll just make up for it.
1:25:06 So I thought, you know, I could go Monday to Friday,
1:25:08 I’ll sleep maybe sometimes two hours a night,
1:25:09 three hours a night, whatever.
1:25:11 Then Saturday, you know, I’ll just do a,
1:25:14 you know, 11 hour sleep and I’ll just make up for it.
1:25:14 – Yeah.
1:25:18 – Is that a good strategy?
1:25:22 – The delightful laughter at the end of your sentence
1:25:26 that I think probably tells you the answer that, you know,
1:25:29 unfortunately sleep doesn’t work like that.
1:25:32 It would be nice if it did.
1:25:33 Sleep is not like the bank, in other words,
1:25:37 you can’t accumulate a debt as you were doing
1:25:40 during the week and then hope to try and pay it off
1:25:41 at the weekend.
1:25:45 So for example, let me take an extreme version
1:25:46 of that experiment.
1:25:49 Let me take you tonight, I’m going to deprive you of sleep
1:25:52 for an entire night for let’s say eight hours of sleep.
1:25:54 And then tomorrow night, I’m going to give you
1:25:56 all of the recovery sleep that you want
1:25:58 as much as you wish for.
1:26:01 And then the next night, you can have all of the recovery
1:26:04 sleep that you want and even on the third night,
1:26:08 will you sleep longer that first recovery night
1:26:09 after a night of no sleep?
1:26:12 Absolutely, you will sleep longer.
1:26:15 But across those three or four recovery nights of sleep,
1:26:17 will you get back all of the sleep that you lost?
1:26:21 Not even close, you’ll maybe only sleep back about four,
1:26:24 four and a half of the eight hours that you lost.
1:26:27 In other words, by that stage, you are four
1:26:31 or three and a half hours in overdraft
1:26:32 on your sleep bank account.
1:26:37 You went into debt and you only paid about 50% of it back.
1:26:39 So what’s happening with you during the week
1:26:43 is that you’re accumulating this debt of maybe 10 hours.
1:26:46 You’re short changing, you’re only sleeping like six hours
1:26:48 a night for the five nights during the week.
1:26:51 And then you binge on sleep and you try to maybe sleep
1:26:54 10 hours or 11 hours.
1:26:56 That’s only two or three extra hours.
1:27:01 So some total, that’s only four to six hours
1:27:05 of made-up sleep relative to the 10 hours of debt.
1:27:07 So what happens is that that next week,
1:27:12 you now carry forward four hours of your debt.
1:27:14 And then next weekend, you try to sleep it back,
1:27:16 but you’re still four hours lost.
1:27:18 So now you’ve got eight hours of net debt.
1:27:20 In other words, what it develops
1:27:22 is into a compounding interest on a loan.
1:27:24 It just starts to escalate ballistically
1:27:28 across weeks, across years, and across a lifespan.
1:27:31 – And then what happens in terms of health outcomes?
1:27:33 So say that I did that for a couple of years.
1:27:36 Say that I sustained that pattern of depriving myself
1:27:39 of sleep throughout the week, maybe catch up on Saturday,
1:27:41 depriving myself again the next week, catch up on Sunday,
1:27:42 deprive myself the next week.
1:27:45 And I did that pattern for multiple years.
1:27:49 What would be the health implications?
1:27:53 – So you can describe them short, mid, and long-term.
1:27:55 The first thing I would say though,
1:27:57 is that the elastic band of sleep deprivation
1:28:00 will stretch only so far before it snaps.
1:28:04 The short-term, probably the most immediate
1:28:07 short-term consequence is that you are popped out
1:28:11 in a driving-related accident, drowsy-related accident,
1:28:16 because drowsy-related accidents are non-trivial.
1:28:19 They make up a large proportion of accidents
1:28:23 on our streets in terms of human, errorful driving.
1:28:25 – When you say popped out?
1:28:26 – Out of the gene pool.
1:28:29 So what happens is that when you are underslept,
1:28:31 you’re at the wheel and you start to have
1:28:33 what we call microsleeps,
1:28:36 where your eyelid will partially close.
1:28:37 Now you are not aware of it.
1:28:39 You have no awareness of it whatsoever.
1:28:41 And in fact, parts of your brain seems though,
1:28:43 they’re almost falling asleep.
1:28:45 Like you’re having this microsleep
1:28:47 and it lasts for about a second or two seconds.
1:28:48 Now if you’re on the motorway
1:28:51 and you’re traveling at 70 miles an hour,
1:28:54 and you have a two-second microsleep,
1:28:55 that’s enough time for you to drift
1:28:57 from one lane into the next.
1:28:59 If you’re just on a two-lane,
1:29:04 sort of back street where there’s oncoming traffic
1:29:06 in the other direction and you’re traveling
1:29:08 at 40 miles an hour and you drift half the way
1:29:12 into that lane, that’s oncoming traffic.
1:29:15 So in other words, if you have a microsleep
1:29:18 at 60 or 70 miles an hour, at that point,
1:29:21 there’s a two-tonne missile traveling at 60 miles an hour
1:29:23 and no one’s in control.
1:29:24 And that may be the last microsleep
1:29:26 that you ever have in your life.
1:29:29 – Obviously, all the other things you’ve mentioned
1:29:31 would be implications, things like performance drop,
1:29:35 sort of memory, relationships, libido would all drop off.
1:29:36 So I wouldn’t be having as much sex.
1:29:37 I would, all those things.
1:29:38 Then midterm.
1:29:41 – So midterm, then you’re going to escalate those things
1:29:42 into more disease state.
1:29:44 So for example, if I were to take an individual
1:29:47 and people have done these studies, not we,
1:29:50 but where you limit them to let’s say four or five hours
1:29:53 of sleep for one week, your levels of blood sugar
1:29:57 are disrupted so significantly that your doctor
1:29:59 at the end of that one week would classify
1:30:00 as being pre-diabetic.
1:30:04 So that’s, you could almost argue that short-term,
1:30:05 not midterm.
1:30:11 If you’re a male and I limit you to four or five hours
1:30:15 of sleep, healthy young male for one week,
1:30:18 I will drop your levels of testosterone to that
1:30:20 of someone who is 10 years older than you.
1:30:24 So I can age you by a decade just by short sleeping you
1:30:26 for one week.
1:30:29 We see equivalent impairments in female reproductive health
1:30:31 in estrogen, luteinizing hormone
1:30:33 and follicle stimulating hormone.
1:30:35 So it’s both men and women.
1:30:38 Your blood pressure will start to creep up.
1:30:41 Your systolic blood pressure in particular will creep up.
1:30:44 Your heart rate in terms of its contraction rate,
1:30:47 in other words, the speed of your heart starts to increase.
1:30:51 The progression into obesity, diabetes,
1:30:55 cardiovascular disease, mental health issues, anxiety,
1:30:59 depression, suicidality, all of these things,
1:31:02 immune compromise, infection, all of those things
1:31:05 can be termed, you know, will be midterm.
1:31:08 Now, all of those things have a longer term tail to them,
1:31:11 which is this thing called premature mortality.
1:31:14 So using that sweet spot of seven to nine hours of sleep,
1:31:17 you can argue that there’s a simple truth on the basis
1:31:20 of the data, the shorter your sleep, the shorter your life,
1:31:23 that short sleep will predict all cause mortality.
1:31:25 – Is that supported by data?
1:31:26 – That’s supported by data.
1:31:28 Now, there’s an interesting change there,
1:31:31 which is once you get past about nine or 10 hours,
1:31:34 your mortality risk doesn’t just keep going down and down,
1:31:38 it will hook back up again as if almost too much sleep
1:31:39 is a bad thing.
1:31:41 And we can explain why that is the case as well
1:31:44 and why it’s probably not quite as simple as that.
1:31:47 But the final long-term consequence that I would say
1:31:49 is Alzheimer’s disease.
1:31:51 You know, the two most feared diseases in developed nations
1:31:53 are cancer and Alzheimer’s disease.
1:31:56 Both of them have links to insufficient sleep,
1:31:57 many of them causal.
1:32:00 And this relationship between sleep and Alzheimer’s disease,
1:32:02 this is where we actually do,
1:32:04 I’d probably say almost 50% of the work that I do
1:32:08 at my sleep center is focused on sleep and Alzheimer’s disease.
1:32:09 And there the data is stunning.
1:32:13 I would say at this stage, insufficient sleep seems to be
1:32:18 one of the more or one of the most significant
1:32:23 lifestyle factors that can develop or dictate
1:32:25 the development of Alzheimer’s disease later in life.
1:32:27 Now, that’s a lifestyle factor.
1:32:29 There are other genetic factors,
1:32:32 but certainly we now know that it’s not just
1:32:36 that insufficient sleep predicts a greater amount
1:32:38 of Alzheimer’s pathology in your brain.
1:32:41 So for example, people who on average are sleeping
1:32:45 six hours or less, have a far higher magnitude
1:32:48 of beta amyloid, which is the sticky toxic protein
1:32:49 related to Alzheimer’s disease.
1:32:51 And another protein called tau protein,
1:32:54 these are the two protein culprits of Alzheimer’s.
1:32:58 Both of those are escalate the less and less sleep
1:32:59 that you have.
1:33:00 Now that’s just associational.
1:33:02 We also know by the way that two sleep disorders,
1:33:05 insomnia and sleep apnea, heavy snoring,
1:33:08 both of those are associated with a marked increased risk
1:33:12 of Alzheimer’s disease later in life.
1:33:14 That’s simply associational.
1:33:15 That doesn’t prove causality,
1:33:18 but we now have the causal evidence,
1:33:20 both in animal models and in human models.
1:33:24 If I deprive a human being of sleep for a single night,
1:33:28 or I just deprive you of deep sleep for a single night,
1:33:30 the next day we can see an immediate increase
1:33:33 in these Alzheimer’s disease related proteins
1:33:35 circulating in your bloodstream,
1:33:37 circulating in what we call a cerebrospinal fluid
1:33:40 that bathes the brain and using special brain scans,
1:33:44 we can even measure it within the brain itself.
1:33:46 So these are causal manipulations.
1:33:48 It’s not associational.
1:33:50 I manipulate this thing called sleep.
1:33:51 And the consequence is that I manipulate
1:33:54 your Alzheimer’s disease proteins.
1:33:57 That’s correlation going to causation.
1:33:59 Then the question is, well, mechanism,
1:34:03 what is it about sleep when you get it
1:34:06 that is de-escalating Alzheimer’s disease risk?
1:34:08 In other words, when you don’t get it,
1:34:11 why would it increase your Alzheimer’s risk?
1:34:13 And this is a stunning discovery made
1:34:15 by a scientist called Macon Nedegaard
1:34:17 at the University of Rochester here in America.
1:34:19 And she found three things.
1:34:22 First, studying mice and rats.
1:34:25 She found that the brain has a cleansing system.
1:34:27 Now, we didn’t used to think
1:34:29 that your brain had a cleansing system.
1:34:32 Your body had one and everyone knows what it’s called.
1:34:34 It’s called the lymphatic system.
1:34:36 We didn’t think the brain had one,
1:34:38 but she discovered that the brain has one.
1:34:40 It’s called the glimphatic system,
1:34:43 named after these glial cells that make it up.
1:34:45 The second thing that she discovered
1:34:48 is that that cleansing system within the brain
1:34:51 is not always switched on in high-flow volume
1:34:53 across the 24-hour period.
1:34:56 It was expressly during sleep
1:34:58 and particularly during deep non-rem sleep
1:35:03 when that sort of sewage system was put into overdrive
1:35:05 and washed away all of this detritus
1:35:07 that built up during the day.
1:35:10 And the final thing that she discovered,
1:35:12 and this is why it’s related to Alzheimer’s disease,
1:35:15 is that two of the metabolic byproducts
1:35:18 that build up during the day in our brain
1:35:20 are beta amyloid and tau protein,
1:35:24 the two bad actors in Alzheimer’s disease.
1:35:26 So in other words, what she discovered
1:35:29 is a system of good night’s sleep clean.
1:35:32 That sleep is a power cleanse for the brain.
1:35:35 And if you’re not getting your sleep every night,
1:35:37 it doesn’t mean that you’re going to get
1:35:38 Alzheimer’s disease next week.
1:35:40 It doesn’t mean that you’re going to get Alzheimer’s disease
1:35:42 in a year’s time.
1:35:44 But night after night, once again,
1:35:47 it’s like compounding interest on a loan.
1:35:50 And that’s why we now believe through this causal mechanism
1:35:52 that insufficient sleep is a risk factor
1:35:54 for Alzheimer’s disease.
1:35:55 Lots of people will say to me,
1:35:58 look, there are these individuals in society
1:36:02 who claim that they didn’t need very much sleep
1:36:03 and who didn’t sleep a lot.
1:36:06 Margaret Thatcher has often quoted me,
1:36:07 quoted to me about that.
1:36:14 Ronald Reagan was apparently another short sleeper.
1:36:16 I don’t think it’s coincidental
1:36:19 that both Thatcher and Reagan went on to die
1:36:23 of the unfortunate disease of Alzheimer’s.
1:36:28 – I’m sold.
1:36:30 Sleep is important, I get it.
1:36:31 I’m sold.
1:36:34 How do I, my question is,
1:36:38 what are the things that in the modern society
1:36:39 are standing in the way of sleep?
1:36:41 We’ve touched on some of them loosely,
1:36:43 but some of the like big obvious things,
1:36:45 the things that you would suggest doing,
1:36:47 very actionable things we could do straightaway
1:36:51 to improve our chances of having that healthy,
1:36:54 deep sleep that we need to be optimal
1:36:57 in every regard of our health and performance.
1:37:00 – There’s probably, I think, five standard tips,
1:37:02 what we call sort of sleep hygiene that you can do.
1:37:05 And then I’ll come on to maybe just some unconventional
1:37:07 tips that we’ve sort of touched on.
1:37:09 And we’ve spoken about many of these.
1:37:11 The first thing I would recommend people to do,
1:37:13 and this is why when some people say,
1:37:15 what about this new sleep supplement?
1:37:18 Or, you know, it’s 40 quid for this bottle
1:37:20 of these new sleep natural medications.
1:37:21 I’m gonna give it a try.
1:37:25 I would say, try these tried and true things first
1:37:27 before you spend your money on supplements.
1:37:29 The first thing is regularity.
1:37:32 Go to bed at the same time and wake up at the same time.
1:37:35 No matter whether it’s the weekday or the weekend,
1:37:37 your brain expects regularity.
1:37:40 It thrives best under conditions of regularity.
1:37:42 When you give it regularity,
1:37:45 you can improve the quantity and the quantity of your sleep.
1:37:48 The second thing is get some darkness at night.
1:37:52 As I said, we don’t get enough darkness in the modern world.
1:37:56 And so the trick I would offer, and I don’t use it,
1:37:59 I don’t like the word hack, but the suggestion would be,
1:38:02 in the last hour before bed,
1:38:04 try this experiment for everyone listening
1:38:08 for the next week, dim down half of the lights
1:38:09 or switch off half of the lights,
1:38:13 or even three-quarters of the lights in your home
1:38:16 in the last hour before bed.
1:38:17 – All of the lights in every room.
1:38:21 – In all of the rooms, switch off almost all of the light.
1:38:22 Now, I’m not suggesting be unsafe
1:38:24 and walk around in the darkness in the last hour.
1:38:25 That’s not what I’m saying.
1:38:29 Just dim down, switch off half of the lights.
1:38:32 You will be surprised at how sleepy
1:38:34 that darkness will make you feel.
1:38:37 And it’s also an incredible behavioral trigger
1:38:44 to signal to your brain that it is time for sleep,
1:38:46 that darkness is around me.
1:38:48 That’s the second tip, is darkness.
1:38:51 The third tip is temperature.
1:38:54 Most people sleep in an ambient bedroom temperature
1:38:56 that is too high.
1:38:58 And you need to aim for a bedroom temperature
1:39:01 of about 18, 18 and a half degrees Celsius
1:39:05 around about 65 to 68 degrees Fahrenheit,
1:39:08 if I’m probably butchering the mathematics there on that,
1:39:11 but you need to get cool.
1:39:12 Now, you can worth thick socks,
1:39:14 you can have a hot water bottle, that’s fine,
1:39:17 but the ambient needs to be cold
1:39:20 because you need to drop your core body temperature
1:39:23 and your brain temperature by about one degree Celsius
1:39:25 to fall asleep and stay asleep.
1:39:27 And it’s the reason that you will always find it easier
1:39:30 to fall asleep in a room that’s too cold than too hot.
1:39:35 So make your bedroom cold, make it dark like a cave.
1:39:39 The fourth question would be sort of what we’ve,
1:39:42 or fourth suggestion would be walk it out.
1:39:45 And we’ve spoken about this, the 30 minute rule,
1:39:48 get up, do something different or meditate,
1:39:50 don’t lie in bed awake for too long.
1:39:52 Then the final two things we’ve spoken about,
1:39:54 well, we’ve spoken about caffeine.
1:39:56 We haven’t spoken about alcohol,
1:39:59 but let me just say as the kind of headline of it,
1:40:01 alcohol is not a sleep aid.
1:40:04 Many people use it as a sleep aid, it is not your friend.
1:40:07 Alcohol, again, is a sedative, so it knocks you out.
1:40:10 The second is that it fragments your sleep.
1:40:12 So you wake up, your sleep is littered
1:40:14 with all of these small awakenings.
1:40:16 Most of them you don’t remember ’cause there’s too brief,
1:40:20 but it makes for miserable, lousy quality sleep.
1:40:22 And the final thing is that alcohol is very good
1:40:23 at blocking your REM sleep or your dream sleep,
1:40:26 which we know is critical for many other functions as well.
1:40:28 So alcohol is not your friend,
1:40:29 that’s the sort of the final tip.
1:40:33 Again, just if you’re with friends,
1:40:36 have a glass of red wine, just know,
1:40:37 okay, my sleep’s not going to be great.
1:40:38 – No, thank you, Matt.
1:40:39 – You’re amazing.
1:40:40 – Yeah, okay, that’s right.
1:40:41 – I’m joking.
1:40:45 – I’m not, yeah, it’s just, you know, live life too.
1:40:46 – Of course, yeah.
1:40:47 – I’m not saying that.
1:40:49 – I was thinking there about the other sort
1:40:52 of behavioral things that we do that harm our sleep as well.
1:40:54 We talked about coffee earlier on, avoiding that.
1:40:57 It’s weird that people drink it off to dessert in the evening.
1:40:58 So I never understood that.
1:41:00 I guess that’s an old tradition.
1:41:01 But the other thing, obviously,
1:41:03 that the modern generation are even more susceptible to
1:41:06 is to have a quick TikTok.
1:41:08 Look at the social media account or something.
1:41:10 Now, I thought, you know,
1:41:12 there’s a lot of different products out there
1:41:14 that are trying to help with the light
1:41:15 that comes from these screens
1:41:18 that I think is the cause of what’s keeping us awake.
1:41:21 But there’s this little button called dark mode
1:41:22 on my iPad.
1:41:24 Oh, there’s also one called night shift.
1:41:27 So if I just pop that on, Bob’s your uncle.
1:41:31 And I can crack on with my screen time.
1:41:32 True or false?
1:41:35 – Partly true.
1:41:35 – Oh, good.
1:41:36 Okay, partly.
1:41:38 So I can just pop that on night mode and dark mode
1:41:40 and then I can carry on using my iPad.
1:41:41 – Partly true.
1:41:46 So it turns out that the blue light from screens
1:41:48 does have an impact on sleep.
1:41:50 So there’s a great study done by Harvard Medical School
1:41:51 by some colleagues there.
1:41:55 And they showed that reading for an hour on an iPad
1:41:56 just before bed,
1:41:59 relative to just reading a book in dim light.
1:42:03 Firstly, it delayed the time with which people fell asleep.
1:42:05 So it took them a lot longer to fall asleep.
1:42:08 Second, it reduced the total amount of sleep that they had.
1:42:11 Third, it decreased a sleep-related hormone
1:42:12 called melatonin.
1:42:14 It delayed the release of that melatonin
1:42:17 and it reduced the amount of melatonin.
1:42:18 And finally, it reduced the amount
1:42:20 of rapid eye movement sleep.
1:42:21 So it had–
1:42:22 – Significantly.
1:42:23 – Significantly.
1:42:24 – The melatonin point, how significantly.
1:42:26 – So it delayed the release by about somewhere
1:42:29 between 90 minutes to two hours across the individuals.
1:42:31 So in other words, your brain wasn’t.
1:42:33 So what melatonin does,
1:42:37 it’s called the hormone of darkness or the vampire hormone
1:42:41 just because it makes you want to bite into people’s necks
1:42:44 because it signals to your brain that it’s nighttime,
1:42:45 that it’s darkness.
1:42:49 And so your brain needs the signal of melatonin
1:42:51 for it to understand when is it dark.
1:42:53 In other words, it needs to understand
1:42:56 by way of melatonin when it is time to fall asleep.
1:42:59 And when you’re bathed in electric light at night,
1:43:00 and especially when you’re getting blue light
1:43:01 from these devices,
1:43:05 your brain is fooled into thinking it’s still daytime.
1:43:08 And when there is light emitting through your retina,
1:43:10 coming into your brain,
1:43:12 it signals to a part of your brain
1:43:14 to hit the brakes on melatonin.
1:43:16 And your brain will not release melatonin.
1:43:19 So what was happening with this iPad reading
1:43:21 is that you were artificially telling the brain
1:43:22 it’s still daytime,
1:43:25 and the brakes on melatonin was still shut on.
1:43:28 And so melatonin was not starting to be released
1:43:29 until much later.
1:43:32 And what was also interesting about the study, by the way,
1:43:34 is that when they stopped the iPad reading,
1:43:37 the sleep disrupted pattern continued
1:43:38 for several days later.
1:43:40 In other words, it was almost like a drug
1:43:44 that it had a washout period that was a blast radius to it.
1:43:45 Now, there’s been some great work
1:43:49 by a wonderful sleep scientist in Australia,
1:43:50 Michael Gradizar,
1:43:53 and he has added to this story,
1:43:55 and he said, “It’s not just the blue light.
1:43:59 “These devices, the principal function of these devices
1:44:01 “is that they are attention-captured devices.”
1:44:02 Just like you said,
1:44:06 I’m just gonna have a wee little TikTok before bed.
1:44:10 They are in the attention economy,
1:44:12 and all they care about is capturing your attention
1:44:13 for a current currency,
1:44:16 and they make a lot of money from it.
1:44:19 What that attention does is that it stimulates your brain,
1:44:21 and when your brain is stimulated,
1:44:23 it’s very difficult for you to fall asleep,
1:44:26 and it creates what we call sleep procrastination,
1:44:27 where you’re lying in bed,
1:44:28 and you could be perfectly sleepy,
1:44:31 and you could fall asleep right now,
1:44:33 but then you sort of check social media,
1:44:36 and they think, oh, I’ll just shoot that last email,
1:44:39 and then I’ll order that last thing on sort of Amazon,
1:44:41 and then you get a text back from your friend,
1:44:43 and you start texting them,
1:44:46 and then you look up, and it’s now an hour later,
1:44:48 and you’re an hour deficient on sleep,
1:44:51 so it’s the activation of your cerebral cortex
1:44:55 by these devices that is perhaps the more harmful aspect
1:44:57 of them regarding your sleep.
1:45:02 Now, here again, I don’t want to be finger-wagging.
1:45:04 The genie of technology is out the bottle,
1:45:06 and it’s not going back in any time soon.
1:45:09 There’s nothing that I’m going to say as a sleep researcher
1:45:10 that’s going to change that.
1:45:13 I don’t take my phone into my bedroom.
1:45:16 I put my phone out in the kitchen,
1:45:18 and I don’t see it until morning,
1:45:21 but lots of people do, and fair enough,
1:45:24 but there’s another rule that I’ve stolen
1:45:26 from another friend called Michael Grandner,
1:45:31 who’s here in America at the University of Tucson in Arizona.
1:45:33 He has this great rule regarding technology,
1:45:34 and it’s the following,
1:45:38 that if you really must take your phone into your bedroom,
1:45:42 you can only use it standing up.
1:45:46 And what you’ll find is that after about six or seven minutes
1:45:49 standing up, you think, I’m just going to sit down
1:45:50 on the bed, and at that point,
1:45:52 as soon as your backside hits the bed, you’re done.
1:45:53 You’ve got to put the phone away.
1:45:55 I think it’s a great rule of thumb
1:45:58 if you need to take technology in the bedroom.
1:45:59 – I’m going to apply that.
1:46:03 The other thing I wanted to ask was about sleep and weight loss.
1:46:06 I’ve had a lot of health experts on this podcast recently,
1:46:08 but none of them have really talked to me about the role
1:46:12 that sleep or sleep deprivation plays in weight.
1:46:15 Is there a relationship?
1:46:20 – It’s probably one of the most well-defined relationships
1:46:21 that we know in all of sleep science.
1:46:27 And it is at least a three-part story.
1:46:32 So the first emerging evidence came in terms of hormones.
1:46:35 So there are what we call appetite-regulating hormones,
1:46:38 and the two principle ones of concern here
1:46:41 are something called leptin and ghrelin.
1:46:43 Now, leptin, when it’s released,
1:46:46 will signal to your brain that you’re satisfied
1:46:49 with your food, you are satiated,
1:46:51 and you are no longer hungry.
1:46:54 Ghrelin does the opposite.
1:46:56 When ghrelin is released, it says,
1:46:58 “No, you’re not satisfied with your food.
1:47:00 “You are not full.
1:47:01 “You still want to eat more.
1:47:04 “You are still hungry.”
1:47:06 And some of the first things they started to do,
1:47:08 just limit people, restrict people’s sleep
1:47:11 to six hours or five hours or four hours.
1:47:14 And what they found was that there was,
1:47:17 firstly, that signal leptin that says,
1:47:20 “No, you’re satisfied with your food.
1:47:22 “You don’t want to eat anymore, you’re full.”
1:47:25 That signal of fullness, satiation,
1:47:28 was decreased by 18%.
1:47:31 If that wasn’t bad enough, ghrelin,
1:47:36 which is the hunger hormone, that lept up by 28%.
1:47:43 Overall, hunger levels rose by about 26%.
1:47:48 So firstly, it’s almost like double jeopardy,
1:47:50 that you are getting punished twice
1:47:52 for the same crime of not sleeping enough,
1:47:56 once by losing the signal of, “I’m full.
1:47:58 “I don’t want to eat anymore.”
1:48:01 And once again, for the, “No, I’m much more hungry,
1:48:04 “and I’m just going to overeat,” which is ghrelin.
1:48:10 So what that produces is a profile of increased eating.
1:48:13 So on average, under-slept individuals
1:48:14 started to eat in those studies
1:48:19 about three to 400 extra calories
1:48:23 at each sitting by way of insufficient sleep.
1:48:27 Then what they discovered is that it’s not just
1:48:30 that you want to eat more, it’s what it is
1:48:33 that you have a craving for when you are under-slept.
1:48:35 And this is the problem.
1:48:37 What they found is that when you are under-slept,
1:48:40 you eat more of everything, but you especially eat more
1:48:44 of these heavy-hitting, stodgy carbohydrates,
1:48:47 bread, pasta, pizza.
1:48:49 The next thing that you started to eat,
1:48:52 have a preference for, was simple sugary foods,
1:48:54 sweets, and chocolate.
1:48:57 And then finally, you started to crave very salty food,
1:49:01 and high-sodium food intake will increase your blood pressure.
1:49:06 So that was the first of the three mechanisms.
1:49:08 Then we did a study where we said,
1:49:11 perhaps it’s not just the circulating hormones in the body,
1:49:15 the brain is the ultimate arbiter of your food decisions.
1:49:16 So what’s going on in the brain?
1:49:19 So we took a group of perfectly healthy individuals,
1:49:21 and we put them through the experiment twice,
1:49:24 once when they’d had a full eight hours of sleep,
1:49:26 and once when we deprived them of sleep.
1:49:29 And the next day, we placed them inside an MRI scanner,
1:49:32 and we showed them images of lots of different foods
1:49:36 that range from being very healthy to being very unhealthy,
1:49:40 and ice cream, and chocolate, and pizza, and things,
1:49:45 to leafy salads, and nuts, and greens, and vegetables.
1:49:49 And we asked them to rate how much they wanted that food
1:49:50 for each item.
1:49:53 Now, we did something a bit dastardly,
1:49:55 to make it more ecologically correct,
1:49:56 so that they weren’t just saying,
1:49:59 okay, they probably think I should probably say that’s healthy.
1:50:02 We said, we’re gonna randomly select one of these images,
1:50:04 these food images that you see,
1:50:05 and after you get out the brain scanner,
1:50:06 we’re gonna give you that food,
1:50:09 and we’re going to politely ask you to eat it all.
1:50:10 So it made it a bit more realistic,
1:50:14 so the choices were more, you know, as much as that we could.
1:50:17 So what we found is that when they were sleep deprived,
1:50:22 the deep, hedonic centers, the emotional centers of the brain,
1:50:26 these desire centers, these reward centers,
1:50:28 they ramped up in their activity
1:50:30 in response to these highly desirable,
1:50:32 highly unhealthy foods.
1:50:35 So these more basic sort of, you know,
1:50:38 guttural parts of the brain, as it were,
1:50:41 these reward centers were lighting up much more strongly
1:50:43 when you were sleep deprived.
1:50:46 Worse still, the impulse control regions
1:50:47 in the front of the brain,
1:50:49 what we call the prefrontal cortex,
1:50:51 they were shut down, they were taken offline.
1:50:54 So as a consequence, you lost your impulse control,
1:50:56 and that’s why you start to then say,
1:50:58 you know, when I’m sleep deprived,
1:51:02 at the food sort of buffet, I’m not gonna do salad,
1:51:06 I’m just gonna, that pizza looks awful good,
1:51:07 or that pasta with the cream,
1:51:09 I’m just gonna go into that all go.
1:51:13 So it’s what we call a pattern
1:51:16 in terms of brain activity in neuroscience
1:51:17 of hedonic eating,
1:51:20 that your brain goes into this hedonic desire profile.
1:51:24 So now we understood it’s not just hormones in the body,
1:51:26 it’s also changes in the brain.
1:51:28 Then came the finding that there’s another chemical
1:51:31 in the body that’s responsible.
1:51:33 And this comes on to cannabis.
1:51:40 When people, when people,
1:51:43 when people that you may know have smoked at cannabis,
1:51:45 they’ll often say, I get viciously hungry,
1:51:47 I get the munchies, I get really hungry.
1:51:52 That’s no coincidence because cannabis will stimulate appetite.
1:51:57 Now, we all have naturally occurring cannabis compounds
1:51:59 in our brain and our bodies.
1:52:02 They are called endocannabinoids.
1:52:05 Endo meaning comes from insiders,
1:52:08 whereas the cannabis that comes externally
1:52:11 when you sort of smoke it or take edibles.
1:52:16 So endocannabinoids do many things for the brain and the body,
1:52:19 but one of the things that they do is control your appetite
1:52:20 and your hunger.
1:52:23 And what we found is that when you sleep-deprived individuals,
1:52:26 these naturally occurring endocannabinoids
1:52:29 rocketed up by over 20%,
1:52:31 cranking up people’s appetite.
1:52:37 And so these three ways lead you to start packing on,
1:52:40 when insufficient sleep is occurring,
1:52:41 when sleep gets short,
1:52:45 your waistline typically starts to expand.
1:52:47 And we now understand the reasons.
1:52:49 If that wasn’t bad enough.
1:52:50 – It is bad enough.
1:52:54 – Yeah, you just stop, Matt please, honestly, I’m really.
1:52:57 The last thing that we discovered is that,
1:52:59 let’s say that you’re trying to be really careful
1:53:01 and you’re trying to diet and you’re trying to lose weight.
1:53:05 If you’re not getting sufficient sleep,
1:53:09 then 60% of all of the weight that you lose
1:53:14 will come from lean muscle mass and not fat.
1:53:16 – I know exactly.
1:53:19 So in other words, when you are dieting,
1:53:21 but you are under slept,
1:53:24 you lose what you want to keep, which is muscle,
1:53:28 and you keep what you want to lose, which is fat.
1:53:30 So again, it’s-
1:53:31 – I’m sold.
1:53:33 – Not an ideal situation.
1:53:35 – My last question for you, in fact,
1:53:38 was of all the subject matter we’ve talked about,
1:53:40 what is the most interesting thing we’ve missed?
1:53:43 In your view, the thing that you think is most pertinent
1:53:46 or interesting or significant or perks people up
1:53:49 or sits them on the end of their chair when you discuss it?
1:53:54 – I think the only other area
1:53:59 that fascinates people even more than sleep is dreaming.
1:54:05 So dreaming above and beyond the stage of which it comes from,
1:54:07 which is principally called rapid eye movement sleep
1:54:11 or dream sleep, REM sleep provides a set of physiological
1:54:15 and benefits, but dreaming we’ve now discovered
1:54:19 even above and beyond that provides benefits
1:54:20 and it provides at least two benefits.
1:54:22 The first is creativity.
1:54:24 I was telling you that during deep sleep,
1:54:25 you cement individual memories.
1:54:28 You grab memories and you shift them
1:54:29 from a short-term storage reservoir
1:54:32 to a long-term storage reservoir,
1:54:33 and you strengthen the circuit of those memories.
1:54:36 So you future-proof information,
1:54:38 but that’s individual memories.
1:54:40 What we discovered is that sleep is much more intelligent
1:54:42 than you ever thought possible.
1:54:46 That it’s during REM sleep and particularly during dreaming
1:54:49 that we take all of the individual pieces of information
1:54:52 that we’ve been learning and we start interconnecting them
1:54:55 and associating them with all of our back catalog
1:54:57 of stored information.
1:55:00 And so what dream sleep, one of the functions of dream sleep
1:55:05 is to cross link and associate new memories together.
1:55:09 So you wake up the next day having after dream sleep
1:55:13 with a revised mind web of associations.
1:55:15 And those are capable of defining solutions
1:55:18 to previously impenetrable problems.
1:55:21 So think of dreaming as,
1:55:23 it’s almost like informational alchemy
1:55:25 that you start to fuse things together
1:55:27 that shouldn’t normally go together.
1:55:30 But when they do, they cause marked advances
1:55:34 in your thinking, in your productivity, in your ingenuity.
1:55:36 And in that way, you go to sleep
1:55:38 with the pieces of the jigsaw,
1:55:41 but you wake up with the puzzle complete.
1:55:43 And I would argue that that’s the difference
1:55:45 between knowledge, which is remembering
1:55:49 the individual pieces and wisdom,
1:55:51 which is knowing what it all means
1:55:53 when you fit them together.
1:55:55 That’s one of the functions of dreaming.
1:55:56 It’s the reason, by the way,
1:55:58 that you’ve never been told to stay awake on a problem.
1:56:04 – The other function of dreaming that we know of
1:56:07 is that dreaming provides a form of emotional first aid
1:56:10 that we’ve done a lot of work
1:56:12 and we came up with a theory
1:56:15 that was called dreaming as overnight therapy.
1:56:17 And what we’ve discovered is that
1:56:19 when we go into dream sleep,
1:56:21 particularly based on its neurochemical profile
1:56:23 and its physiological anatomy of the brain,
1:56:27 the dreaming brain will take difficult,
1:56:30 painful experiences, sometimes traumatic experiences.
1:56:33 And it will essentially strip away
1:56:36 the bitter emotional rind from the informational orange.
1:56:37 So let’s take a step back.
1:56:40 What makes a memory emotional?
1:56:41 What makes a memory emotional
1:56:43 is that at the time of the experience,
1:56:46 that experience triggered a strong visceral reaction.
1:56:49 And that visceral reaction is useful to the brain
1:56:51 and it wraps that experience
1:56:53 in this blanket of what we call emotion.
1:56:56 It red flags it and prioritizes it in the brain.
1:56:59 So now you’ve created a memory of an emotional event.
1:57:03 In other words, you’ve created an emotional memory.
1:57:06 But what dream sleep does is then it takes
1:57:08 that useful emotional memory
1:57:11 and it will detox the emotion from the memory.
1:57:14 It strips the bitter emotional rind
1:57:17 from the informational orange.
1:57:20 It’s almost, and that’s why we called it overnight therapy.
1:57:22 So that the next day you come back
1:57:26 and now you feel better about those experiences.
1:57:30 So you have a memory of an emotional event
1:57:32 but is no longer emotional itself.
1:57:35 You don’t regurgitate that same visceral reaction
1:57:37 that you had at the time of learning.
1:57:40 So the brain has done this elegant trick
1:57:43 of stripping the emotion from the memory.
1:57:48 So that’s the second benefit is that it provides,
1:57:51 it’s not time that heals all wounds.
1:57:55 It is time during sleep and particularly during dream sleep
1:57:57 that provides emotional convalescence.
1:57:59 – It’s funny because there’s a stereotype
1:58:02 that we should never go to bed angry each other.
1:58:06 You will wake up far less angry as a consequence.
1:58:08 – Matt, we have a closing tradition on this podcast
1:58:10 where the last guest asks a question for the next guest,
1:58:13 not knowing who they’re gonna ask it for.
1:58:14 The question that’s been left for you
1:58:15 from our previous guest,
1:58:16 obviously they didn’t know who they’re leaving it for
1:58:17 but it’s a very,
1:58:19 I love these questions when they’re challenging.
1:58:23 What is the biggest way in which you are a contradiction?
1:58:31 – Gosh, I’m a contradiction in so many ways.
1:58:34 I think I’m a contradiction in the sense
1:58:39 that within my profession with this field of sleep,
1:58:40 I feel very comfortable.
1:58:42 I’m reticent to say confident,
1:58:46 but I am very comfortable to get on stage,
1:58:49 give a TED talk in front of a couple of thousand people
1:58:51 and my heart rate will be very stable.
1:58:56 I probably, I probably don’t feel,
1:59:00 I feel more myself on stage alone
1:59:02 in front of thousands of people
1:59:04 than I do at any other time in my life.
1:59:07 That’s where I feel most myself.
1:59:11 But yet I’m a contradiction because offstage,
1:59:16 I’m very insecure, I’m very much an introvert,
1:59:22 I’m very shy, I don’t like being the focus of attention.
1:59:25 And so those two things I’ve often wrestled with
1:59:27 but the more people I’ve spoken to
1:59:29 sort of now being out in the public sphere
1:59:33 and sort of being more in the public intellectual realm,
1:59:36 you start to meet very famous people
1:59:41 and you meet musicians and what you learn
1:59:42 is that they’re very similar,
1:59:45 that they say that they become this version
1:59:48 of themselves onstage and then when they’re offstage,
1:59:50 they are a radically different person,
1:59:52 but I’m such a contradiction in that sense.
1:59:57 I feel very comfortable and very secure onstage
1:59:59 and in front of thousands of people.
2:00:01 And for many people, public speaking
2:00:04 is one of the most angiogenic things
2:00:05 you can ask anyone to do.
2:00:10 But for me, heart rate is probably in the mid-40s,
2:00:13 very relaxing for me.
2:00:15 But then put me in a room,
2:00:17 in a small room of a couple of people
2:00:18 and my heart rate’s probably through the roof
2:00:19 and I’ve become very introverted.
2:00:21 So I’m a contradiction in that sense.
2:00:24 Yeah.
2:00:27 – Matthew, thank you.
2:00:29 Thank you for making the time today.
2:00:31 I’ve wanted to speak to you for many, many years
2:00:33 and you absolutely never disappoint anybody.
2:00:34 So you’re–
2:00:36 – That’s a great kind of you to say.
2:00:37 – It’s exceptionally important work.
2:00:38 And as you said at the start of this conversation,
2:00:41 we often neglect the medicinal properties
2:00:45 of a great night’s sleep over things like diet and medicine
2:00:47 or exercise, whatever else it is.
2:00:50 But your voice and the passion that sits behind it
2:00:54 has led a charge in society which is waking us up,
2:00:58 no pun intended, to the virtues
2:00:59 and the power and the importance
2:01:01 of having a great night’s sleep.
2:01:02 But in a nice way,
2:01:04 in a way that I find really empowering and actionable
2:01:05 and that’s the most important thing.
2:01:06 So thank you for that, Matthew.
2:01:08 – Thank you and thank you for saying that last part
2:01:09 especially.
2:01:14 I don’t think I can lay claim to that sort of early on.
2:01:15 I think I’m doing much better as,
2:01:16 oh, much better.
2:01:19 I’m doing a little bit better as a public communicator.
2:01:21 I’m being less puritanical and dictatorial
2:01:22 in my sleep message.
2:01:24 I think I did a terrible job coming out.
2:01:26 I’m learning and I’m being more sensitive
2:01:29 but I’m always lovely to hear feedback from folks
2:01:31 about what I’m not doing well
2:01:34 ’cause I would love to do this better and better if I can.
2:01:36 But thank you for saying those kind words
2:01:38 and thank you again for having me on,
2:01:40 giving me this opportunity to speak.
2:01:43 I now will anoint you as a sleep ambassador
2:01:44 from this point forward.
2:01:46 So thank you so much again, Stephen.
2:01:47 I really appreciate it.
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