Latest / The LIVING Room Podcast | Inside The WNDR Lab / Neuroscientist Matthew Walker Destroys the Biggest Sleep Myths — From 5-Hour Nights to Melatonin Use

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Neuroscientist Matthew Walker Destroys the Biggest Sleep Myths — From 5-Hour Nights to Melatonin Use · The LIVING Room Podcast | Inside The WNDR Lab

• 0:00
  SPEAKER_00: Sleep is not an optional lifestyle luxury.
• 0:03
  SPEAKER_00: Sleep is a non-negotiable biological necessity.
• 0:07
  SPEAKER_00: It is your elixir of life.
• 0:09
  SPEAKER_00: If you're not getting sufficient sleep, let's say defined as either less than six hours of sleep, your immune system is one of the first things that we see is highly sensitive.
• 0:17
  SPEAKER_00: There was a great study from UCLA, and they brought healthy individuals in and they limited them to four hours of sleep for one single night.
• 0:25
  SPEAKER_00: And then they looked to see what was the percent reduction in a set of critical anti-cancer-fighting immune cells called natural killer cells.
• 0:32
  SPEAKER_00: And the next day there was a 70% drop, and that's one night of just four hours of sleep.
• 0:38
  SPEAKER_00: Deep sleep is one of the most wonderful forms of natural blood pressure medication that you could ever wish for.
• 0:45
  SPEAKER_00: If I manipulate sleep and get you sleeping better, it has a measurable impact on your dementia mortality.
• 0:52
  SPEAKER_00: There was a study where they took healthy young fertile guys and they put them on essentially a restricted amount of sleep, five hours of sleep for six nights.
• 1:01
  SPEAKER_00: At the end of that one week, their level of testosterone was that of someone 10 years ago senior.
• 1:07
  SPEAKER_00: So I can age a man by a decade within just five nights of short sleep.
• 1:12
  SPEAKER_00: It's never too late to start sleeping better.
• 1:42
  SPEAKER_01: I loved filming this episode and I hope you enjoy it.
• 1:45
  SPEAKER_01: Without further ado, please welcome Dr.
• 1:47
  SPEAKER_01: Matthew Walker.
• 1:48
  SPEAKER_01: Hey Matt.
• 1:49
  SPEAKER_01: Chris, hello.
• 1:50
  SPEAKER_01: So good to see you as per.
• 1:53
  SPEAKER_01: Hey, we are both British.
• 1:56
  SPEAKER_01: So good start.
• 1:57
  SPEAKER_00: Unfortunately, yeah.
• 1:58
  SPEAKER_00: Um for the people listening.
• 2:00
  SPEAKER_01: And knowing the UK, how I do 30 years ago, you know, sleep wasn't a sexy, trendy topic.
• 2:10
  SPEAKER_01: In fact, people just weren't talking about it, right?
• 2:12
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
• 2:12
  SPEAKER_01: And so, you know, now it feels like this huge phenomenon certainly wasn't a topic that we were talking about, you know, 20 plus years ago when we were not with any degree of granularity when we were trying to optimize athletic performance.
• 2:27
  SPEAKER_01: Like we knew it was important, but not really how to optimize for it.
• 2:31
  SPEAKER_01: This is a long-winded way of asking how and why did you end up studying the then unsexy topic of sleep?
• 2:40
  SPEAKER_00: Um, mostly because I'm a desperately unsexy, sexy man.
• 2:44
  SPEAKER_00: Um, but I would say all of us in the sleep field for the most part were all accidental sleep scientists.
• 2:51
  SPEAKER_00: You know, no one, when you're five years old in the classroom and they say, What would you like to be when you grow up?
• 2:56
  SPEAKER_00: No one's shooting their hand up and saying, I would desperately love to be a sleep scientist, you know.
• 3:01
  SPEAKER_00: And so I was, so I did medicine um back in the UK, then went into a PhD.
• 3:09
  SPEAKER_00: And I was studying people with dementia, very early stage dementia, and I was using brainwave recordings with EEG slapped on the uh the scalp to see if I could differentially diagnose what type of dementia they had very early on in the course of the disease.
• 3:23
  SPEAKER_00: And I was failing.
• 3:24
  SPEAKER_00: I was getting absolutely no good results whatsoever.
• 3:27
  SPEAKER_00: So one weekend I was reading sort of stack of journals, this igloo of journals around me, and I realized that some of the dementias would eat away at the sleep centers.
• 3:38
  SPEAKER_00: And other forms of dementia, they would go after other areas of the brain.
• 3:42
  SPEAKER_00: So I started to think, well, I'm measuring my patients at the wrong time, which is when they're awake, I should be measuring them when they're asleep.
• 3:50
  SPEAKER_00: Got a grant, built a sleep lab, figured out how to do that, and the results were unbelievable.
• 3:55
  SPEAKER_00: Just night and day, night night and day difference.
• 3:59
  SPEAKER_00: Um and then I started to ask, well, I wonder if the sleep problems are not just a symptom of the dementia, I wonder if it's an underlying cause of the dementia.
• 4:09
  SPEAKER_00: At that point, started to read everything I could about sleep, and I fell in love with the topic of sleep, and it it came out of the blue.
• 4:21
  SPEAKER_00: I think it's the most beguiling topic in all of science, although I understand I'm biased.
• 4:27
  SPEAKER_00: Sure.
• 4:27
  SPEAKER_00: And it's a love affair that's lasted me over 20 years now, and I will not study anything else.
• 4:33
  SPEAKER_00: So you still love it?
• 4:34
  SPEAKER_00: Do you still love studying sleep?
• 4:36
  SPEAKER_00: Absolutely fascinated by it.
• 4:38
  SPEAKER_00: I could talk, people sometimes say, you know, after an evening, or you do these speaking events and you talking, and I say, Don't you must be so tired, you must get so bored.
• 4:47
  SPEAKER_00: I genuinely don't.
• 4:48
  SPEAKER_00: I'm like a child who almost has this sort of amnesic sort of shroud.
• 4:54
  SPEAKER_00: That's so every day I wake up and I'm so excited to talk about sleep.
• 4:59
  SPEAKER_00: I don't know what it is.
• 4:59
  SPEAKER_00: It's very strange.
• 5:01
  SPEAKER_01: I can completely see what it is.
• 5:02
  SPEAKER_01: One, I think you're just so passionate and um just incredibly good at turning something that is insanely complex but disguised as something simple into something that people can understand.
• 5:17
  SPEAKER_01: Like trans, you do so good at translating it.
• 5:20
  SPEAKER_01: I had the privilege of introducing you at a talk recently, and I just saw every single person in that room right on the edge of their seats.
• 5:28
  SPEAKER_01: And and and they wanted to all come and talk to you afterwards and question you.
• 5:31
  SPEAKER_01: And I was glad you were there because you you're so good at uh uh uh answering questions that I think these are things that we all struggle with.
• 5:41
  SPEAKER_01: Like the the optimizing for something that we all do, but we all struggle with.
• 5:46
  SPEAKER_01: I think you you and I have discussed this in in the past that you you can get away with not eating well for a week or not training for a week.
• 5:54
  SPEAKER_01: You do one or two days of poor sleep and you feel like you're drunk or terrible or hung over or exhausted.
• 6:02
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
• 6:03
  SPEAKER_00: The only thing I lose to in that sort of um r situation is oxygen.
• 6:08
  SPEAKER_00: You know, you will definitely have a harder time without oxygen in a shorter period of time than you will without sleep.
• 6:14
  SPEAKER_00: But other than that, if I put it up against, you know, that is the only thing you lose to.
• 6:18
  SPEAKER_00: For the most part, yeah.
• 6:19
  SPEAKER_00: You know, you take a human being and I deprive them of food for 24 hours, exercise for 24 hours, um, you know, sleep for 24 hours, and I map you brain and body, and I look, what is the degree of physiological disturbance as a consequence of those three perturbations?
• 6:36
  SPEAKER_00: Hands down, sleep, it's not even close.
• 6:39
  SPEAKER_00: And it's not to say that diet and exercise aren't important.
• 6:42
  SPEAKER_00: Of course they are, they are fundamentally.
• 6:44
  SPEAKER_00: But I used to think sleep was the third pillar alongside diet and exercise.
• 6:48
  SPEAKER_00: And I actually now think it's not, I think it's the foundation on those that those two other things sit.
• 6:53
  SPEAKER_00: And I'll give you one example.
• 6:54
  SPEAKER_00: There's a great study, we didn't do it.
• 6:57
  SPEAKER_00: Um, and it was from the University of Chicago, and they looked at people who were dieting.
• 7:02
  SPEAKER_00: And sure enough, when you diet and you're not getting sufficient sleep, you still lose weight.
• 7:06
  SPEAKER_00: But what was interesting is that 60% of all of the weight that they lost came from lean muscle mass and not fat mass.
• 7:15
  SPEAKER_00: In other words, when you're dieting but you're not getting sufficient sleep, your body gives away what you want to keep, which is muscle, and you keep what you're trying to lose, which is fat.
• 7:27
  SPEAKER_00: Is that right?
• 7:28
  SPEAKER_01: 60% came from lean.
• 7:30
  SPEAKER_00: And you think, well, why is why would that be the case?
• 7:33
  SPEAKER_00: Uh human beings, firstly, are the only species that will deliberately deprive themselves of sleep for no apparent good biological reason.
• 7:41
  SPEAKER_00: And there are only a few handful of reasons that you see it in the wild.
• 7:45
  SPEAKER_00: The first is under predation, the second is starvation.
• 7:49
  SPEAKER_00: And when an animal is under conditions of starvation, it will deliberately release a chemical that allows it to stay awake longer so it can forage in a broader perimeter to get food because whatever perimeter it's currently in, it's not working, it's not working.
• 8:04
  SPEAKER_00: So it will overdrive the wake system.
• 8:07
  SPEAKER_00: And so as a consequence, when it goes into those, when you're starting to get signals of I'm not sleeping enough, the from an evolutionary perspective, the body thinks, oh my goodness, I'm in a state of starvation because it usually those two things go hand in hand.
• 8:22
  SPEAKER_00: And as a consequence, it says, I need to preserve the thing that has the highest caloric value per unit of energy or of gram sort of mass, which is adipose of fat tissue.
• 8:33
  SPEAKER_00: And so that's why you get stuck in this evolutionary bind from a legacy that we are not suffering from.
• 8:40
  SPEAKER_00: Is that right?
• 8:41
  SPEAKER_00: That's remarkable.
• 8:43
  SPEAKER_01: And I did not know that.
• 8:45
  SPEAKER_01: Wow, that makes so much sense.
• 8:47
  SPEAKER_01: One thing I always struggled about with with sleep in general, and I asked one of our one of your peers this recently in person, um, was why why then you know evolution is is so um in is so particular and intentional and and predictable in in so many ways.
• 9:07
  SPEAKER_01: Why have we why do we even still need to sleep at all?
• 9:10
  SPEAKER_01: You know, like it feels like a bit of um, you know, pred if predation is one of the reasons we stay awake, then why the need for sleep?
• 9:17
  SPEAKER_00: And why I mean it's and it's a it's a fundamental question that you just raised, because from an evolutionary standpoint, sleep is the most idiotic of all behaviors.
• 9:30
  SPEAKER_00: From first, you're not finding a mate, you're not foraging for food, you're not reproducing, you're not caring for your young, and worst of all, you're vulnerable to predation.
• 9:39
  SPEAKER_00: On any one of those five grounds, and especially all of them as a collective, sleep should have been strongly selected against in the course of evolution.
• 9:47
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
• 9:47
  SPEAKER_00: The fact that in every single species that we've studied to date, sleep seems to be present or something very much like it.
• 9:54
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah means number one, sleep evolved with life itself on this planet.
• 9:58
  SPEAKER_00: Number two, it has fought its way through heroically every step along the evolutionary path, which must mean that if sleep does not serve an absolutely vital set of functions, then it is the biggest mistake the evolutionary process ever made.
• 10:11
  SPEAKER_00: And now, based on the weight of the evidence, we understand that nature didn't make a spectacular blunder.
• 10:16
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
• 10:16
  SPEAKER_00: It's absolutely stunning what you can accomplish.
• 10:19
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
• 10:19
  SPEAKER_00: And but you have to think if it outweighs all of those detrimental things that I just described, whatever it's doing must be elemental.
• 10:28
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
• 10:29
  SPEAKER_00: Must be.
• 10:30
  SPEAKER_00: Super high return on that danger.
• 10:32
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
• 10:32
  SPEAKER_01: Your ROI with sleep is pretty solid.
• 10:35
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
• 10:36
  SPEAKER_01: Let's talk about like why it's become such a phenomenon and like how that research has evolved.
• 10:42
  SPEAKER_01: Because, as you say, it is fundamental and elemental part of human biology.
• 10:48
  SPEAKER_01: Why do you think it took so long for us to understand its importance and urgency?
• 10:53
  SPEAKER_01: Because, you know, from your work and and others, I mean the our our likelihood of living a long and healthy life in the absence of good sleep is very slim.
• 11:04
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
• 11:05
  SPEAKER_01: So so how how how what what has changed such that we now treat this with urgency?
• 11:10
  SPEAKER_01: Or is it just funding and accessibility and you know access to knowledge?
• 11:15
  SPEAKER_00: I think it's if you look back, I think it's the tools of science that accelerated the progress.
• 11:23
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
• 11:23
  SPEAKER_00: And, you know, 50 or 60 years ago, we used to ask the question, you know, why do we sleep?
• 11:29
  SPEAKER_00: And the crass answer was, we sleep to cure sleepiness.
• 11:33
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
• 11:34
  SPEAKER_00: Which is the idiotic equivalent of saying, well, I eat to cure hunger.
• 11:38
  SPEAKER_00: No, you don't eat to cure hunger.
• 11:39
  SPEAKER_00: You eat for all sorts of biological reasons.
• 11:41
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
• 11:42
  SPEAKER_00: But now, 60 years later, we've had to upend the question based on the wealth of the data.
• 11:47
  SPEAKER_00: Now we have to ask, is there any major physiological system of your body, or is there any operation of your mind that isn't wonderfully enhanced by sleep when we get it or demonstrably impaired when we don't get enough?
• 12:00
  SPEAKER_00: And the answer seems to be no.
• 12:02
  SPEAKER_00: But really, it was, you know, back it was only in 1953, published in 1954, that we realized that we have different stages of sleep.
• 12:11
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
• 12:12
  SPEAKER_00: So the whole idea that there are this collection of different this ballet of roller coaster ride stages that you go in and out of, that's relatively new in the the history of the scientific method.
• 12:25
  SPEAKER_00: So 70, 80 years old.
• 12:27
  SPEAKER_00: So no wonder we until that point were somewhat, you know, grasping in the dog when it came to understanding why we sleep.
• 12:37
  SPEAKER_00: But then the tools of neuroscience and physiology came about, and boom, the floodgates were open.
• 12:44
  SPEAKER_00: Stunning discoveries.
• 12:45
  SPEAKER_00: And even now though, we're still making just radical new discoveries based on the technology that we have.
• 12:51
  SPEAKER_01: How bad is it for someone?
• 12:55
  SPEAKER_01: You know, and the reason I asked this, we all have nights where we don't sleep well.
• 12:58
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
• 12:59
  SPEAKER_01: And, you know, I think some of the you know modern technology makes that worse.
• 13:03
  SPEAKER_01: It certainly does for me.
• 13:05
  SPEAKER_01: Um, you know, how bad it like what is happening physiologically when we are short sleeping, you know, when we are creating a sleep debt?
• 13:14
  SPEAKER_01: What is actually happening?
• 13:15
  SPEAKER_01: Because I think the answer to that might create some more urgency.
• 13:19
  SPEAKER_01: Uh it certainly does knowing what you know.
• 13:22
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
• 13:22
  SPEAKER_00: You can in some ways you can answer the question um through two different lenses.
• 13:27
  SPEAKER_00: The first is the what happens when by way of the absence of it.
• 13:31
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
• 13:31
  SPEAKER_00: And secondly, we can also look, well, what is the what are the mechanisms of the benefit when we obtain it?
• 13:37
  SPEAKER_00: But probably the best way is through the first lens.
• 13:40
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
• 13:40
  SPEAKER_00: Firstly, if you're not getting sufficient sleep, let's say defined as either less than six hours of sleep, five hours of your immune system is one of the things, first things that we see is highly sensitive.
• 13:51
  SPEAKER_00: There was a great study from um UCLA, and they brought healthy individuals in and they limited them to four hours of sleep for one single night.
• 13:59
  SPEAKER_00: And then they looked to see what was the percent reduction in a set of critical anti-cancer-fighting immune cells called natural killer cells.
• 14:07
  SPEAKER_00: And the next day there was a 70% drop in natural killer cells, and that's one night of just four hours of sleep.
• 14:14
  SPEAKER_00: Uh you can also look, for example, and when you turn that table, I just sort of go to the second lens.
• 14:21
  SPEAKER_00: Uh then what is it about sleep that seems to give us that immune resilience?
• 14:26
  SPEAKER_00: It's two things.
• 14:27
  SPEAKER_00: When you go into sleep, particularly deep sleep or what we call deep non-rapid eye movement sleep, uh deep sleep will restock the weaponry in your immune arsenal.
• 14:37
  SPEAKER_00: And the second thing that it does is it sensitizes the body to all of those immune factors.
• 14:44
  SPEAKER_00: So on both sides of the equation, the production of your immune sort of um factors and how receptive your body is to getting those signals, uh, you're you're as a consequence a much more immune-resilient organism the following day after a good night of sleep.
• 15:01
  SPEAKER_00: Uh we can also look, for example, your cardiovascular system.
• 15:06
  SPEAKER_00: And firstly, deep sleep is one of the most wonderful forms of natural blood pressure medication that you could ever wish for.
• 15:14
  SPEAKER_00: Because as you're going down into deep sleep, all of a sudden your nervous system shifts from one branch, which is this sort of very active the fight or flight branch of the nervous system, what we call the sympathetic nervous system, which is um anything but, and it shifts over into what we call the parasympathetic, which is this sort of quiescent branch of the nervous system.
• 15:32
  SPEAKER_00: At that point, when you go down into deep sleep, the heart rate starts to decelerate, your blood vessels start to relax and they dilate, and all of a sudden, this blood pressure, this cardiovascular reset will happen.
• 15:45
  SPEAKER_00: As a consequence, when you don't get sufficient sleep, there are cardiovascular consequences.
• 15:51
  SPEAKER_00: And a good example here is um there's a global experiment that is performed on about 1.6 billion people, and it happens across 70 countries twice a year, and it's called daylight savings time.
• 16:03
  SPEAKER_00: And there was an amazing study, and they looked in the spring in the northern hemisphere when we lose one hour of sleep at the spring time change.
• 16:12
  SPEAKER_00: The following day there was a 24% increase in relative heart attack risk the next day, and that's one hour of lost sleep.
• 16:20
  SPEAKER_00: In the autumn, when you gain an hour of sleep, there's a 21% reduction in heart attack, so it's bi-directional.
• 16:26
  SPEAKER_00: And so we could sort of keep going with these with all of this the model systems.
• 16:31
  SPEAKER_00: Another great example is your hormonal system, the endocrine system.
• 16:35
  SPEAKER_00: And there was a study where they took healthy, young, virile guys and they put them on essentially a restricted amount of sleep, five hours of sleep for six nights.
• 16:45
  SPEAKER_00: At the end of that one week, their level of testosterone was that of someone 10 years their senior.
• 16:52
  SPEAKER_00: So I can age a man by a decade within just five nights of short sleep.
• 16:58
  SPEAKER_00: And so, and I'm sure we'll talk about the brain as well, but these are just some of the ways in which your system is so dependent on sleep.
• 17:07
  SPEAKER_00: And that's why we use words like elemental and fundamental.
• 17:11
  SPEAKER_00: Uh but it's uh sleep is a strange bird relative to diet and exercise, in the sense of how we virtue signal.
• 17:22
  SPEAKER_00: And what I mean by this is I think a lot of people are happy to tell you, well, I've been getting to the gym five times a week for the past three months now.
• 17:29
  SPEAKER_00: And well, congratulations, but I'm really pleased for you.
• 17:31
  SPEAKER_00: Or I've been eating super clean for the for the past month.
• 17:35
  SPEAKER_00: Um it's very different when people say, Oh, I've been sleeping eight and a half, nine hours every and almost no one does that.
• 17:43
  SPEAKER_00: And why is it's because we've got this terrible stigma that we associate sufficient sleep, and I choose my word very carefully, sufficient sleep with laziness.
• 17:53
  SPEAKER_00: And I think I've thought a lot about this.
• 17:55
  SPEAKER_00: I think it's because uh we uh if you are allowed or you are able to get eight or nine hours of sleep, people think, well, you must not be busy.
• 18:04
  SPEAKER_00: And if you're not busy, you must not be important.
• 18:07
  SPEAKER_00: And we associate busyness with this tag, this prestige tag of importance, and as a consequence, we don't virtue signal.
• 18:16
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, and it's an odd thing because we don't hold that opinion all of the time.
• 18:20
  SPEAKER_00: No one looks like an infant sleeping during the day and says, Well, what a lazy baby.
• 18:25
  SPEAKER_00: You're bone idle, what are you doing?
• 18:27
  SPEAKER_00: You know, it's where's the rent check?
• 18:29
  SPEAKER_00: Um, but we know that at that moment in uh in life, sleep is absolutely elemental, it's required.
• 18:37
  SPEAKER_00: But if you look at the data now, even somewhere between infancy and childhood, not only do we abandon the notion that sleep should be embraced and celebrated, we chastise people and we call you a sloth.
• 18:49
  SPEAKER_00: And so there's there's something about the mindset that I think it was part of the reason that I ended up wanting to write a book because uh I I could see so much disease and sickness and suffering happening by way of insufficient sleep.
• 19:05
  SPEAKER_00: And I I wanted to try to help re-educate people and say it's a right, it's your it's your human right to be able to get sufficient sleep and not feel as though you are, you know, doing yourself a disservice and everyone else around you because you're lazy.
• 19:23
  SPEAKER_00: So isn't it crazy?
• 19:25
  SPEAKER_01: I mean, do you think that's changing though a little now with the wearables?
• 19:29
  SPEAKER_01: And like, you know, one of my team members this morning, the very first thing she said to me when I got in was my sleep score was 86.
• 19:36
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, and I was like, I'm really, really happy for you.
• 19:40
  SPEAKER_01: Um still not on that same level as you know, you know, uh work hard, play hard.
• 19:50
  SPEAKER_01: Right, you know, um, we certainly virtue signal for training and you know, and even like um these are sort of diet philosophies, religions, like everyone has their own sort of nutrition plan that they uh will defend until passionately and you know, vocally and publicly.
• 20:11
  SPEAKER_00: But but I think that the tide is starting to change.
• 20:15
  SPEAKER_00: I'm not entirely sure why that's happening, but I think it's particularly in younger generations, I think there is this idea where in people in the sort of maybe 30s, 40s, 50s, in some sectors of the professional world, it's almost competitive under sleeping.
• 20:35
  SPEAKER_00: Which get this kind of like bright, it's almost like a sleep machismo attitude.
• 20:39
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, for sure.
• 20:39
  SPEAKER_00: And people are very vocal to wear their badge of sleep deprivation as if it's honor based on their arm and they're happy to tell you about it.
• 20:48
  SPEAKER_00: And I think that's that's starting to change.
• 20:50
  SPEAKER_00: We're even seeing it starting to bleed out.
• 20:52
  SPEAKER_00: You know, there's now a um a sleep tourism industry that's happening where people are literally just booking themselves into a hotel, not to go and see a country, not for business, simply to say I'm gonna gift myself the privilege of getting a decent night of sleep.
• 21:07
  SPEAKER_00: I know some I know some parents like that, you know, who are like one night.
• 21:11
  SPEAKER_00: Oh they they would think that to me, if you could just give me a Friday and Saturday where I've just clean sheets, no crankheads, nothing, and I just get to sleep, that would be heaven.
• 21:21
  SPEAKER_00: I don't need to go and see the wonders of the world, just give me a bed.
• 21:24
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, you know, and it's strange that we've got to that point in society, but I do think to your point, I think the tide is changing just a little bit.
• 21:31
  SPEAKER_01: Has has sleep duration, how has that trended over the last like three, four, five decades?
• 21:38
  SPEAKER_01: Like, have we do we get less sleep now than we used to?
• 21:41
  SPEAKER_00: If you look at it on a wider timescale across and the sort of earliest decent data that we have is probably around 1920, is when we started to be able to get some good data.
• 21:52
  SPEAKER_00: And it has just consistently declined over time.
• 21:56
  SPEAKER_00: In fact, there was a study, um, a great thesis from a A graduate student actually from Australia, and she looked gathered together all this data on um children from age six through until 18.
• 22:08
  SPEAKER_00: And what she saw was very consistent.
• 22:10
  SPEAKER_00: They were losing um about um, well, they've lost since about 1940 about two hours of total sleep, which you know, on a for a child or a teenager, let's say that the average sleep need there is like nine and a half, ten hours, if you just aggregate all of the data, you know, two hours off of a 10-hour sleep need is non-trivial.
• 22:35
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
• 22:35
  SPEAKER_00: You know, and so if I were to come along and say relative to 1940, now society has essentially been throttling children to the point where they are 20% less oxygen intake, a vital life ingredient, and there's something that's asphyxiating them so that they're only getting 80% of what they used to get in terms of oxygen to the brain, you know, 60, 80 years ago.
• 23:04
  SPEAKER_00: You would think whatever this is this is that's that's terrible.
• 23:08
  SPEAKER_00: You know, we need that's a public health campaign.
• 23:11
  SPEAKER_00: Sleep is not far off that in terms of a biological need, but essentially that's what's happened, and there's no outcry.
• 23:18
  SPEAKER_01: It's just this really baffling to me that you know, even I've been working in this field for 20 plus years, yeah, and it wasn't really until you know why we sleep changed my outlook on sleep in so many ways.
• 23:32
  SPEAKER_01: One of the best books of all time.
• 23:34
  SPEAKER_01: I like I really truly really is.
• 23:36
  SPEAKER_01: I I encourage everyone to read that at least once.
• 23:39
  SPEAKER_01: We give it to every single member.
• 23:41
  SPEAKER_01: Um, I we we give it away all the time because I think you're so right when you say that there is this like machismo about like cutting that I'll sleep when I'm dead, or like you know, I'll skip into the grave.
• 23:54
  SPEAKER_01: And you're like, yeah, you will a lot quicker if you don't do this thing.
• 23:57
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, but the reason I the reason I think it's even more important than than that um that that lack of urgency for it is that even the people that are trying to do it that do approach it with urgency struggle at times, yeah.
• 24:10
  SPEAKER_01: Right, myself included, right?
• 24:12
  SPEAKER_01: I think you know, now we have this um screen in our pocket that anyone can contact us on at any point, and we're busying ourselves of all kinds of different um threats to our attention.
• 24:25
  SPEAKER_01: The the social media feeds, the news feeds, the messages are engineered to keep us on them.
• 24:33
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, right.
• 24:34
  SPEAKER_01: And I think that is so very difficult to tear yourself away from um at times.
• 24:40
  SPEAKER_01: And I mean again, I'm speaking about myself here.
• 24:42
  SPEAKER_01: No, um, you know, you combine that with the there's just constant stimulation and constant busyness, even when we think and understand its importance, we're still struggling.
• 24:53
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, you I mean, you had you you have lovely turns of phrase, and but you had one there, which is threat to your attention.
• 25:01
  SPEAKER_00: And actually, to come back, one myth that we can sort of bust is that this notion of blue light, it turns out to actually be pretty much a myth.
• 25:11
  SPEAKER_00: It's not that blue light doesn't change, for example, the release of melatonin at night, it does.
• 25:16
  SPEAKER_00: It's just that for the most part, when you actually look and you and this is a guy called Michael Gradazar from Australia, is a brilliant sleep scientist, and he said, Well, in the laboratory control conditions, and you put an iPad in front of someone at this brightness, at this distance, and does it have a sleep perturbing effect?
• 25:34
  SPEAKER_00: And yes, it does seem to have that.
• 25:35
  SPEAKER_00: But if you actually look in the wild as to how people are doing this in terms of the distance and the brightness, it has a nominal effect on your sleep.
• 25:43
  SPEAKER_00: However, he wasn't saying that these digital devices aren't without consequence, they are very much with consequence.
• 25:50
  SPEAKER_00: It's in fact that these are attention capture devices and they are designed through tens of millions of dollars to fleece you of your attention economy, and they do it ruthlessly well.
• 26:03
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
• 26:04
  SPEAKER_00: And what he was saying is that in fact, it's not just that they do that, it's that multiplied by certain personality types.
• 26:11
  SPEAKER_00: If you're someone who is um impulsive, if you're someone who has aspects of depression, anxiety, you are an especially vulnerable individual to the invasion of technology into the bedroom.
• 26:23
  SPEAKER_00: And so I think one of the reasons that we we are seeing this, because you're you're right to call it out.
• 26:30
  SPEAKER_00: There's probably people listening to the conversation we've just been having where we were saying people aren't respecting it, they're not spending enough time to give themselves opportunity.
• 26:39
  SPEAKER_00: And there's rightfully a bunch of people now saying, excuse me, I give myself an eight-hour opportunity.
• 26:44
  SPEAKER_00: And it's not that I'm not trying, it's just that it doesn't come to me that the way I am tired and I am wired and I cannot fall asleep.
• 26:53
  SPEAKER_00: So don't give me the whole nonsense of, you know, I'm not trying, I am trying, and I'm trying very hard.
• 26:58
  SPEAKER_00: And in part it's it's technology, but there's so many other factors.
• 27:03
  SPEAKER_00: The environment, just light itself, we could have a whole conversation about just light absent the phone.
• 27:09
  SPEAKER_00: Just we are a dark-deprived society in this modern era, and we need darkness at night for a bunch of reasons.
• 27:15
  SPEAKER_00: I I think of it almost like junk light, like junk DNA.
• 27:18
  SPEAKER_00: We have junk light at night, and we have the absence of natural daylight in the morning.
• 27:23
  SPEAKER_00: So we're kind of buggered on both sides of the spectrum.
• 27:26
  SPEAKER_00: We we're failing to get our light when we need it, and we're getting too much of it when we shouldn't be.
• 27:32
  SPEAKER_00: But then there is the aspect of the psychology of society right now.
• 27:37
  SPEAKER_00: If you look at anxiety disorders, they are at all times, all-time highs.
• 27:41
  SPEAKER_00: And there is few things outside of maybe skeletal pain that will do you a disservice in terms of sleep rather than stress and anxiety.
• 27:52
  SPEAKER_00: And we see this at my center all of the time.
• 27:54
  SPEAKER_00: People coming in, they say, I am so tired.
• 27:57
  SPEAKER_00: I am just so so tired, but I'm so wired that I cannot fall asleep.
• 28:02
  SPEAKER_00: And I think all of us have had that experience.
• 28:04
  SPEAKER_00: Maybe, you know, you've had a big event or whatever it is, you've gone to a stadium, sports games, great, you just whatever it is, you're firing on all cylinders, and you know you're tired, but you think there's almost no point in me getting into bed because I know I am not gonna be able to fall asleep.
• 28:20
  SPEAKER_00: Because I'm just so and there's a version of that that is now we are seeing that so common where people think uh, you know, I have what this sort of sleep it's both sleep-onset insomnia where the head hits the pillow, and we are in this modern era, we are constantly on reception, and very rarely do we do reflection.
• 28:41
  SPEAKER_00: And the only time we do reflection is typically when the light goes off and you put your head on the pillow, and that's the last time you want to start doing reflection.
• 28:50
  SPEAKER_00: Because if you're anything like me, the Rolodex of anxiety begins.
• 28:54
  SPEAKER_00: At that point, I start ruminating.
• 28:56
  SPEAKER_00: When I ruminate, I catastrophize, and at that point I'm dead in the water for the next two hours.
• 29:01
  SPEAKER_00: Because everything to me at least is twice as bad in the dark of night as it is in the light of day.
• 29:08
  SPEAKER_00: And at that moment in time, your job is to try to get your mind off itself.
• 29:13
  SPEAKER_00: Because sleep at three o'clock in the morning is like trying to remember someone's name.
• 29:17
  SPEAKER_00: The harder you try, the further you push it away.
• 29:21
  SPEAKER_00: And the moment you stop trying, that's usually when the the alarm goes off in the morning and you realize, I stopped trying so hard.
• 29:30
  SPEAKER_00: Okay.
• 29:32
  SPEAKER_01: So let's talk about then how do we get ourselves into that position where we don't lie in bed and ruminate, or we don't feel anxious, or we don't feel like we're tearing ourselves away from a screen, or we do go to a big event and we can go through this wind-down process.
• 29:51
  SPEAKER_01: And I think maybe a good place to start would be from the morning, right?
• 29:55
  SPEAKER_01: And like so walk us through a full day, walk us through a gold standard full day, and then we'll then we'll talk about how there could be pitfalls throughout it.
• 30:08
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, it's a great question.
• 30:09
  SPEAKER_00: The first thing is that you're waking up at a time that you've been waking up and waking up and waking up for day after day after day, which is the first point, regularity.
• 30:20
  SPEAKER_00: Regularity is king when it comes to sleep.
• 30:23
  SPEAKER_00: And I would say if there is one piece of advice that people take from this podcast, there's only one thing you can do to try to get your sleep.
• 30:30
  SPEAKER_00: Now, this is not I'm suffering from a sleep disorder.
• 30:33
  SPEAKER_00: That's a different, you know.
• 30:34
  SPEAKER_00: What I'm trying to try and do is it's like um a sports coach.
• 30:37
  SPEAKER_00: I'm going to try to optimize you to get you to your best performance.
• 30:40
  SPEAKER_00: But if you've got a broken ankle, none of my advice is going to help me.
• 30:43
  SPEAKER_00: We need to get you to a doctor.
• 30:45
  SPEAKER_00: So we'll that let's take care of that.
• 30:46
  SPEAKER_00: It's separate.
• 30:47
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
• 30:48
  SPEAKER_00: But the first thing is regularity.
• 30:49
  SPEAKER_00: Now, I I won't just give you rules.
• 30:52
  SPEAKER_00: People don't respond to rules, they respond to the reasons, not the rules.
• 30:56
  SPEAKER_00: So I'll try and explain the reasons behind all of these things.
• 30:58
  SPEAKER_00: But regularity is critical.
• 31:01
  SPEAKER_00: Why?
• 31:01
  SPEAKER_00: You have a 24-hour clock inside of your brain and it expects signals of regularity and thrives best under conditions of regularity.
• 31:11
  SPEAKER_00: It's called your circadian clock, your circadian rhythm.
• 31:14
  SPEAKER_00: And when you feed it a consistent wake-up time, and then the next thing that's going to come, which is daylight, it anchors your circadian rhythm.
• 31:22
  SPEAKER_00: And when you anchor your circadian rhythm, it improves both the quantity and the quality of your sleep.
• 31:27
  SPEAKER_00: So the first thing is golden rule number one, I'm waking up at the same time, no matter whether it's the weekday or the weekend, to a degree.
• 31:35
  SPEAKER_00: What is there any uh wiggle room margin of error there?
• 31:41
  SPEAKER_00: Sympathico.
• 31:43
  SPEAKER_00: Somewhere around about 20 to 30 minutes, plus or minus.
• 31:47
  SPEAKER_00: Okay.
• 31:48
  SPEAKER_00: So it's you've got kind of like an hour, but I would say if you could really get it down to 20 minutes plus or minus, that's where we've seen.
• 31:54
  SPEAKER_00: There's a great study from um what's called a data set called the UK Biobank data set.
• 31:59
  SPEAKER_00: It's a remarkable data set.
• 32:01
  SPEAKER_00: And they looked at over 60,000 individuals, and they were looking at all-cause mortality, cancer mortality, cardiovascular mortality, and they were tracking these individuals over time, and they were able to measure both the consistency with which they were going to bed and also the amount of sleep that they were getting.
• 32:22
  SPEAKER_00: So they split the group up into quartiles.
• 32:25
  SPEAKER_00: And what they found is that those who were most regular in the top quartile, plus or minus 20 minutes, versus least regular, who were swinging all over the place, there was about a 50% difference in all-cause mortality.
• 32:37
  SPEAKER_00: 50, 50, 5, 0.
• 32:39
  SPEAKER_00: Wow.
• 32:39
  SPEAKER_00: It was about a 40% in cardiovascular mortality, about a 35% in cancer mortality.
• 32:45
  SPEAKER_00: But what was great about that study was then they said, well, I've got my measure of regularity, and I've also got my measure of quantity in the same individual.
• 32:54
  SPEAKER_00: So why don't we do this?
• 32:56
  SPEAKER_00: Let's put regularity and quantity in the same statistical bucket and see, do a Coke Pepsi challenge and see which one wins out in predicting all cause mortality.
• 33:06
  SPEAKER_00: All of us in the sleep field, we thought it's absolutely going to be quantity.
• 33:10
  SPEAKER_00: We were wrong.
• 33:11
  SPEAKER_00: Regularity beat out quantity in predicting all cause mortality.
• 33:16
  SPEAKER_00: Which is not to say that you can sleep four hours highly consistently and you'll be just fine.
• 33:21
  SPEAKER_00: Of course, you need both.
• 33:22
  SPEAKER_00: So midnight to 4 a.m.
• 33:24
  SPEAKER_00: every day.
• 33:25
  SPEAKER_00: We can just go.
• 33:26
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
• 33:27
  SPEAKER_00: Um, and so so the first thing is regularity.
• 33:30
  SPEAKER_00: Next, when you, if you can, try not to look at your phone for even just the first five minutes.
• 33:37
  SPEAKER_00: First five?
• 33:39
  SPEAKER_00: I can do that.
• 33:40
  SPEAKER_00: And start there.
• 33:41
  SPEAKER_00: It's like saying, okay, we need you to floss.
• 33:43
  SPEAKER_00: Well, right now, just for the next week, I just want you to floss your front two teeth, and then that's it.
• 33:47
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, done.
• 33:48
  SPEAKER_00: We'll that's just crawl, walk, run.
• 33:51
  SPEAKER_00: And the reason is because if you've ever had to get up for an early morning flight, that is absolutely critical, you know for a fact that firstly the night before is going to be measure, it's going to be shallow sleep.
• 34:03
  SPEAKER_00: And there's a strange thing where you almost wake up, you know, your alarm's set for five, and you wake up at 4.58, and you've just been on this high alert, and it's what we call anticipatory anxiety.
• 34:14
  SPEAKER_00: And when you set up events like that and we measure people's sleep, and we've done this in the lab, your deep sleep just is markedly impaired.
• 34:23
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, that's crazy.
• 34:24
  SPEAKER_01: I mean, if you've got a flight in the morning, even getting to sleep can be tough, right?
• 34:30
  SPEAKER_01: Because you're like, I know I've especially if you're getting up very early.
• 34:33
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
• 34:34
  SPEAKER_01: You're like, I there's something about your brain that says, Well, you're gonna have to get up soon, so I wouldn't, I wouldn't enjoy this sleep now.
• 34:40
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
• 34:41
  SPEAKER_01: Might as well give up.
• 34:41
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
• 34:42
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
• 34:42
  SPEAKER_00: And and it's exactly that.
• 34:43
  SPEAKER_00: And that is the anxiety, that's the anticipatory anxiety that you can by way of setting it's not an intention, but an event.
• 34:51
  SPEAKER_00: Now, the first thing that most people do when they wake up in the morning now in the modern era is that you open your phone, and when you open your phone, this tsunami of anxiety just comes over to you, and it's everyone else's agenda for your day.
• 35:05
  SPEAKER_00: That's so true.
• 35:06
  SPEAKER_00: And it creates just an L I T E version of the flight.
• 35:11
  SPEAKER_00: It's nowhere near that powerful.
• 35:12
  SPEAKER_00: But every night you're going to bed, and you know that the first thing I wake up to.
• 35:16
  SPEAKER_00: So if you can just try this experiment for one week, brush your teeth before you check your phone.
• 35:24
  SPEAKER_00: And if you can just do that, it's a lovely way to wake up and just wake up.
• 35:31
  SPEAKER_01: So I I I feel like that there is there is a weird, like, and maybe this is just habit, right?
• 35:38
  SPEAKER_01: And I'm pretty certain it's just habitual.
• 35:41
  SPEAKER_01: I've tried I try this, and I do and I do avoid looking at my phone.
• 35:45
  SPEAKER_01: I try I try and do it like a good 30 minutes in the morning.
• 35:49
  SPEAKER_01: I often end up at doing 10-15.
• 35:51
  SPEAKER_01: That's perfect.
• 35:52
  SPEAKER_01: It's good.
• 35:52
  SPEAKER_01: But for those 10-15 minutes, I think the idea of opening my phone comes into my head maybe 30 times.
• 35:58
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
• 35:59
  SPEAKER_01: I'm like, you should probably check, you should probably check, you should probably check.
• 36:01
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
• 36:02
  SPEAKER_01: And that is really tough to I mean, that in itself, I guess, is some form of anticipatory anxiety, right?
• 36:08
  SPEAKER_01: Like I'm thinking that's right.
• 36:10
  SPEAKER_01: Maybe I'm missing something urgent.
• 36:11
  SPEAKER_01: Never never is.
• 36:12
  SPEAKER_01: And even if there is something urgent, I wish I hadn't seen it.
• 36:16
  SPEAKER_00: Right.
• 36:16
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, in some ways.
• 36:17
  SPEAKER_00: And and you know, I would ask people, and I'm not trying to be dismissive of anyone, but in the past year, was there an event where had you not looked at your phone right there and then versus five minutes later, that either was life-altering and changing, or even if it was, would have made a difference?
• 36:40
  SPEAKER_00: Sure.
• 36:40
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
• 36:40
  SPEAKER_00: And the answer for me at least is no.
• 36:42
  SPEAKER_00: And the answer for me has been no too.
• 36:44
  SPEAKER_00: And again, there will be exceptions to that rule, but for the most part, if you just gift yourself that quiescence, yeah.
• 36:51
  SPEAKER_00: It it's gem.
• 36:52
  SPEAKER_00: So regularity, phone, next thing is within the first 60 minutes, get daylight.
• 36:59
  SPEAKER_00: It's not get next to a window, it is get outside.
• 37:03
  SPEAKER_00: There is something critical.
• 37:04
  SPEAKER_00: There's a set of cells at the back of your eye that are not like the rods and the cones.
• 37:10
  SPEAKER_00: They they do not reconstruct visual information, they are simply there to detect light, and they are a they're they're a vote as to whether light has occurred or not occurred.
• 37:23
  SPEAKER_00: It's that simple.
• 37:24
  SPEAKER_00: And what was interesting is that most people don't realize this.
• 37:28
  SPEAKER_00: The the reason I your question was brilliant, which was how do we think about our night?
• 37:32
  SPEAKER_00: And let's start with when we wake up.
• 37:35
  SPEAKER_00: Because the moment that you get, the first moment that you get daylight, turns an hourglass over, and it determines when your melatonin is going to be released in part later that evening.
• 37:47
  SPEAKER_00: So there is a history that you can set in your future determined by when you get your daylight, and you can alter your night 16 hours before it happens by simply getting daylight.
• 38:00
  SPEAKER_00: And here's the amazing thing about this physiological mechanism: it has no current dose.
• 38:08
  SPEAKER_00: And what I mean by that is it doesn't mean that you have to be out for 30 minutes or 15 minutes.
• 38:14
  SPEAKER_00: It literally simply is did I get daylight or not within the first 60 minutes?
• 38:20
  SPEAKER_00: So just a couple of minutes, 30 seconds.
• 38:22
  SPEAKER_01: Can I just ask two questions on this before we move on?
• 38:25
  SPEAKER_01: One is, and I'm a New Yorker right now, and so getting outside in daylight is a little harder for some people because there isn't a tremendous amount if you're in a high rise or like you like actually getting outside if you're in one of these apartment buildings.
• 38:39
  SPEAKER_01: Would it still work to open the window and look at light?
• 38:44
  SPEAKER_01: And does it need to be direct sunlight?
• 38:47
  SPEAKER_00: Um, yes and no.
• 38:49
  SPEAKER_00: So it does not need to be direct sunlight.
• 38:51
  SPEAKER_00: And yes, putting your head out safely through a window will work just fine.
• 38:56
  SPEAKER_00: But the window has to be open.
• 38:57
  SPEAKER_00: The window has to be open because the the degree of um sort of refract the the the amount of luxe energy that a pane of glass pulls out through its transmission once it gets to the other side is Herculean in terms of size.
• 39:14
  SPEAKER_00: And even on a cloud, I mean you and I, you know, we coming from from England, you know, we know clouds.
• 39:21
  SPEAKER_00: We know clouds, you know, we know skies that are low.
• 39:23
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
• 39:23
  SPEAKER_00: You know, I rem why is the sky so low, most people when they arrive in England.
• 39:28
  SPEAKER_00: But even on the dullest of dull days, the magnitude or the intensity of light that we use a measure called luxe, the luxe intensity of light on a cloudy day is far in extreme and and beyond anything that you would get, even in a brutally well-lit office.
• 39:47
  SPEAKER_00: It's just log orders of magnitude difference.
• 39:50
  SPEAKER_00: So that's the next thing I'm gonna try and do is get my hit of daylight within the first 60 minutes.
• 39:57
  SPEAKER_01: First six, zero, first hour.
• 39:59
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, within the first hour.
• 40:00
  SPEAKER_01: Is there a uh is there more of an upside to doing that very first thing?
• 40:04
  SPEAKER_01: Not so much negligible.
• 40:06
  SPEAKER_00: No, you as long as it's sort of within that wiggle room of 60 minutes, you're safe, you're good.
• 40:12
  SPEAKER_00: Then I would say think about strategically using caffeine if you want to.
• 40:17
  SPEAKER_00: Um, no harm, no foul, and we can speak about that later.
• 40:21
  SPEAKER_00: But I would say if you're going to do it, try to make sure that you get your caffeine in based on the average human being, at least 12 hours before you expect to go to sleep.
• 40:31
  SPEAKER_00: And the reason is because caffeine has a half-life of about five to six hours, which is means after five to six hours, 50% of that caffeine is still circulating in your brain, which means that caffeine has a quarter life of 10 to 12 hours.
• 40:46
  SPEAKER_00: So if you have a cup of coffee at noon, it's the equivalent of just getting into bed at midnight and you swig a quarter of a cup of coffee and you hope for a good night of sleep.
• 40:56
  SPEAKER_00: Now that's hyperbolic.
• 40:57
  SPEAKER_00: That's me being hyperbolic and idiotic, but it just keep that in mind.
• 41:01
  SPEAKER_00: And again, it turns out that it's one of the things I've changed my mind and tune on so much since I wrote the book because I was a little bit dictatorial in general.
• 41:13
  SPEAKER_00: I was pretty embarrassed by looking back now at the but one of the things I was a bit hard-headed on was caffeine, and you know, even if you take it in the morning, and that's true to a degree, but drink coffee.
• 41:28
  SPEAKER_00: The reason is not because of the caffeine, though.
• 41:31
  SPEAKER_00: If you look at the health associations with drinking coffee, they are monumental.
• 41:36
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, yeah.
• 41:37
  SPEAKER_00: In fact, if you stack them up uh side by side with the health benefits from sleep, it's a remarkable match.
• 41:43
  SPEAKER_00: And people would say to me, How do you square that circle, Matt?
• 41:46
  SPEAKER_00: Because you're telling me that caffeine is bad for sleep.
• 41:50
  SPEAKER_00: The coffee bean contains a whopping dose of antioxidants.
• 41:55
  SPEAKER_00: And because we're so deficient in our antioxidant consumption in Western diets, the coffee bean has been asked to carry this huge weight of all of our antioxidant needs.
• 42:07
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
• 42:07
  SPEAKER_00: And therefore, no wonder it carries this massive health signal in the literature.
• 42:12
  SPEAKER_00: It's just the dose and the timing make the poison.
• 42:15
  SPEAKER_00: And once you get past about three cups of coffee, the health benefits actually start to go down in vacuum.
• 42:21
  SPEAKER_01: Would there be ways in which we could up that that um volume of antioxidants without you know other foods, other sources?
• 42:27
  SPEAKER_01: I'm sure there are that where we don't have to have that trade-off.
• 42:31
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, absolutely.
• 42:32
  SPEAKER_00: I mean, if you just look, you know, colourful foods and yeah, just wonderful.
• 42:38
  SPEAKER_00: Um and so I would say that's the next thing, which is before we move on from caffeine.
• 42:45
  SPEAKER_01: I've heard various other on various other podcasts, in fact, that you should delay the consumption of caffeine for an amount of time after you wake up.
• 42:55
  SPEAKER_01: Is there any science to that?
• 42:56
  SPEAKER_01: Any truth to that?
• 42:57
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, there is some truth to that because my window of caffeine drinking is getting narrow now.
• 43:02
  SPEAKER_00: And it's okay.
• 43:02
  SPEAKER_00: Um yeah, because now I'm pushing you later and I'm also dragging you earlier.
• 43:07
  SPEAKER_00: And so I'm sort of like squeezing it like vice grips in the middle of the morning.
• 43:12
  SPEAKER_00: There is a circadian rhythm of lots of different things in your body, but one of the things that has a circadian rhythm is a hormone called cortisol.
• 43:20
  SPEAKER_00: And cortisol gets a bad rap.
• 43:22
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, it's actually an amazing hormone, and it's very beneficial unless it's left on in chronic high flow volume.
• 43:31
  SPEAKER_00: Not good.
• 43:32
  SPEAKER_00: I don't want to race over and hug Chris and just say it's gonna be okay, it's gonna be okay.
• 43:36
  SPEAKER_00: Um I am cortisol.
• 43:41
  SPEAKER_00: Your middle name could be cortisol.
• 43:46
  SPEAKER_00: Um so, Mr.
• 43:47
  SPEAKER_00: Cortisol, the cortisol has uh a circadian rhythm to it.
• 43:53
  SPEAKER_00: And as we're getting into the the sort of late evening hours, cortisol is on its awesome downstroke, so it's coming down and Once we get down into sort of the first two or three hours of sleep, it hits its lowest point, what we call its nadea.
• 44:05
  SPEAKER_00: Then after about four or five hours of being asleep, cortisol starts to rise back up.
• 44:11
  SPEAKER_00: And in fact, cortisol is a wake-promoting hormone.
• 44:14
  SPEAKER_00: One of the reasons that it rises is to wake us up.
• 44:17
  SPEAKER_00: And so you're actually on the most awesome upstreak of your cortisol piston kind of maneuver, right around, let's say, assume a natural wake-up time of let's say seven.
• 44:28
  SPEAKER_00: The first sort of eight, nine, ten, your cortisol is still rising.
• 44:32
  SPEAKER_00: So you actually have quite a natural, what we call endogenous, meaning from within within you, sort of wake-promoting chemical, such that you if you just left the caffeine.
• 44:44
  SPEAKER_00: Now you're going to have to go through a caffeine detox if you're if you've been drinking caffeine for a long time.
• 44:48
  SPEAKER_00: But if you get through that, and after about two weeks of detoxing, you probably will find that naturally you will have this sense of being woken up without any caffeine.
• 45:00
  SPEAKER_00: Why?
• 45:00
  SPEAKER_00: And that's the cortisol that's waking you up.
• 45:03
  SPEAKER_00: And it's one of the things it's going to do is increase your metabolism.
• 45:05
  SPEAKER_00: The metabolism increases your core body temperature.
• 45:08
  SPEAKER_00: Core body temperature going up wakes you up.
• 45:11
  SPEAKER_00: So you can forego the caffeine.
• 45:14
  SPEAKER_00: And that's where that sort of story comes from.
• 45:16
  SPEAKER_00: So there's actually some good biology to it.
• 45:18
  SPEAKER_00: The idea being if you say, well, I'm going to limit myself to just one or two cups of coffee, why not take the free lunch that is the cortisol and then dish it out once the cortisol has finished its rise and get the hit sort of twice rather than like wasting one of your sort of golden tickets.
• 45:38
  SPEAKER_00: Okay, that's a great way of putting it.
• 45:40
  SPEAKER_00: If that makes some sense.
• 45:41
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, that makes perfect sense.
• 45:42
  SPEAKER_00: Do you drink coffee?
• 45:44
  SPEAKER_00: I didn't used to, but based on looking at the health associations and my idiotic absence of colourful foods, I ended up thinking I probably should start to uh no, I do try to get a few of them in, but I I did start to drink coffee.
• 46:01
  SPEAKER_00: I wouldn't say it's it's something that it is my thing, but I and by the way, decaffeinated coffee has almost the same health benefits as caffeinated coffee.
• 46:13
  SPEAKER_00: Again, why?
• 46:14
  SPEAKER_00: It's because it's not the caffeine.
• 46:16
  SPEAKER_00: So if anything, I'll actually sometimes switch over to just drinking.
• 46:19
  SPEAKER_00: I'll have one caffeinated coffee, especially if I'm gonna work out in the morning, and then I'll usually just go on to decaf if I'm gonna go.
• 46:26
  SPEAKER_01: Word for warning though for the audience there's still caffeine in decaf.
• 46:30
  SPEAKER_01: There is just a lot less.
• 46:31
  SPEAKER_00: Decaf does not mean no caffeine.
• 46:32
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, yeah, yeah.
• 46:34
  SPEAKER_00: Because people will be nailing decaf like nine, ten at night.
• 46:37
  SPEAKER_00: Yep.
• 46:37
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
• 46:38
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
• 46:38
  SPEAKER_00: And it's, you know, sometimes it can be as much as, you know, eight, nine percent, ten percent.
• 46:44
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
• 46:44
  SPEAKER_00: And so if you stack a couple of those together in the evening, yeah, you're pretty turbo going to bed.
• 46:50
  SPEAKER_00: Okay.
• 46:50
  SPEAKER_01: So we're up.
• 46:52
  SPEAKER_01: We've got our light exposure.
• 46:55
  SPEAKER_00: We've had our caffeine.
• 46:58
  SPEAKER_00: What's next?
• 47:00
  SPEAKER_00: Depending on what we call your chronotype, which I'll explain in a second, you may want to engage in exercise.
• 47:07
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
• 47:08
  SPEAKER_00: Exercise is one of the most consistent Archimedes lever or levers, I should say, that we found for maintaining good quantity and quality of sleep.
• 47:24
  SPEAKER_00: Aerobic sort of so cardio tends to have a stronger benefit on sleep than, for example, resistance training or strength training.
• 47:34
  SPEAKER_00: But all of those versions of athletic performance will have some kind of a benefit on sleep.
• 47:42
  SPEAKER_00: Now it it really depends on your chronotype.
• 47:45
  SPEAKER_00: And your chronotype is are you a morning type, evening type, or somewhere in between?
• 47:49
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
• 47:51
  SPEAKER_00: The first thing to note for the listeners is it's not your fault.
• 47:56
  SPEAKER_00: And what I mean is if you're a night owl, uh you don't get to decide.
• 48:01
  SPEAKER_00: Right.
• 48:01
  SPEAKER_00: There's a myth also that, well, if you're a night owl, just get it together.
• 48:06
  SPEAKER_00: For goodness sake, just get with me.
• 48:08
  SPEAKER_00: You know, 6 a.m.
• 48:09
  SPEAKER_00: I'm at the gym already, I've been awake since five.
• 48:12
  SPEAKER_00: I mean, well, that's great because you're a morning type, but there are 351 genes that dictate your morningness or your eveningness.
• 48:22
  SPEAKER_00: And it's gifted to you at birth, it's hardwired, and it's fiendishly difficult to change.
• 48:28
  SPEAKER_00: Isn't it funny that that is there's some stigma around that as well.
• 48:31
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
• 48:32
  SPEAKER_00: And people, you know, maybe the early bird catches the worm, but I would say the second mouse gets the cheese.
• 48:38
  SPEAKER_00: I love that, Matt.
• 48:39
  SPEAKER_00: Um, but but but putting that aside, I would say though, you know, it's it's a little bit like saying, well, right now we we're really into people with brown eyes, and you've got blue eyes, Matt.
• 48:54
  SPEAKER_00: So can you can you not just get it together?
• 48:58
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
• 48:59
  SPEAKER_00: I'm so sorry, but that this is how I was born.
• 49:02
  SPEAKER_00: It's genetic.
• 49:03
  SPEAKER_00: I don't I didn't get the choice.
• 49:04
  SPEAKER_00: Well, I mean, we'd never say that, but we do say it about chronotype.
• 49:08
  SPEAKER_01: And it's do you think though that there's you know, how do people know?
• 49:12
  SPEAKER_01: Because I would imagine there are people that might think one, but then they're habitually have just fallen into a pattern of the other.
• 49:19
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
• 49:19
  SPEAKER_01: Or do or do you not think that would happen?
• 49:21
  SPEAKER_00: No, I it it very much does, and people will just think that I am someone who takes forever to wake up in the morning, I struggle sometimes to get to the night.
• 49:30
  SPEAKER_00: Like they might not have the choice.
• 49:31
  SPEAKER_00: Correct.
• 49:32
  SPEAKER_00: And that's the thing, is that society is very much designed for the morning types.
• 49:38
  SPEAKER_00: And as a consequence, there are evening types throughout the world who are going through life thinking that either A, they're a bad sleeper.
• 49:47
  SPEAKER_00: I see this all the time.
• 49:47
  SPEAKER_00: People come to uh this the sleep center and they'll say, I have terrible sleep onset insomnia.
• 49:53
  SPEAKER_00: I'm awake usually for the first hour or two.
• 49:55
  SPEAKER_00: And to your question, we'll do a chronotype test with them.
• 49:58
  SPEAKER_00: Now, you can do it with your genetics, or you can just go onto Google and you can type in M E Q test, M-E-Q, and it stands for morningness, eveningness, questionnaire.
• 50:10
  SPEAKER_00: Takes about five minutes, and it will walk you through a set of questions and it gets about 80% of the way there to being consistent with your genetic test.
• 50:18
  SPEAKER_00: We'll add that to the show notes.
• 50:20
  SPEAKER_00: Pretty good, yeah.
• 50:20
  SPEAKER_00: And it's it's easy to do.
• 50:23
  SPEAKER_00: Or you can just answer the following question.
• 50:25
  SPEAKER_00: This is the like Matt's cheap version of this.
• 50:28
  SPEAKER_00: If you are on a desert island, no one to wake up for, no responsibilities, what time do you think your body would naturally like to wake up and go to bed?
• 50:39
  SPEAKER_00: And the reason I say your body is because you, everyone, we are still so psychologically primed for this bias of I need to be a morning type.
• 50:48
  SPEAKER_00: And and usually you'll probably get quite close to that.
• 50:51
  SPEAKER_00: And the reason I'm saying this is because it comes back to when is the best time for you to exercise.
• 50:58
  SPEAKER_00: So for a morning type, if you look at, in fact, if you look at world records uh throughout the Olympics and you look at you plot them on distribution of the clock face, yeah.
• 51:08
  SPEAKER_00: World records are not evenly distributed on the 24-hour clock face.
• 51:13
  SPEAKER_00: It's right around sort of like the early afternoon period, which on average, if you kind of sum everyone together, that's the time when you get your peak core body temperature.
• 51:25
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
• 51:25
  SPEAKER_00: And that's when we are optimal.
• 51:27
  SPEAKER_00: Now, if you're a morning type, your peak core body temperature is actually going to be in the early sort of mid-morning phase for a night owl, that's gonna be much later into the afternoon, maybe even in the early evening.
• 51:39
  SPEAKER_00: And if you're a neutral, it's gonna be right in that sort of middle day.
• 51:42
  SPEAKER_00: So and I'm talking about the ideal world here and drum roll.
• 51:46
  SPEAKER_00: None of us live in the ideal world.
• 51:48
  SPEAKER_00: So please don't think that oh, he's talking about this utopian way, and I've got it.
• 51:52
  SPEAKER_00: I I know I understand that life is there in the way, but if you can, typically you will know that I if I have my brothers, I'd probably prefer to work out at X.
• 52:02
  SPEAKER_01: So there's like like almost every child in the world is having to fall into the former, into the the early bird.
• 52:11
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
• 52:11
  SPEAKER_01: Because of the school times.
• 52:12
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
• 52:13
  SPEAKER_01: And and well, and most employees of regular nine to fives.
• 52:16
  SPEAKER_00: They're all regimented into this.
• 52:19
  SPEAKER_00: And and you have to think, you know, where did it come from?
• 52:22
  SPEAKER_00: If you look back, it actually comes from the industrial era where we had factory work, and at that point, the populace, um, from a professional standpoint, you all had to be at the factory at a certain time point.
• 52:36
  SPEAKER_00: That's why that the original alarm clock was the factory whistle.
• 52:40
  SPEAKER_00: Because it was the first time in humanity where we had to have en masse employees begin at a certain moment in time.
• 52:49
  SPEAKER_01: And so those hunter-gatherers were just having lions.
• 52:53
  SPEAKER_01: They were great is that I read this in I read this, by the way.
• 52:57
  SPEAKER_01: Can you can you maybe explain why we have this, why we are early birds or or night owls in the first place?
• 53:04
  SPEAKER_01: Why we've evolved because I think this is amazing.
• 53:06
  SPEAKER_00: Why aren't we as a species all synchronized to the same moment of being peak physically active and peak sort of quiescent?
• 53:17
  SPEAKER_00: Why aren't we all sort of in harmony with the time that we all go to bed?
• 53:21
  SPEAKER_00: We all like to go to bed at 11 and we all like to wake up at seven.
• 53:24
  SPEAKER_00: Be really handy.
• 53:25
  SPEAKER_00: Why is they wouldn't it just, you know?
• 53:27
  SPEAKER_00: And there would be marriages that would be saved by that type of stuff.
• 53:31
  SPEAKER_00: And the reason that we believe this is because it comes back to the start of our conversation.
• 53:37
  SPEAKER_00: When you sleep, you are, if let's say it's an eight-hour period of time, you're vulnerable for eight hours.
• 53:44
  SPEAKER_00: But if I were to insert some genetic variability into the equation, uh when we study hunter-gatherer tribes, they typically don't sleep like we do, which is solo or just a couple.
• 53:56
  SPEAKER_00: You typically sleep as a collective, as a group.
• 54:00
  SPEAKER_00: Uh that's important because when you spread some genetic variability on your sleep wake preference on the 24-hour clock face, all of a sudden an interesting mathematical equation appears, which is that if I have extreme morning types, morning types, neutrals, evening types, extreme evening types, there is going to be some individuals in the tribe who are going to bed at, let's say, nine o'clock at night, and they'll be waking up at five.
• 54:28
  SPEAKER_00: And there's going to be other people who are going to be going to bed at 2 a.m.
• 54:32
  SPEAKER_00: and waking up at 11.
• 54:34
  SPEAKER_00: So now, as a collective, you only are vulnerable as a nucleus for maybe just two or three hours.
• 54:42
  SPEAKER_00: So you have halved, if not reduced by 60, 70%, your survival equation simply by spreading some genetic variability into what's going on.
• 54:54
  SPEAKER_00: There's always a sentinel there watching, almost always.
• 54:58
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
• 54:58
  SPEAKER_00: And so as a result, that's why we think it it was a stroke of genius.
• 55:03
  SPEAKER_01: Do you think that has that has that window has narrowed over time, given that we don't need to or has biology not caught up yet?
• 55:12
  SPEAKER_00: If you look, there's the same distribution.
• 55:14
  SPEAKER_00: When we study hunter-gatherer tribes and you look at the distribution of the chronotype variability, almost identical.
• 55:20
  SPEAKER_01: It's a bit annoying how slow the biology, the evolution of biology.
• 55:24
  SPEAKER_00: Wouldn't it be nice if you buddy, you know, can you not just, you know, I've got to get out of the school biology.
• 55:30
  SPEAKER_00: Come on.
• 55:31
  SPEAKER_01: Get with the program.
• 55:33
  SPEAKER_01: Um that feels like something that is is remarkably valuable to corporations, you know, like having this wider spread of start-finish times.
• 55:42
  SPEAKER_01: I mean, most of them don't even have start-finish times now, but no, which I think is the right move.
• 55:48
  SPEAKER_00: Utilize that, you know, or you can think, well, if I enforce my employees to all be here by eight o'clock in the morning, yeah, the night owls, based on what happens, which is when they wake up at let's say, you know, 6.30, because they have to, because everyone's going to get into work at eight, their brain is not going to be coming online.
• 56:08
  SPEAKER_00: Their frontal lobe in particular is not going to be coming online to its peak optimal function until about 10 or 11 in the morning, probably much later.
• 56:15
  SPEAKER_00: So you can have this somewhere thick-headed mentality of everyone needs to be regimented here at eight o'clock in the morning.
• 56:22
  SPEAKER_00: And you're paying people for doing largely poorly efficient execution of their jobs.
• 56:31
  SPEAKER_00: So why not have a little bit more freedom?
• 56:33
  SPEAKER_00: And that is definitely happening more so now, but why would you, you know, shortchange yourself and if anything, you know, utilize that?
• 56:42
  SPEAKER_00: Think about how you could utilize that.
• 56:44
  SPEAKER_01: So the early birds typically better off working out in the morning.
• 56:49
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
• 56:50
  SPEAKER_00: You will find that that if you train them across the day and you ask them to do, you know, whether it's time to physical exhaustion, peak muscle contraction, peak jump height, reaction time, sprint times, you can benchmark them and there will be a distribution of personal bests that will fit beautifully with your chronotype.
• 57:08
  SPEAKER_00: You an early bird?
• 57:09
  SPEAKER_00: I'm a neutral, just like the rest of me.
• 57:11
  SPEAKER_00: I am desperately pedestrian, remarkably vanilla, and deeply boring.
• 57:16
  SPEAKER_00: I'm just medium everything.
• 57:18
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
• 57:19
  SPEAKER_00: I place myself underneath the pedestal.
• 57:21
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, yeah, no.
• 57:22
  SPEAKER_00: I've never been able to get it on top of the pedestal.
• 57:25
  SPEAKER_01: Um I think though there'll be a number of people listening to this, maybe all of the people listening to this, they're like, Yeah, great, that's really useful to know.
• 57:34
  SPEAKER_01: And I think it is.
• 57:35
  SPEAKER_01: And but I think we all kind of have some inclination as to which of those that sort of phenotype we are, or chronotype, should I say.
• 57:42
  SPEAKER_01: Um, but isn't life so busy that like I think so many people just don't have a choice, right?
• 57:47
  SPEAKER_01: And I think one one of the things I really love about prescribing workouts in the morning and doing them myself in the morning is it's just done.
• 57:53
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
• 57:54
  SPEAKER_00: Right.
• 57:54
  SPEAKER_01: And so sometimes we let perfection become the enemy of done, I think.
• 57:58
  SPEAKER_01: Um such a good could you say that again?
• 58:01
  SPEAKER_01: I think sometimes we let perfection become the enemy of done.
• 58:06
  SPEAKER_01: T-shirt.
• 58:06
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, that is oh no, I've got one.
• 58:10
  SPEAKER_00: Come back to the whole abs photograph, which we won't talk about on this podcast, but um, people ask me on on the comments and I'll describe.
• 58:17
  SPEAKER_00: No, but um I think there is when it comes to sleep, good enough sometimes is fantastic.
• 58:28
  SPEAKER_00: And I was the biggest culprit and perpetrator of I think creating maybe almost too much of a perfectionistic mentality around sleep.
• 58:41
  SPEAKER_00: And it for the people who were struggling with sleep, it in fact gave them some anxiety because and I I can't lie to you about the the data and the evidence, and I don't want to do that, but just like you said, I think in the very early on in the podcast, having one or two bad nights of sleep is not the end of the world.
• 59:00
  SPEAKER_00: You're not gonna wake up with Alzheimer's disease, you're the you're not guaranteeing cancer in your future.
• 59:06
  SPEAKER_00: Don't you know we all I have bad nights of sleep, but we all do.
• 59:11
  SPEAKER_00: So I think there is uh some sense of sometimes just taking the pressure out of the equation, and never more so than when it's three o'clock in the morning.
• 59:21
  SPEAKER_00: Yes.
• 59:22
  SPEAKER_00: I know that feeling when I can't and if I'm the worst person because I become this because I know some you know some something about sleep, and I'm thinking, okay, great, my dorsolateral prefrontal cortex is not shutting down, I've got far too much histamine, my preoptic neurons in the hypothalamus, and and at that moment that's it.
• 59:42
  SPEAKER_00: Like I'm and sometimes you've just got to think, you know what, tonight is just not my night.
• 59:50
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, I'm not gonna stress, and instead, I am simply going to stay awake.
• 59:56
  SPEAKER_00: Okay, my job right now is to stay awake.
• 1:00:00
  SPEAKER_00: And in fact, I'm just going to rest.
• 1:00:03
  SPEAKER_00: Because wouldn't it be wonderful if someone came to you at you know three o'clock in the afternoon on your job and they said, Don't worry about the report, and I know it just come come over, lie down on the couch and just have a rest.
• 1:00:14
  SPEAKER_00: No need to sleep, just have a rest.
• 1:00:17
  SPEAKER_00: Sounds rather nice to me.
• 1:00:19
  SPEAKER_00: And so now I'll just try to reverse and you know, sort of twist it psychologically.
• 1:00:25
  SPEAKER_00: You're trying to reverse Kippa yourself, right?
• 1:00:27
  SPEAKER_00: Exactly.
• 1:00:27
  SPEAKER_00: You know, I'll just say, fine.
• 1:00:30
  SPEAKER_00: I don't need to, I don't need to.
• 1:00:31
  SPEAKER_00: I don't need to.
• 1:00:31
  SPEAKER_00: I don't need to, you know, what's it's all this thing about sleep?
• 1:00:34
  SPEAKER_00: Nonsense, but absolute charlatan.
• 1:00:37
  SPEAKER_00: But um, and I'll just say it's I'm just gonna lie here with my eyes open and I'm just gonna rest.
• 1:00:46
  SPEAKER_00: And within about a minute, you'll think, I've got to keep my I've gotta close my eyes.
• 1:00:52
  SPEAKER_00: I've got to close my eyes.
• 1:00:53
  SPEAKER_00: The other thing too to keep in mind is the well, we can explain uh why 3 a.m.
• 1:01:01
  SPEAKER_00: awakenings happen so frequently, because there's a science behind that too.
• 1:01:06
  SPEAKER_00: But as I mentioned before, your job at that moment is to get your mind off itself.
• 1:01:10
  SPEAKER_00: And how do we do that?
• 1:01:11
  SPEAKER_00: Probably at least five different things.
• 1:01:13
  SPEAKER_00: The first is guided meditation, second, some kind of box breathing.
• 1:01:18
  SPEAKER_00: So whether it's you know, inhale for six, you hold for five, exhale for all these different numbers, but it's basically just box breathing.
• 1:01:26
  SPEAKER_00: Third, you can do a body scan.
• 1:01:28
  SPEAKER_00: So just sit, close your eyes, and then start at the top of your head and think, is do I have tension in my forehead?
• 1:01:34
  SPEAKER_00: I'm just gonna relax it.
• 1:01:35
  SPEAKER_00: How's my neck feeling?
• 1:01:36
  SPEAKER_00: Okay, I'm just gonna shoulders and and just walk yourself all the way down through the body.
• 1:01:42
  SPEAKER_00: Once you hit your toes, bring it all the way back.
• 1:01:45
  SPEAKER_00: The the fourth is um take yourself on a mental walk, but it has to be in vivid, by the way, don't count cheap.
• 1:01:52
  SPEAKER_00: The study has been done, it makes it worse because with each kind of No one's done that study, surely.
• 1:01:57
  SPEAKER_00: They've absolutely done the study.
• 1:01:59
  SPEAKER_00: I know, I know, I know.
• 1:02:00
  SPEAKER_00: But with true story.
• 1:02:02
  SPEAKER_00: The idea is I think that with each sort of you know, bleating ball of white cotton wool that's you know bouncing over the fence, it's just reinforcing the number of minutes that I'm not sleeping in.
• 1:02:12
  SPEAKER_00: Right, yeah.
• 1:02:12
  SPEAKER_00: And so, but take yourself on a mental walk.
• 1:02:14
  SPEAKER_00: So for me, I'll think about walking the dog and something that you know.
• 1:02:19
  SPEAKER_00: So I'll go over, open the drawer.
• 1:02:21
  SPEAKER_00: Do I take the red lead or the blue?
• 1:02:23
  SPEAKER_00: I'll take the blue lead this time, clip him with my right hand, open the door with the left hand, go down the stairs.
• 1:02:27
  SPEAKER_00: There's that strange house across the street, terrible architecture.
• 1:02:30
  SPEAKER_00: It's that level of 4K detail that you need to do.
• 1:02:34
  SPEAKER_01: I'm gonna try this because I think that is sometimes when I'm drifting off or like trying to drift off, you do you do catch yourself just like somewhere else, like something that I know.
• 1:02:46
  SPEAKER_01: Anything I think I sometimes fall into that mental, like that walk without even doing it on purpose.
• 1:02:52
  SPEAKER_00: Do or yeah, or and sleep stories, you know, calm the uh the the meditation companies.
• 1:02:58
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, they were looking at their usage statistics and they were trying to get people to meditate in the morning, and they would see people meditating.
• 1:03:05
  SPEAKER_00: But then what they found was that in the evening there could be this huge spike.
• 1:03:09
  SPEAKER_00: And what they realized cleverly is that people are self-medicating their insomnia by using meditation, and then they realized in another stroke of genius what do we do with kids?
• 1:03:20
  SPEAKER_00: We read kids' stories at bedtime, it helps them fall asleep.
• 1:03:23
  SPEAKER_00: Yes, that's true.
• 1:03:23
  SPEAKER_00: Well, hang on a second, adults are just big kids, doesn't it work with them?
• 1:03:28
  SPEAKER_00: Lo and behold, now you've got Matthew McConaughey, you've got Harry Styles reading your sleeps, so Tom Hardy, and then uh sometimes a odd British scientist with a bad accent and a terrible voice, they'll also do that.
• 1:03:40
  SPEAKER_00: But all of those five things, whether it's meditation, box breathing, body scan, mental walk, um, sleep stories, the thing they all have in common is that they're trying to get your mind off itself.
• 1:03:54
  SPEAKER_00: And that is your job at that time of night.
• 1:03:57
  SPEAKER_01: That's the threat, the common thread for I think it would be really useful.
• 1:04:01
  SPEAKER_01: I'm gonna add these to the show notes as well.
• 1:04:04
  SPEAKER_01: Okay, these options.
• 1:04:05
  SPEAKER_01: Because I I think the box breathing thing is is a good is a really good strategy, not just for sleep, I think just for like calming your central nervous system really throughout the day.
• 1:04:13
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, um, so we should we should go, we should add them.
• 1:04:18
  SPEAKER_01: But Matt, we did jump from we were middle of the day working out.
• 1:04:22
  SPEAKER_01: Is it anything we've just set a world record, okay?
• 1:04:27
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, but can we talk about the I love the modesty of Chris?
• 1:04:32
  SPEAKER_01: Can we talk about the wind down?
• 1:04:34
  SPEAKER_01: Because I and again, selfishly, I think this is where I get it wrong.
• 1:04:39
  SPEAKER_01: Um, in that you know, the narrative is you know, we should begin winding down way before we are planning on lying down and resting, going to sleep.
• 1:04:49
  SPEAKER_01: But again, I think just practically so many people are so busy, are so time restricted.
• 1:04:55
  SPEAKER_01: Many people have young children they're caring for, looking after, partners that they're trying to spend some quality time with, eating, wrapping up work, and before you know it, you should be in bed.
• 1:05:07
  SPEAKER_01: And I think sometimes that rush between like capping off the end of the day and then right now I should be winding down, I often find that that's when I'm on the screen the most, right?
• 1:05:18
  SPEAKER_01: Because I've had no time to just do something mindless.
• 1:05:22
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
• 1:05:22
  SPEAKER_01: And so is there any is there anything that we can do that is mindless that does maybe like I don't know, it feels like downtime to me is when I don't have to be answering emails or or be available.
• 1:05:34
  SPEAKER_01: And that's when I don't know, sometimes I do some doom scrolling.
• 1:05:40
  SPEAKER_00: I love how you just casually drop that in there as the the biggest violation of the conversation.
• 1:05:45
  SPEAKER_00: Um sleep is not like a light switch.
• 1:05:51
  SPEAKER_00: But we often think it should be.
• 1:05:53
  SPEAKER_00: Sleep is sleep, is much more like trying to land a plane.
• 1:05:57
  SPEAKER_00: You've just got to take time to come down onto The terra firma of good sleep at night.
• 1:06:03
  SPEAKER_00: And I think one of the things that we fail to do because of all of the reasons that you just described is that we're racing and racing and racing, and then all of a sudden we just dive into bed, turn the light off, and then just wait.
• 1:06:19
  SPEAKER_00: And if you know, if you did that with your kids, you know, you're racing around, you're doing this stuff, stuff them into bed, yeah, that it's not gonna work.
• 1:06:28
  SPEAKER_00: So they'll just be wide awake.
• 1:06:29
  SPEAKER_00: And we're just the same too.
• 1:06:31
  SPEAKER_00: So I think the having some kind of a consistent routine, and the here's another experiment I would ask people to do.
• 1:06:40
  SPEAKER_00: Light can be one of your friends in this regard.
• 1:06:44
  SPEAKER_00: We all, many of us, will have an alarm to wake up to.
• 1:06:48
  SPEAKER_00: Why don't we have a to-bed alarm?
• 1:06:50
  SPEAKER_00: So for the next seven days, do me this favor, set an alarm one hour before bed.
• 1:06:57
  SPEAKER_00: And when that alarm goes off, what I want you to do is try to turn off almost all of the lights in your home.
• 1:07:04
  SPEAKER_00: And you will be surprised at how many other things that first domino flick consequentially produces.
• 1:07:10
  SPEAKER_00: So it's a great sort of anchoring tool that has manifold consequences.
• 1:07:15
  SPEAKER_00: Because all of a sudden you are your signaling, it's it's incredibly soporific.
• 1:07:20
  SPEAKER_00: You'd be surprised at how sleepy it makes you feel.
• 1:07:24
  SPEAKER_00: In part, that's because it's allowing the release of melatonin.
• 1:07:27
  SPEAKER_00: Melatonin is a hormone, it's a bioactive hormone, and we sometimes call it the hormone of darkness or the vampire hormone.
• 1:07:34
  SPEAKER_00: Not because it makes you kind of look longingly at people's necklines and want to bite in, although you're welcome to appropriately, but it's it's because it simply comes out at night.
• 1:07:44
  SPEAKER_00: And it's the melatonin, people get all sorts of confused.
• 1:07:48
  SPEAKER_00: They think it's a sleep aid.
• 1:07:50
  SPEAKER_00: Melatonin is not going to help you sleep in the way that you think it is.
• 1:07:54
  SPEAKER_00: It's the reason that no insomnia patient, unless they've got a circadian disorder, has ever been prescribed melatonin.
• 1:08:00
  SPEAKER_00: No one's going around with scripts saying, oh, you've got insomnia.
• 1:08:02
  SPEAKER_00: Great.
• 1:08:03
  SPEAKER_00: Here's the script for melatonin.
• 1:08:04
  SPEAKER_00: Melatonin is simply there to tell your brain when it is night and when it is time to go to sleep.
• 1:08:10
  SPEAKER_00: So melatonin is like the, they're like the starting official in the 100-meter race.
• 1:08:15
  SPEAKER_00: They bring all of the races to the front of the line and they begin the sleep race, but they don't participate in the generation of sleep itself.
• 1:08:22
  SPEAKER_00: That's a different set of chemicals, if that makes sense.
• 1:08:24
  SPEAKER_00: Makes perfect combinated sense.
• 1:08:26
  SPEAKER_00: But yeah, no, no, it does.
• 1:08:27
  SPEAKER_00: So when you turn off the lights, all of a sudden now you're allowing the brake pedal on melatonin to be released.
• 1:08:34
  SPEAKER_00: And that will help with the timing.
• 1:08:36
  SPEAKER_00: But psychologically, I think it's even more powerful than that because it tells your brain now is not the time to be, you know, oh, I need to do that last email, or I need to go on and sort of, you know, I forgot the laundry, I'll go and get the laundry out.
• 1:08:51
  SPEAKER_00: And oh, I was gonna get that thing out the back of the car.
• 1:08:54
  SPEAKER_00: Just darkness, it gives you a sense that now is my time, my entry into sleep.
• 1:09:00
  SPEAKER_00: Now is the time when the plane is starting.
• 1:09:02
  SPEAKER_00: So you're bringing it forward the start line.
• 1:09:04
  SPEAKER_00: Correct.
• 1:09:04
  SPEAKER_00: Rather than it happening within minutes, it's now going to transpire over 60 minutes.
• 1:09:09
  SPEAKER_01: Okay, so an hour before the the bedtime, yep.
• 1:09:12
  SPEAKER_01: Set the alarm, that alarm goes off, we turn off all the lights.
• 1:09:15
  SPEAKER_00: All the lights.
• 1:09:16
  SPEAKER_00: And if you can, I would also encourage you, you know, digital detox, but I know that genie is out of the bottle and it's not going back in anytime soon.
• 1:09:24
  SPEAKER_00: So I'm not going to be puritanical about it.
• 1:09:26
  SPEAKER_00: If you can just do 15 minutes before bed, just put the device away, just that by itself is huge.
• 1:09:34
  SPEAKER_00: Now, if you have to take it into the bedroom, um, Michael Grandner, who I I know you know, is one of the most brilliant sleep scientists.
• 1:09:43
  SPEAKER_00: He is just exceptional.
• 1:09:45
  SPEAKER_00: And he has a wonderful rule, which is you can take your phone into the bedroom, but you can only use your phone standing up.
• 1:09:57
  SPEAKER_01: I had I've I've had Michael on and he didn't tell me that.
• 1:10:01
  SPEAKER_01: But I love that.
• 1:10:01
  SPEAKER_01: Well, he's got so many of these.
• 1:10:03
  SPEAKER_00: Yes, I mean, we could have spoken about the treasure trove of yeah.
• 1:10:06
  SPEAKER_00: Actually, at this point, stop listening to this.
• 1:10:08
  SPEAKER_00: Like, in fact, I'm sorry you've wasted your time.
• 1:10:10
  SPEAKER_00: Go and listen to the podcast with Michael Grant, it's gonna be far more useful to you.
• 1:10:13
  SPEAKER_00: Both are both amazing.
• 1:10:15
  SPEAKER_00: It's this idea that you know you're there and for about seven or eight minutes you think, I'm just gonna have a bit of a sit-down.
• 1:10:20
  SPEAKER_00: Sorry, at that moment, the phone goes away and it's but if you can that that nighttime one hour, also at that point too, see if you can when the alarm goes off, just get ready for bed.
• 1:10:37
  SPEAKER_00: Go and brush your teeth, get just get bed ready because when finally that hour is over, what I don't want you to do is then go and turn the lights out.
• 1:10:47
  SPEAKER_00: You know, so just get yourself ready and you know, that's I would say that's one way you can try.
• 1:10:54
  SPEAKER_00: And don't just do the experiment where you do it for seven days.
• 1:10:58
  SPEAKER_00: When the experiment is over, I want you to go back to doing what you used to do before.
• 1:11:03
  SPEAKER_00: So, and then ask yourself the question did things get better when I did the intervention and did things get worse when I went back to doing what I did before?
• 1:11:10
  SPEAKER_00: Because I'm trying to prove to you by directionality of the experiment.
• 1:11:14
  SPEAKER_01: Whoa, whoa, whoa.
• 1:11:15
  SPEAKER_01: So you're saying do the reversey Percy.
• 1:11:17
  SPEAKER_01: Correct.
• 1:11:18
  SPEAKER_01: So do the seven days.
• 1:11:19
  SPEAKER_01: Yep.
• 1:11:20
  SPEAKER_01: Then go back to how you were without setting the alarm, without starting.
• 1:11:23
  SPEAKER_01: Yep.
• 1:11:24
  SPEAKER_01: And and just ask yourself, and if you truly For like one or two days.
• 1:11:28
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, yeah.
• 1:11:29
  SPEAKER_00: And you could say made no difference at all.
• 1:11:32
  SPEAKER_00: I I didn't fall asleep any easier, that nothing.
• 1:11:35
  SPEAKER_00: Then that that one of those two British guys, he's just full of it, and I'm not gonna listen to him every day.
• 1:11:42
  SPEAKER_01: No, that I mean, I I would wager that that works a hundred percent of the time.
• 1:11:46
  SPEAKER_01: It's somewhat effective.
• 1:11:47
  SPEAKER_01: Do you ever take your phone to bed?
• 1:11:49
  SPEAKER_00: It's a very intimate question.
• 1:11:52
  SPEAKER_00: Phone, I said.
• 1:11:56
  SPEAKER_00: Um, but we're at that level now.
• 1:11:58
  SPEAKER_00: So um I will take my phone into my room, but usually what I'll do is I'll plug it in and I'll leave it on the other side of the room.
• 1:12:08
  SPEAKER_00: In part just because there is there's something about this, like the psychological.
• 1:12:14
  SPEAKER_00: So I have you know my favorites on my phone, and I just know that they have access, then they can break through the night, and if they need me, then I'm there.
• 1:12:23
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
• 1:12:24
  SPEAKER_00: But for the most part, phone goes away, and I that's a good, that's a good strategy just to keep it out of reach, because that does because it gives you that sense of it.
• 1:12:34
  SPEAKER_00: Exactly, yeah.
• 1:12:35
  SPEAKER_00: And I didn't know that there are people who have lives where there are others who depend on them, yeah, and you have to be the critical lifeline to call.
• 1:12:41
  SPEAKER_00: So do that, but with some degree of a buffer in in between.
• 1:12:45
  SPEAKER_01: What are your what's your take on white noise or brown noise, like any kind of like ambient noise?
• 1:12:52
  SPEAKER_01: Because I I seem to do quite well with rain sounds.
• 1:12:55
  SPEAKER_01: I'm actually experimenting with an app right now.
• 1:12:58
  SPEAKER_01: Um understanding so much more about your rain.
• 1:13:01
  SPEAKER_01: Um I I like my personal favourite right now is rain on a tin roof.
• 1:13:05
  SPEAKER_01: Um I went through a period of of rain on fresh snow, but it didn't it didn't stick.
• 1:13:10
  SPEAKER_01: Rain on the tin roof is delightful.
• 1:13:13
  SPEAKER_01: And I and I put a timer on for about 30 minutes, and I don't I nearly I'm nearly always asleep before the before.
• 1:13:22
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, so firstly, you crap this is why I look like I've slept with a coat hanger in my mouth after I've spent some time with Chris because he's cracking me up all the time.
• 1:13:29
  SPEAKER_00: But um there is there is a pretty decent literature now that says if you are in an environment in a city where there is noise pollution, white noise machines can definitely have an effect.
• 1:13:44
  SPEAKER_00: For the most part, though, if there's not sound pollution, look at the evidence.
• 1:13:48
  SPEAKER_00: Really?
• 1:13:49
  SPEAKER_00: They at least it doesn't necessarily hurt you so much, but it doesn't necessarily benefit you very much either.
• 1:13:57
  SPEAKER_00: There is a little bit of evidence that so there's different colours of noise.
• 1:14:01
  SPEAKER_00: There's white noise, there's brown noise, there's pink noise.
• 1:14:05
  SPEAKER_00: Pink noise is sort of they just enrich it in different sort of parts.
• 1:14:09
  SPEAKER_00: So um brown noise and pink noise, they'll sound a little bit more kind of um baritone and sort of a little bit more bassy, they'll enrich that those lower frequencies.
• 1:14:20
  SPEAKER_00: Um there was a study though that looked at pink noise, and what they found is that it actually did a little bit of a disruption to REM sleep for whatever reason.
• 1:14:29
  SPEAKER_00: But I would say that worry less about the sort of colour of the noise, but worry about its distance because there are, especially for kids, it's not to say that sound machines aren't helpful, they definitely can be, but check the decibel level.
• 1:14:48
  SPEAKER_00: You can download decibel meters for free on your phone, and then just check the guidelines for what the safety standards are for decibel readings and make sure that the distance that you place it next to your child is far enough that it's it's not exceeding that because is that do you do you know of any evidence that is robust about um EMFs and like having the phones?
• 1:15:12
  SPEAKER_00: It's pretty controversial, and there is if you look at the data, it's scant and it's highly inconclusive.
• 1:15:19
  SPEAKER_00: So, you know what's your intuition there?
• 1:15:24
  SPEAKER_00: My intuition is that it's probably a very small effect.
• 1:15:28
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
• 1:15:29
  SPEAKER_01: Um for people listening, that that's electromagnetic frequencies, right?
• 1:15:33
  SPEAKER_01: And so I think like the the MF gubbins and gadgets and yeah.
• 1:15:39
  SPEAKER_00: Now you and I both know absence of evidence is not evidence of absence.
• 1:15:45
  SPEAKER_00: And so just because I don't have the evidence right now doesn't mean that it couldn't pop up and be actually quite significantly disrupting your sleep.
• 1:15:53
  SPEAKER_00: So I entertain an open mind to say I can't go either side of it right now.
• 1:15:58
  SPEAKER_00: Um but for for those noise machines, I would say if you feel as though they're working, that's great.
• 1:16:05
  SPEAKER_00: Uh earplugs, also fantastic, eye mask, you know, you're essentially trying to create or mimic the conditions that you would in nature, which in fact isn't necessarily silence.
• 1:16:21
  SPEAKER_00: Because if you look at hunt together tribes, you know, they are listening to wind in you know the sort of the the savannah grasses.
• 1:16:29
  SPEAKER_00: There's other people surrounding them and making noise.
• 1:16:32
  SPEAKER_00: Now night owls are gonna be looking about, you know.
• 1:16:36
  SPEAKER_00: So so it's we often try to engineer an environment that is completely silent, but if you look at how we evolved when it comes to sleep, there was some degree of noise, it just wasn't the honking of the horns and the trash Matt.
• 1:16:50
  SPEAKER_01: I've got so uh I I could honestly talk to you for hours about this, and there's so many big pillars that I want to still talk about, but I'm gonna let you pick out of them because I think we could otherwise we'll be here for the you know one thing I think um that is of particular certainly becoming more in of interest to the aging population now that we're doing a great job of um surviving some of the things that used to kill us, you know, like the heart disease and cancers and um you know infectious diseases, we haven't conquered them yet, but we are as a on a population level doing a good job of treating and diagnosing these things.
• 1:17:30
  SPEAKER_01: Now this this whole field of cognition is becoming something that we all I think have started to think about.
• 1:17:38
  SPEAKER_01: Very much, yeah.
• 1:17:39
  SPEAKER_01: And you you work with us and we work with a with a bunch of members together, and I think that is something that is always brought up when we're talking about what does longevity look like to you.
• 1:17:50
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, I think the concept of us getting into our 80s, 90s and beyond, but losing our self-of-sense or our memory, or you know, the recognizing our loved ones is the most terrifying thing about Asia.
• 1:18:02
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, I know you've done tons of work on memory, on you know, we mentioned right at the top of the show on Alzheimer's dementia.
• 1:18:11
  SPEAKER_01: You know, we've seen in parallel research out of you know, people like Rudy, Tanzi and um um Gene Bowman and Adam Ghazali doing great research on how to sharpen the saw before it gets blunt with certain tools for for improving cognition.
• 1:18:31
  SPEAKER_01: Um, but there's only so much you can do if you're not majoring in the majors, right?
• 1:18:35
  SPEAKER_01: And I use that term, I overuse that term.
• 1:18:39
  SPEAKER_01: Sleep seems, and correct me if I'm wrong, to be just so fundamental in protecting memory and building resilience for cognition in keeping the shore, the shore, the sore sharp across all these different mechanisms of the brain that create us as an individual, our our identity.
• 1:19:00
  SPEAKER_01: Can you should we unpack that one?
• 1:19:02
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, because that that I know it's gonna, I know it's uh there's a lot to that.
• 1:19:06
  SPEAKER_00: Um, but maybe Yeah, maybe I can sort of uh condense it.
• 1:19:09
  SPEAKER_00: I would say what we've discovered is that sleep is is important for learning in memory in three distinct ways.
• 1:19:16
  SPEAKER_00: First, you need sleep before learning to prepare your brain, um almost like a dry sponge, ready to initially soak up new information.
• 1:19:25
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
• 1:19:25
  SPEAKER_00: And without sleep, the memory circuits of your brain essentially become waterlogged, as it were, and you can't absorb new memories.
• 1:19:32
  SPEAKER_00: You can't imprint them as effectively as you could do.
• 1:19:36
  SPEAKER_00: But then you also need sleep, not just before learning, but you need sleep after learning for two additional steps.
• 1:19:43
  SPEAKER_00: The first thing is that sleep, after you've formed a memory, will take that freshly minted information and it will essentially hit the save button on those new memories so that you don't forget.
• 1:19:54
  SPEAKER_00: Now that takes time, it's much quicker than the digital file, but sleep effectively future-proofs the information in your brain.
• 1:20:03
  SPEAKER_00: And how it does it is uh stunning.
• 1:20:06
  SPEAKER_00: It does it in at least two um uh non-competing ways.
• 1:20:12
  SPEAKER_00: The first thing that sleep will do is it will take that memory circuit that you've learned and it will actually replay it during sleep.
• 1:20:21
  SPEAKER_00: And it replays it not during dream sleep.
• 1:20:23
  SPEAKER_00: You would think, well, maybe my memories of me replaying absolutely wrong.
• 1:20:26
  SPEAKER_00: It's during deep sleep, during deep dreamless sleep.
• 1:20:30
  SPEAKER_00: And there's great studies where they were looking at rats who are learning a maze, and the rats would run around the maze, and they had electrodes listening to the memory centers.
• 1:20:39
  SPEAKER_00: And so as the rat ran around the maze, you could place a tone on each one of the sort of cells, and so it would sound a little bit like this as the rat was essentially coding the maze, laying down the memories.
• 1:20:52
  SPEAKER_00: Genius thing was they let the rat sleep and then they kept listening.
• 1:20:56
  SPEAKER_00: And when it went into deep non-REM sleep, what did they hear?
• 1:20:59
  SPEAKER_00: What they heard was the memory being replayed, but not at the same speed, somewhere between 10 to 20 times faster.
• 1:21:07
  SPEAKER_00: So what instead you heard was unbelievable.
• 1:21:12
  SPEAKER_00: Unbelievable.
• 1:21:14
  SPEAKER_00: So that's the first one.
• 1:21:15
  SPEAKER_00: It's essentially it's etching the memory into the neural architecture of the brain more powerfully.
• 1:21:23
  SPEAKER_01: In the same way as you might memorize a monologue, right?
• 1:21:26
  SPEAKER_01: Once you've once you've gone through it and once you've got enough reps in, it stays there for good.
• 1:21:30
  SPEAKER_00: Exactly, because you've scored it into, you've etched it down into that surface.
• 1:21:34
  SPEAKER_00: So that's the first thing.
• 1:21:35
  SPEAKER_00: That's remarkable.
• 1:21:36
  SPEAKER_00: The second thing that sleep does is that during that sort of replay, it will also take memories that are located in a short-term vulnerable reservoir, and it will move them out into a more permanent long-term storage site within the brain.
• 1:21:50
  SPEAKER_00: So there's a structure in your left and the right side of your brain called the hippocampus.
• 1:21:54
  SPEAKER_00: And it's sort of think about it like the informational inbox of your brain.
• 1:21:58
  SPEAKER_00: It's very good at receiving and holding on to new files.
• 1:22:01
  SPEAKER_00: But it also has what we believe is a limited storage capacity.
• 1:22:04
  SPEAKER_00: It's it's almost like a USB stick, if anyone remembers those things.
• 1:22:08
  SPEAKER_00: And you used to go around and you could plug in, you could, you know, grab the day's information.
• 1:22:13
  SPEAKER_00: But at some point, you're gonna get into storage issues.
• 1:22:16
  SPEAKER_00: So every night, sleep will then take those memories and it will shift them off onto the hard drive of the cortex, and that's where it stores them, long-term memory storage.
• 1:22:25
  SPEAKER_00: Freeing up the USB again.
• 1:22:26
  SPEAKER_00: And that's the beauty, genius, you see, which is that once you've got the packets transferred, then it will send back down.
• 1:22:34
  SPEAKER_00: And we've done these studies where you'll see this, it'll send down a signal saying message received.
• 1:22:39
  SPEAKER_00: And locked in.
• 1:22:40
  SPEAKER_00: Clear out the file.
• 1:22:41
  SPEAKER_00: And every morning you have this symbiotic relationship between taking yesterday's memory, storing them in the long-term hard drive of the cortex, and you've cleared out the USB stick.
• 1:22:52
  SPEAKER_00: So I can wake up the next morning and I can keep learning new memory files.
• 1:22:56
  SPEAKER_00: And it just repeats.
• 1:22:57
  SPEAKER_00: It's beautiful, elegant system of informational storage.
• 1:23:00
  SPEAKER_00: The third thing that sleep does, though, is I think the most impressive.
• 1:23:04
  SPEAKER_00: And this is where we come into dreaming now.
• 1:23:07
  SPEAKER_00: Sleep, and particularly dream sleep, will take all of these recently encoded memories and it will start to collide them with all of your back catalogue of information.
• 1:23:18
  SPEAKER_00: And it will start to test and build novel and new associations so that you wake up the next day and you have a revised mind-wide web of associations.
• 1:23:29
  SPEAKER_00: And as a consequence, you're capable of divining solutions to previously impenetrable problems.
• 1:23:35
  SPEAKER_00: And it's the reason that no one has ever said, Chris, you should stay awake on a problem.
• 1:23:40
  SPEAKER_00: No one ever says that to you.
• 1:23:42
  SPEAKER_00: You sleep on it.
• 1:23:43
  SPEAKER_00: And in every language that I've studied, that notion, that idea, that phrase sleep on it, or something very close, actually, which means that it transcends cultural boundaries.
• 1:23:52
  SPEAKER_00: It's a common experience across humanity.
• 1:23:55
  SPEAKER_00: Um, the French, by the way, I think the French translation is much closer to you sleep with a problem.
• 1:24:00
  SPEAKER_00: The Brits, where you say you sleep on a problem.
• 1:24:02
  SPEAKER_00: The French, you say you sleep with a problem.
• 1:24:04
  SPEAKER_00: I think it says so much about the romantic difference between the British and the French, but I digress.
• 1:24:09
  SPEAKER_01: That's kind of crazy though, because and I've never thought about it in that way.
• 1:24:12
  SPEAKER_01: But we do say sleep, you know, we do sleep on problems.
• 1:24:16
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
• 1:24:16
  SPEAKER_01: And we do have a different mindset in the morning.
• 1:24:18
  SPEAKER_00: It's it's it's radically different.
• 1:24:20
  SPEAKER_01: And I thought that would just be a product of time.
• 1:24:22
  SPEAKER_01: You've been able to ruminate.
• 1:24:23
  SPEAKER_00: Right, exactly.
• 1:24:24
  SPEAKER_00: And it's not time that is the instigator, it's time with sleep that makes the difference.
• 1:24:30
  SPEAKER_00: And we've seen this for textbook memory, we've seen it for skill memory.
• 1:24:34
  SPEAKER_00: So athletic performance.
• 1:24:36
  SPEAKER_00: Practice does not make perfect.
• 1:24:38
  SPEAKER_00: Practice with a night of sleep leads to perfection.
• 1:24:43
  SPEAKER_00: And so those are the three sort of distinct ways.
• 1:24:46
  SPEAKER_00: And it's that last one that to me sort of blows my mind.
• 1:24:49
  SPEAKER_01: I'll ask you a question on that.
• 1:24:50
  SPEAKER_01: A niche one with the athletes.
• 1:24:52
  SPEAKER_01: Do you think that then, you know, that repetition of a skill or imagery of, you know, going walking through that mental model of a skill in the day would then lead to them memorizing the monologue in the evening, and that that would effectively they're getting more reps in, and that would there's some neuromotor coordination upside for doing that, which is why perfect practice makes perfect sort of thing.
• 1:25:18
  SPEAKER_00: And we've done exactly those studies.
• 1:25:19
  SPEAKER_00: Really?
• 1:25:20
  SPEAKER_00: And it's even more mind-blowing.
• 1:25:21
  SPEAKER_00: Not only can we actually see the reactivation of that same motor skill memory during sleep, but you you can ask a question, well, so then if I'm better the next morning than the the night before, how is sleep making me better?
• 1:25:38
  SPEAKER_00: What is what is it doing?
• 1:25:40
  SPEAKER_00: You can imagine that, let's say there's this complex motor repertoire that you have to go through.
• 1:25:45
  SPEAKER_00: And you you could think of sleep grabbing that sort of motor skill repertoire and just lifting all aspects of the motor skill up.
• 1:25:53
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
• 1:25:53
  SPEAKER_00: Sleep doesn't do that.
• 1:25:55
  SPEAKER_00: What we discovered, and we were sort of teaching people almost like learning a piano scale, sort of you type on a keyboard 41324, 413244, they train over and over again and practice, and they would get better, come back the next day, and despite the absence of any further practice, they were about 20% faster and about 30% more accurate.
• 1:26:14
  SPEAKER_00: But what was interesting is that when you looked at the individual components of the motor sequence, before they slept, people had what we call these problem points in the sequence.
• 1:26:25
  SPEAKER_00: And they were different for different people, but it would sound a little bit like this 413, 24, 413, 24, 413, 24.
• 1:26:34
  SPEAKER_00: Sleep didn't just make everything faster or better.
• 1:26:38
  SPEAKER_00: Sleep understood where the problem point was in the motor repertoire, and it selectively went in and it improved it.
• 1:26:46
  SPEAKER_00: So what you got, which is what you want as an athlete, which is automaticity.
• 1:26:51
  SPEAKER_00: And the next day, all you heard was 41324413244.
• 1:26:55
  SPEAKER_00: It was just it ironed out the creases in the motor skill repertoire.
• 1:27:00
  SPEAKER_00: That's crazy, and that's why people were so much better.
• 1:27:03
  SPEAKER_00: And people have told me this, you know, the the idea that I had for that experiment, I was giving a talk, gosh, it was soon after I did my PhD.
• 1:27:12
  SPEAKER_00: It was back in the UK, and I was speaking about sleep and just this early work on memory, and this guy came over to me at the end and sort of looked like a learned man.
• 1:27:23
  SPEAKER_00: He had this sort of tweed sort of jacket, and I'll never forget it.
• 1:27:27
  SPEAKER_00: And he said, This is amazing.
• 1:27:29
  SPEAKER_00: I'm but I'm a a pianist and I teach piano, and I know for a fact that sometimes when I'm learning a piece and I'm practicing and I'm practicing and I just can't get it, and I come back the next day and I sit down and I can just play.
• 1:27:44
  SPEAKER_00: And he said, Do you think that's sleep?
• 1:27:46
  SPEAKER_00: And I said, Well, I but no one's done the studies, but but I I think it's a really fascinating thing.
• 1:27:52
  SPEAKER_00: And it could just be that you're tired at night and sort of, you know.
• 1:27:55
  SPEAKER_00: And and he said, That's great, thank me for it, and walked away.
• 1:27:58
  SPEAKER_00: And I just st stood.
• 1:28:00
  SPEAKER_00: There, I remember it distinctly thinking, and I can just play.
• 1:28:04
  SPEAKER_00: And I thought that is it.
• 1:28:05
  SPEAKER_00: And that was a that led to about a 15-year series of studies where we just dismantle the whole thing and did all sorts of stuff.
• 1:28:14
  SPEAKER_00: And I I never got the chance to thank him for it.
• 1:28:16
  SPEAKER_00: Um, but he was the one who gave me that idea.
• 1:28:19
  SPEAKER_00: No way.
• 1:28:19
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
• 1:28:20
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
• 1:28:21
  SPEAKER_01: How can we find him?
• 1:28:22
  SPEAKER_01: I know.
• 1:28:22
  SPEAKER_01: Uh yeah.
• 1:28:23
  SPEAKER_00: I want to, but but so those are the three ways.
• 1:28:26
  SPEAKER_00: So sleep before learning, sleep after learning, and sleep after learning for at least two different reasons.
• 1:28:31
  SPEAKER_00: How elegant.
• 1:28:33
  SPEAKER_00: It's so clever in the sense of it's almost like someone designed it.
• 1:28:40
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
• 1:28:42
  SPEAKER_00: Dot dot dot.
• 1:28:43
  SPEAKER_00: And what what it tells me is something remarkable about dream sleep, which is that it's one of the two functions of of why we dream.
• 1:28:52
  SPEAKER_00: Uh but this function of saying that the goal of your memory system isn't necessarily just to learn and routinize and just remember every single fact.
• 1:29:06
  SPEAKER_00: When I teach students, there's a difference between uh students, uh, one of which is knowledge that they can repeat everything back to me versus the really good student, which is wisdom, which is knowing what it all means when you fit it together.
• 1:29:22
  SPEAKER_00: That's the student I want.
• 1:29:24
  SPEAKER_00: That's REM sleep.
• 1:29:26
  SPEAKER_00: Rem sleep, it's almost like group therapy for memories.
• 1:29:29
  SPEAKER_00: REM sleep takes in all of this information, everyone gets a name badge, and Dream Sleep forces you to speak to the people not at the front of the room that you think you've got a direct, obvious connection with, it forces you to speak with the people at the back of the room that you think you've got no connection with whatsoever.
• 1:29:42
  SPEAKER_00: But when you start having the conversation, you do.
• 1:29:45
  SPEAKER_00: It's a very distant, non-obvious connection.
• 1:29:47
  SPEAKER_00: But when you start to fuse things together that shouldn't normally go together, but cause a marked advance in evolutionary fitness, that sounds like the biological basis of creativity.
• 1:29:58
  SPEAKER_00: That seems to be one of the functions of Dream Sleep.
• 1:30:00
  SPEAKER_00: It's like a Google search gone wrong.
• 1:30:01
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
• 1:30:02
  SPEAKER_00: It's like you, you know, you type in sort of, you know, Wonder Health, and the first page, you know, well, actually it's far too exclusive, but it you get the idea.
• 1:30:10
  SPEAKER_00: But and then if but if you go to page eight, it's about a field hockey game in Utah, and you think, hang on a second.
• 1:30:17
  SPEAKER_00: But then you read it and you think, oh, that's oh, I see what they did there.
• 1:30:21
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
• 1:30:22
  SPEAKER_00: And you do this in a non-consequential arena of dreaming, where it it's it's a free lunch.
• 1:30:29
  SPEAKER_00: And even if you only get one of those hits out of every 10,000, you only need one.
• 1:30:36
  SPEAKER_00: It's that moment in sort of 2001 where the the ape is, you know, bashing around sort of with the bones, and all of a sudden it realizes that this thing is actually a weapon.
• 1:30:45
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, all of a sudden it's that one of those moments which then changes the evolutionary yeah.
• 1:30:50
  SPEAKER_00: That's all you need.
• 1:30:51
  SPEAKER_00: Dreams.
• 1:30:52
  SPEAKER_01: Why why tell me if this is going to be too long to unpack, but why do we have some really delightful dreams?
• 1:30:59
  SPEAKER_01: And then sometimes I'll have the weirdest dreams that are like I'm like, how did my brain ever conceive this conceptually?
• 1:31:06
  SPEAKER_01: And then sometimes they're really frightening.
• 1:31:09
  SPEAKER_01: We call them nightmares.
• 1:31:10
  SPEAKER_01: Like, how do we assume but why?
• 1:31:12
  SPEAKER_01: What and is there are they serving different functions?
• 1:31:15
  SPEAKER_00: Ah astute point.
• 1:31:18
  SPEAKER_00: Um you can do that episode too if you when you think strap yourselves down.
• 1:31:25
  SPEAKER_00: Well, from if you think about it, last night, you and I and everyone listening, you all became flagrantly psychotic.
• 1:31:35
  SPEAKER_00: Because last night, when you slept and you went into dream sleep, you started to see things which were not there.
• 1:31:40
  SPEAKER_00: So you were hallucinating.
• 1:31:41
  SPEAKER_00: You believed things that couldn't possibly be true, so you're delusional.
• 1:31:45
  SPEAKER_00: You became confused about time, place, and person.
• 1:31:48
  SPEAKER_00: So you're suffering from disorientation.
• 1:31:51
  SPEAKER_00: You had wildly fluctuating emotions, something that psychiatrists call being affectively labile.
• 1:31:57
  SPEAKER_00: And then how wonderful.
• 1:31:58
  SPEAKER_00: You woke up this morning and you forgot most, if not all, of that dream experience.
• 1:32:02
  SPEAKER_00: So you're suffering from amnesia.
• 1:32:03
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
• 1:32:04
  SPEAKER_00: If you were to experience any one of those five whilst you're awake, you would be seeking psychological intervention.
• 1:32:09
  SPEAKER_00: But for reasons that we're now only starting to understand, it's a normal biological and psychological process.
• 1:32:16
  SPEAKER_00: So why are dreams the way that they are?
• 1:32:20
  SPEAKER_00: Well, when we put people in inside of a brain scanner and we let them sleep and go into dream sleep, your some parts of the brain are up to 30% more active than when you're awake, number one.
• 1:32:30
  SPEAKER_00: Number two, emotional and memory centers light up, visual centers light up, the motoric centers of the brain light up lots.
• 1:32:38
  SPEAKER_00: I mean, it's like a Christmas tree, except your prefrontal cortex, which is the part of the brain right at the front, directly above your eyes.
• 1:32:46
  SPEAKER_00: The prefrontal cortex is the thing that makes us most human.
• 1:32:49
  SPEAKER_00: It's the most evolved part of our brain.
• 1:32:52
  SPEAKER_00: And that part of the brain, we think of it almost like the CEO of the brain.
• 1:32:56
  SPEAKER_00: It's very good at making high-level, top-down executive decisions and controlling processes.
• 1:33:01
  SPEAKER_00: That part of the brain takes a nosedive, like a dart into the ground.
• 1:33:07
  SPEAKER_00: So all of a sudden, you've got all these memories and these emotions and visions.
• 1:33:11
  SPEAKER_00: And so the prison guards are away and the prisoners are running amok.
• 1:33:16
  SPEAKER_00: And that's why your dreams are so illogical and irrational.
• 1:33:20
  SPEAKER_00: And we believe that that's, as I said, it's a use, it serves one of the useful functions, which is that you can get really loosey-goosey with these associations.
• 1:33:29
  SPEAKER_00: What's also interesting is that when you start to normally dreaming is a non-conscious process.
• 1:33:36
  SPEAKER_00: As you described, it happens to you.
• 1:33:39
  SPEAKER_00: You don't get to decide, yeah, except when people become lucid.
• 1:33:44
  SPEAKER_00: So what we call lucid dreaming.
• 1:33:46
  SPEAKER_00: And one of the hypotheses, and the data is mixed, is that this part of the brain, the prefrontal cortex, that's about volitional control.
• 1:33:54
  SPEAKER_00: I decide what happens, I decide to lift the glass, I decide to make that choice.
• 1:33:59
  SPEAKER_00: That part of the brain, as I said, goes offline during dreaming.
• 1:34:02
  SPEAKER_00: So no wonder it's illogical, irrational, and non-volitional.
• 1:34:06
  SPEAKER_00: There's no adults in the room.
• 1:34:08
  SPEAKER_00: There's none.
• 1:34:10
  SPEAKER_00: Basically like a two-year-old at that point from a brain maturation perspective.
• 1:34:14
  SPEAKER_00: However, when people start to gain lucid control, there is some evidence that that prefrontal cortex starts to come back online.
• 1:34:21
  SPEAKER_00: Interesting.
• 1:34:22
  SPEAKER_00: And you get to decide what it is that you're dreaming.
• 1:34:25
  SPEAKER_00: And that's in part of the definition of lucid dreaming.
• 1:34:28
  SPEAKER_00: But to come back to your question, we there's nothing necessarily mechanistically different that we see from a gross brain activity perspective regarding sort of emotionally challenging dreams versus just standard dreams.
• 1:34:43
  SPEAKER_00: And I would say that nightmares, for the most part, seem to be a normal part of the dreaming process.
• 1:34:50
  SPEAKER_00: We do know I told you that one of the functions of dreaming is this memory association.
• 1:34:55
  SPEAKER_00: The second function of dreaming is overnight therapy.
• 1:34:59
  SPEAKER_00: Dreaming is emotional first aid.
• 1:35:03
  SPEAKER_00: And what's stunning is that there's a chemical inside of your brain called noradrenaline.
• 1:35:07
  SPEAKER_00: And you've heard of the sister chemical in the body, it's called adrenaline.
• 1:35:11
  SPEAKER_00: But upstairs in the brain, it's noradrenaline.
• 1:35:13
  SPEAKER_00: And it's one of the chemicals that's associated with sort of stress and strong emotions.
• 1:35:20
  SPEAKER_00: During dream sleep is the only time during the 24-hour period where noradrenaline is shut off in the brain.
• 1:35:28
  SPEAKER_00: It's gone.
• 1:35:29
  SPEAKER_00: No noradrenaline.
• 1:35:31
  SPEAKER_00: So why is this relevant?
• 1:35:33
  SPEAKER_00: We put forward a theory called the sleep to remember and sleep to forget hypothesis, which is that when you go into dreaming, you reactivate, as I said, the memory centers are active, the emotional centers are active.
• 1:35:45
  SPEAKER_00: So you get the chance to reactivate these difficult emotional experiences, but you're doing it in a brain state that is devoid of stress chemistry.
• 1:35:55
  SPEAKER_00: So it's almost like it's this form of overnight therapy that you get to process the memories finally.
• 1:36:01
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
• 1:36:01
  SPEAKER_00: Dreaming is like a nocturnal soothing bomb.
• 1:36:05
  SPEAKER_00: And it just takes the difficult, painful edges off those traumatic memories so that you come back the next day and you have a memory of an emotional event, but it's no longer emotional.
• 1:36:17
  SPEAKER_00: You don't regurgitate the same visceral reaction that you had at the time of learning.
• 1:36:22
  SPEAKER_01: Wow.
• 1:36:23
  SPEAKER_01: Okay.
• 1:36:23
  SPEAKER_01: That makes so much sense.
• 1:36:25
  SPEAKER_01: Would I be right in saying, is that why when you have a poor night of sleep, your ability to regulate your emotions is lower, like your empathy just kind of disappears.
• 1:36:37
  SPEAKER_01: You're, you know, you're really reactive and like you're just harder to be around.
• 1:36:42
  SPEAKER_01: Is that is that the truth to that?
• 1:36:44
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
• 1:36:44
  SPEAKER_00: And there's actually two parts to that.
• 1:36:46
  SPEAKER_00: The first is that you you haven't gone through that process of processing the emotions.
• 1:36:51
  SPEAKER_00: You know, I sometimes almost think insomnia is maybe the revenge of things that we haven't processed in our waking day.
• 1:36:57
  SPEAKER_00: But there's another part, which is that when we go into sleep at night, we essentially give your prefrontal cortex the chance to reboot and it reconnects because one of the things that your prefrontal cortex is designed and literally designed to do is that it connects to your deep emotional centers, particularly an area called the amygdala.
• 1:37:17
  SPEAKER_00: And the amygdala is the centerpiece region for the generation of strong emotional reactions.
• 1:37:22
  SPEAKER_00: And normally that connection between your prefrontal cortex and the amygdala is robust.
• 1:37:29
  SPEAKER_00: And that's why we all, for the most part, have the ability to regulate our emotions.
• 1:37:34
  SPEAKER_00: That's why children don't, because they don't have a fully developed prefrontal cortex.
• 1:37:38
  SPEAKER_00: So think of your prefrontal cortex like the brakes and your amygdala like the accelerator pedal.
• 1:37:44
  SPEAKER_00: And normally with a night of sleep, you restore that functional connection between those two areas.
• 1:37:50
  SPEAKER_00: But without a night of sleep, when we did the study, we put people back inside of the scanner, that connection has been severed.
• 1:37:57
  SPEAKER_00: And as a consequence, your all emotional gas pedal and too little regulatory control break, as it were.
• 1:38:04
  SPEAKER_00: And that's why it's sort of the, you know, I just snapped, dot, dot, dot.
• 1:38:09
  SPEAKER_00: That is a night of insufficient sleep.
• 1:38:11
  SPEAKER_01: It explains so much.
• 1:38:12
  SPEAKER_01: Matt, you're so good at explaining complex science in way to people.
• 1:38:16
  SPEAKER_00: I'm such a I'm so low IQ on it.
• 1:38:18
  SPEAKER_00: I have no ability not to.
• 1:38:21
  SPEAKER_01: It's brilliant on so many levels.
• 1:38:23
  SPEAKER_01: Let's see if you can do it in a quick fire fashion.
• 1:38:25
  SPEAKER_01: Oh, I love this.
• 1:38:26
  SPEAKER_01: Okay.
• 1:38:26
  SPEAKER_01: No, no, I'm I'm I I want to be respectful of your time, and I genuinely could ask a thousand more questions about this, but I know how busy you are.
• 1:38:33
  SPEAKER_01: Tell me one thing that your peers in your field might disagree with that you believe.
• 1:38:39
  SPEAKER_00: That sleep evolved.
• 1:38:42
  SPEAKER_02: Really?
• 1:38:43
  SPEAKER_00: Why do we assume that?
• 1:38:45
  SPEAKER_00: I have a different opinion.
• 1:38:47
  SPEAKER_00: I think sleep was the default state and wakefulness evolved.
• 1:38:51
  SPEAKER_02: Huh.
• 1:38:55
  SPEAKER_02: Wait.
• 1:38:57
  SPEAKER_01: Let me unpack that for a second.
• 1:38:58
  SPEAKER_01: No, I'm not going to unpack it.
• 1:39:00
  SPEAKER_01: Wow, okay.
• 1:39:02
  SPEAKER_01: I can cut this bit of me marinating on it, but that is actually kind of profound.
• 1:39:07
  SPEAKER_01: Um, okay, one thing that you used to like vehemently believe, which you now don't, I've probably done it already, which is that coffee was the the villain.
• 1:39:15
  SPEAKER_01: Um contra to a degree.
• 1:39:18
  SPEAKER_01: What do you think is the most overrated longevity hack that you're seeing online right now?
• 1:39:24
  SPEAKER_01: Can be outside of your field.
• 1:39:26
  SPEAKER_00: I just think supplements in in general.
• 1:39:28
  SPEAKER_00: Not to say that some supplements aren't good.
• 1:39:30
  SPEAKER_00: I think supplements can be fantastic, but I think we overemphasize, per se, I mean melatonin is a is a great demonstration of this.
• 1:39:37
  SPEAKER_00: Um just to be very brief, it took George Lucas, I think, 30 years to amass 4 billion in profit with the Star Wars franchise.
• 1:39:46
  SPEAKER_00: It took Ambient 21 months to accomplish that.
• 1:39:49
  SPEAKER_00: In other words, pharmaceutical companies know that there is big money in sleep pharmacology.
• 1:39:55
  SPEAKER_00: If there was some Shangri-La of all wonderful, resplendent sleep that sat in a bottle of supplements, don't you think that they would have been on it decades ago and making money from it?
• 1:40:04
  SPEAKER_00: What does that tell you about how effective supplements probably are?
• 1:40:08
  SPEAKER_01: We we can, for your reference, take that statement and apply it across every aspect of these major principles.
• 1:40:14
  SPEAKER_01: You know, I think it would be great.
• 1:40:16
  SPEAKER_00: You've done such a good job of of giving people just the hard truth of stop stepping over dollars and picking up pennies.
• 1:40:25
  SPEAKER_00: Thank you.
• 1:40:26
  SPEAKER_01: I think that's that's the that's the best compliment I've been given ever from someone like you.
• 1:40:33
  SPEAKER_00: The way that you've cut through the noise and just tell people, you know, I'm sorry, it's not gonna be the most sexy thing, it's not gonna garner the most hits.
• 1:40:41
  SPEAKER_00: But trust me, if you do these talking about the elemental, fundamental things, it's they're not sexy, but they will they've got mileage in them all day, every day.
• 1:40:52
  SPEAKER_01: And and and I think to your point, if we discover some kind of sleep memetic or exercise memetic or anything along those lines, we would be the first people talking about them.
• 1:41:02
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, absolutely.
• 1:41:03
  SPEAKER_00: I'd embrace it.
• 1:41:04
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, I'd take it.
• 1:41:06
  SPEAKER_01: Take it, yeah, yeah.
• 1:41:07
  SPEAKER_01: Um, what do you think the most over uh underrated tool is?
• 1:41:12
  SPEAKER_01: And I'm gonna say here, Matt, you can't say sleep pro-social behavior, just getting out and being with people.
• 1:41:24
  SPEAKER_01: I I would say 90% of our scientists have given that same answer.
• 1:41:29
  SPEAKER_00: Really?
• 1:41:30
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
• 1:41:31
  SPEAKER_00: I am I knew I was desperately vanilla.
• 1:41:35
  SPEAKER_00: So medium right now.
• 1:41:37
  SPEAKER_00: Um I'm I'm very shallow, but I have a very deep surface.
• 1:41:42
  SPEAKER_01: Well, look, I think I think that just speaks to how important it is and and m potentially how we're we're seeing less of it with this, you know, just crazy amount of tools and technology that are now removing displacators from your life thing.
• 1:41:56
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
• 1:41:57
  SPEAKER_01: What would you going back to the first day of your career?
• 1:42:03
  SPEAKER_01: If you knew everything that you know now about optimizing for sleep, but also for health in general, how would you approach your own health differently?
• 1:42:12
  SPEAKER_00: I would double down on consistency and I would stop leaning into every fad that I saw, and I would try to shy away from some guy who's clearly jacked on steroids in a sauna who's shouting at me.
• 1:42:30
  SPEAKER_01: We're unpacking some trauma there.
• 1:42:35
  SPEAKER_01: Um, okay.
• 1:42:37
  SPEAKER_01: What's one unanswered question in sleep science that you would love to answer?
• 1:42:42
  SPEAKER_00: Can I zip file sleep?
• 1:42:46
  SPEAKER_00: Can I compress eight down into four and get away with it?
• 1:42:52
  SPEAKER_00: Because I've tried as best I can to raise awareness about sleep, but again, that genie is out the bottle, and I think uh I'll always be fighting the battle.
• 1:43:02
  SPEAKER_00: So rather than fight it, why don't I find a way to try to go with it and see?
• 1:43:07
  SPEAKER_00: But the problem is if I end up succeeding and I've got some ideas genetically how to do that, then four becomes the new eight, and now everyone's sleeping too.
• 1:43:17
  SPEAKER_00: That's such a good point.
• 1:43:20
  SPEAKER_01: You're just moving the goalposts a little.
• 1:43:22
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah.
• 1:43:23
  SPEAKER_02: That's okay.
• 1:43:24
  SPEAKER_02: Do you think we ever get there?
• 1:43:26
  SPEAKER_00: Uh yeah.
• 1:43:29
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, but there's some there's a small fraction of uh percent of a population who are what we call the genetic short sleepers, and they seem to be able to sleep as little as six hours and show no impairment in brain or body, and we're starting to unpack what those genes are.
• 1:43:44
  SPEAKER_00: What that tells me is that somewhere along the way, nature has figured out how to zip file sleep to a degree.
• 1:43:50
  SPEAKER_00: If I can figure that out, then in some dystopian future there's CRISPR.
• 1:43:54
  SPEAKER_01: For the people listening who do sleep six hours and then think they're genetic short sleepers.
• 1:44:02
  SPEAKER_01: We've done this test on people is nowhere near as common as people think, right?
• 1:44:08
  SPEAKER_00: You're statistically more likely to be struck by lightning in your lifetime than you are to be a genetic short sleeper, just for context.
• 1:44:15
  SPEAKER_00: Okay.
• 1:44:15
  SPEAKER_00: Um I think it's um gets about uh depending on the gene, about 0.004% of the population.
• 1:44:22
  SPEAKER_00: Wow, it's at 0.006 to be struck by lightning.
• 1:44:26
  SPEAKER_01: Oh, I thought it was I thought it was more than that.
• 1:44:28
  SPEAKER_01: I thought it was under 1%, but still that's crazy.
• 1:44:35
  SPEAKER_01: Again, we don't want to go down a rabbit hole, but there are people that do get away with sleeping less that just haven't paid the pie piper yet, right?
• 1:44:44
  SPEAKER_00: It's these assumption of people saying, Look, my uncle smoked two packs packs of cigarettes a day and he lived until he was 95 and he, you know, passed away in his sleep, you know, peacefully.
• 1:44:56
  SPEAKER_00: Does that mean that smoking is okay?
• 1:44:58
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
• 1:44:59
  SPEAKER_00: And by the way, I mean, you you gotta be careful with the numbers.
• 1:45:03
  SPEAKER_00: First thing I would say is that seven-sixths of the population don't understand fractions.
• 1:45:07
  SPEAKER_00: And then the second thing I would say is that um the number of people who can survive on less than six hours of sleep without showing any impairment in their brain or their body, rounded to a whole number and expressed as a percent of the population as zero.
• 1:45:27
  SPEAKER_01: There's a clip right there.
• 1:45:30
  SPEAKER_01: Okay, so there's a lot of people listening.
• 1:45:32
  SPEAKER_01: I hope there's a lot of people listening by now.
• 1:45:34
  SPEAKER_01: Um unless you've lost the will to live, which is very common when I'm speaking.
• 1:45:38
  SPEAKER_01: So I'm so so sorry.
• 1:45:41
  SPEAKER_01: Still going.
• 1:45:42
  SPEAKER_01: Um who will be listening with both aging parents and young children.
• 1:45:50
  SPEAKER_01: I think you know, we would all love to have had our parents have access to the tools, the technology, the knowledge that we have access to now about how to live a long and healthy life.
• 1:46:03
  SPEAKER_01: We know that the risk factor for all of these common diseases that we succumb to typically, including physical and cognitive decline, the biggest risk factor is age.
• 1:46:12
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
• 1:46:13
  SPEAKER_01: What advice would you give the listeners or the parents themselves, but the listeners to take to their parents to make this a compelling case that they should still be, you know, trying to carve out urgency and time for some of these fundamentals?
• 1:46:28
  SPEAKER_00: Um I would say it is never too late to start sleeping better.
• 1:46:34
  SPEAKER_00: And I'm not trying to be Polly Anna or, you know, rah-rah-rah.
• 1:46:38
  SPEAKER_00: There's a great study from UCSF, and they looked at people in their 50s who had undiagnosed sleep apnea, and then they gave them a treatment, which is something called a CPAP machine for um to help them breathe better at night.
• 1:46:49
  SPEAKER_00: And about 50% of the people complied to the treatment and about 50% didn't, and they tracked them over decades.
• 1:46:55
  SPEAKER_00: What they found was that those people who complied to the treatment staved off the onslaught of Alzheimer's disease by somewhere between 12 to 15 years relative to the group that didn't.
• 1:47:05
  SPEAKER_00: That's a causal manipulation that if in late stage or later stages of life, if I manipulate sleep and get you sleeping better, it has a measurable impact on your dementia mortality.
• 1:47:17
  SPEAKER_00: It's never too late to start sleeping better.
• 1:47:19
  SPEAKER_01: Love that.
• 1:47:21
  SPEAKER_01: Matt, last question.
• 1:47:26
  SPEAKER_01: I don't know why I asked this question because it might actually just be a reason that people then fast forward to the end.
• 1:47:33
  SPEAKER_01: If people were tuning in for the last 60 seconds of this episode, what would be the three highest level takeaways you'd want them to go in action right now?
• 1:47:42
  SPEAKER_00: It's the belief, which is the following sleep is not an optional lifestyle luxury.
• 1:47:49
  SPEAKER_00: Sleep is a non-negotiable biological necessity.
• 1:47:53
  SPEAKER_00: It is your life support system.
• 1:47:56
  SPEAKER_00: Um, I mean, it's it's nature's hack.
• 1:47:59
  SPEAKER_00: It's not a hack, it's nature's best effort yet at immortality.
• 1:48:03
  SPEAKER_00: Think of sleep like the Swiss Army knife of health.
• 1:48:07
  SPEAKER_00: It is your elixir of life.
• 1:48:10
  SPEAKER_01: Okay, I need to say something to you before you finish because I I think it should be said.
• 1:48:14
  SPEAKER_01: You are one of the um the good guys, the great scientists that that bridge this gap between being an incredible academic and someone who can translate it and has a platform to translate that.
• 1:48:27
  SPEAKER_01: And I think this is you are one of the rarities, the exceptions that bridge that gap.
• 1:48:31
  SPEAKER_00: Oh, thank you.
• 1:48:32
  SPEAKER_01: And I think that should be said always.
• 1:48:34
  SPEAKER_01: That like there is there are people that are great and compelling and can deliver a message well, but that message is not always based in actual science and academia in its entirety.
• 1:48:45
  SPEAKER_01: And I don't think there's any overreaching ever.
• 1:48:48
  SPEAKER_01: I think it's always just fascinating and well structured and well delivered, and I love it.
• 1:48:52
  SPEAKER_01: Matt's you've also got a great podcast as well, by the way.
• 1:48:56
  SPEAKER_01: Um one of the best books written ever on sleep, one of it actually the best TED Talk of all time.
• 1:49:03
  SPEAKER_01: I don't know.
• 1:49:04
  SPEAKER_01: Really, truly, 45 million views.
• 1:49:06
  SPEAKER_01: Like, I mean, if you haven't watched the TED Talk and you haven't read the book and you haven't listened to the podcast, you should.
• 1:49:12
  SPEAKER_03: Okay.
• 1:49:13
  SPEAKER_01: Thank you for coming in.
• 1:49:14
  SPEAKER_01: It's a pr pleasure and a privilege to work with you.
• 1:49:16
  SPEAKER_01: Long neck.
• 1:49:17
  SPEAKER_00: Likewise, I you are such a gift as well, and your ability to communicate the stance that you've taken in this modern era is arguably the most unpopular.
• 1:49:28
  SPEAKER_00: And yet here you are standing and succeeding.
• 1:49:32
  SPEAKER_00: And I think the the only way that you can do that is not just with an authoritative mind, but with integrity.
• 1:49:42
  SPEAKER_00: Because just as you were describing there, the space of uh longevity and wellness, and I don't mean to be dismissive, can sometimes be a bit of a minefield where there are some non-good actors.
• 1:49:56
  SPEAKER_00: And the way that you have to change the title or movement of what has been, I think, uh misled rhetoric at best and malintent at worst, is a such a service to society that do not stop doing what you are doing.
• 1:50:18
  SPEAKER_00: It absolutely is.
• 1:50:19
  SPEAKER_00: I mean, talk about non-negotiables and necessity, and and these this is consequential.
• 1:50:25
  SPEAKER_00: This is years of people's lives that you're changing.
• 1:50:29
  SPEAKER_00: You're gonna give people through your discussions, through the practice of what you do at Wonder Health, but also just the message, years of of healthy life, lives of healthy life, I should say, to people.
• 1:50:42
  SPEAKER_00: That's worth fighting for, that's worth getting up for, and occasionally having a rough night of sleep for.
• 1:50:47
  SPEAKER_00: So thank you for what you do.
• 1:50:48
  SPEAKER_00: Every night.
• 1:50:50
  SPEAKER_00: Thank you.
• 1:50:51
  SPEAKER_00: But truly, you you are an absolute gift, you are a gem.
• 1:50:54
  SPEAKER_00: So thank you.
• 1:50:54
  SPEAKER_00: That's such an honor to hear.
• 1:50:57
  SPEAKER_00: Huh.
• 1:50:59
  SPEAKER_01: Well, on that note, is it it's 12, it's midnight here in the studio.