Alcohol and Caffeine, Naps, and the Science of Sleep, with Dr. Matt Walker ｜ Ep. 284
Episode Stats
Length
1 hour and 41 minutes
Words per Minute
173.54047
Summary
In this episode, Dr. Matt Walker, a neuroscientist and founder of the Center for Human Sleep Science at the University of California, Berkeley, joins Dr. Kelly to discuss the importance of sleep and how to get more of it.
Transcript
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Like that woman over there with the designer jeans.
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Your home for open, honest, and provocative conversations.
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You're not getting enough sleep and it's killing you.
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but lack of quality sleep is a very serious issue.
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We are going to learn all about the science of the world
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of sleep and why this mysterious chunk of our 24-hour day is so important to every aspect
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Joining me now to discuss it all is professor of neuroscience and psychology at the University of California, Berkeley, and the founder of the Center for Human Sleep Science, Dr. Matt Walker.
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It's a delight and a privilege to be with you, Megyn.
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I was reading the packet that my team prepared for me, you know, get me started on the research.
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And I was sitting on an airplane sandwiched in between my oldest child and my husband, and I just kept interrupting their movies every two seconds.
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I'm showing Doug the stuff about the, you know, the steroid, the testosterone and the, you know, look at how it affects sex drive.
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I'm showing my little guy about how it can perform.
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And so it's just every part of how we live starts right here in our bed at night.
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It's really very difficult to find almost anything that isn't wonderfully enhanced by sleep when we get it or demonstrably impaired when we don't get enough.
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I used to think of sleep almost like the third pillar of good health alongside things like diet and exercise.
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When you look at the data, it really tells the story that sleep is the very foundation on which those two other things sit.
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But I think very simply put, sleep is the single most effective thing that we can do each and every day to reset the health of our brain and our body.
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And yet people don't tend to be thoughtful about it.
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It just tends to be something we do at the end of the day when we can't go any longer and then, you know, lather, rinse, repeat.
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But you argue for a very different approach, which we're going to get into, and gave really specific recommendations, which I love.
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But before we get to all that, just tell us a little bit about your background.
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I understood that you were doing some sort of research on dementia patients back in London and trying to figure out, okay, this one has Alzheimer's.
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During my initial PhD work, I was trying to differentially diagnose people with dementia very early on in the course of their disease.
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And I was using brainwave recordings to see if I could do that.
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And each weekend, I'd go home with my little set of journals and I'd keep reading, which tells you everything about the degree of social life I was having at the weekend.
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But one weekend, I started to read that some of these dementias would eat away at the sleep centers in the brain and others would leave them untouched.
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And I realized that I was measuring the brainwave activity of my patients at the wrong time.
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And I should be measuring it when they were asleep.
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So I started measuring the sleeping brainwave activity, got some fantastic results.
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And at that point, I wondered, perhaps the sleep problems are not just a symptom of the dementia.
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I wonder if it's an underlying cause of the dementia.
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And 20 years ago, which is when I was doing that work, no one could actually answer a very simple fundamental question.
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And in fact, the crass answer at the time was that we sleep to cure sleepiness, which is the fat juice equivalent of saying, you know, you eat to cure hunger.
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Well, that doesn't really tell you much about the benefits of nutrition.
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But now, 20 years later, we've had to upend that question and ask, is there anything in the body or any operation of the mind that isn't benefited by sleep?
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And so that's how I was essentially an accidental sleep researcher.
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I didn't think about sleep until I got to that stage.
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And then I just fell desperately and deeply in love with this thing called sleep.
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It is a love affair that has remained with me for the past 20 years.
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I'm biased, but I think it is the most beguiling topic in all of science, and I can't imagine studying anything different for the rest of my career.
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It's funny because I think to myself before we choose any topic for a show, will people be interested in this?
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Of course, everyone is interested in love in general.
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They tend to want love in their life and have love in their life.
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But would they listen to a show for two hours about love?
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I don't know, you know, figure, OK, I like it, so we'll do it.
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You spend, I mean, it could be up to half of your day, but certainly a good third of your day doing this thing that gets almost no attention from you.
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And you really tend to be rather thoughtless about it unless it creeps up as a problem in your life.
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So sleep, at least in human beings, is broadly separated into two main types.
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On the one hand, we have something called non-rapid eye movement sleep or non-REM sleep for short.
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And then on the other hand, we have rapid eye movement sleep or REM sleep.
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And non-REM sleep has been further subdivided into four separate stages.
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They are unimaginatively called stages one through four, increasing in their depth of sleep.
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So stages one and two of non-REM sleep, that's what you would think of as light non-REM sleep.
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When you look at your sort of sleep tracker data, let's say stages three and four, that's the really deep stage of deep non-REM sleep.
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And then we have rapid eye movement sleep, as I said, and that's the state of sleep principally associated with dreaming.
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And when your head hit the pillow last night, it turns out that those two types of sleep, non-REM and REM, will play out and did play out in a battle for brain domination across the night.
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And that cerebral war between non-REM and REM was won and lost every 90 minutes.
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And what that produces is this standard cycling architecture of sleep.
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And as I said, in humans, at least it's 90 minutes.
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So you fall asleep and you go into the light stages of non-REM, then you go down into the deeper stages of non-REM.
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And then after about 70 or 80 minutes, you'll start to rise back up and you'll pop up and you'll have a short REM sleep period.
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And then down you go again, down into non-REM and then up into REM.
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What changes, however, is the ratio of non-REM to REM within that 90 minute cycle as you move across the night.
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And what I mean by this is that in the first half of the night, the majority of those 90 minute cycles that you had last night were comprised of lots of that deep non-REM sleep and very little dream sleep.
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But as you push through to the second half of the night, now that seesaw balance actually shifts.
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And the majority of those 90 minute cycles are comprised much more of rapid eye movement sleep or dream sleep.
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And it's actually, I mean, it's a really important question that you raise, which is not just about what sleep is, but how it's structured, because there are practical implications.
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So let's say that you, Megan, would normally go to sleep at, I'm just going to pull this out the air, let's say that you go to sleep at 10 p.m.
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But tomorrow morning, you have to wake up for an early morning flight.
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Well, you've lost two hours from your eight hour window.
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But because REM sleep comes in the last few hours of the night, you may have lost 50, 60, even 70% of all of your dream sleep.
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And as we'll perhaps discuss, dream sleep is critical for many functions.
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It's critical for your mental and emotional health.
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Downstairs in the body, it regulates particular hormones, including things like testosterone and other sex-related hormones.
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We also know REM sleep is a direct predictor of your lifespan, that the more REM sleep that you're getting each and every night, that's associated with a longer lifespan.
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So it's not just academic that we think about these different stages of sleep, but there are also practical implications too.
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Hmm. So if I were going to do that, let's change the analogy or the situation, the hypothetical to where I just, I have to do two hours of work, two extra hours of work.
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And I'm either going to have to do it from 10 p.m. to midnight, or I'm going to have to set the alarm and get up at 4.
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Um, does it, does it, does it, does it behoove me to stay up later?
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Can you, can you work it such that, um, you're getting up at the same time and still getting more REM stage?
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So unfortunately you can't shortchange sleep on either end of the initiation or the ending of the spectrum.
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What we've discovered is that all stages of sleep are important.
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All the ones that we've just discussed that different stages of sleep, however, perform different functions for your brain and your body at different times of night.
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And if we remove any one of them, we can see selective impairments in those different functions.
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And from, you know, from an evolutionary perspective, that makes a lot of sense because think about sleep.
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It is arguably the most idiotic of all inventions that when you're asleep, you're not finding a mate, you're not reproducing, you're not caring for your young, you're not finding food.
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And worst of all, you're vulnerable to predation.
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So on any one of those grounds, sleep should have been strongly selected against in the course of evolution.
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But sleep, and at least in every species that we've carefully studied to date, sleep appears to be present.
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And what that tells us is that sleep perhaps emerged with life itself on this planet and has fought its way through every step of the evolutionary pathway.
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In other words, if sleep doesn't serve an absolutely vital set of functions, then it's the biggest mistake the evolutionary process has ever made.
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And we're now realizing that Mother Nature didn't make a spectacular blunder in creating this thing called sleep.
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But I make this point in regards to your question, because if you could imagine that any one of those stages of sleep was negotiable rather than non-negotiable, that we could perhaps just let go of it and not necessarily need it, Mother Nature would have excised it many years ago.
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Because sleep is so deleterious from that evolutionary standpoint.
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The fact that all of those stages of sleep remain with us at this late stage of evolution in terms of us, homo sapiens, tells us that we need all of them.
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And we just can't sort of burn the candle at either one of those ends, and certainly not at both ends, without expecting some kind of deficit.
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I mean, everything, like sharks, elephants, they all sleep.
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Every species that we've studied to date, yep, sharks will sleep.
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We also know, and it's actually interesting, sharks will sleep typically with their eyes open.
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Elephants will sleep, but different species will sleep different amounts.
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They will only need somewhere between four to five hours of sleep a night.
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My hero, the rock star god of the sleep world, is the little brown bat, which will sleep somewhere between 17 to 18 hours every single day.
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And so we human beings, we sit somewhere in the middle, our sleep need is somewhere between seven to nine hours a night.
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You know, talk about evolution, and we'll get to, you know, how many hours are ideal.
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But has it always been that, you know, around seven or eight is pretty much what a human body will do if left alone?
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So the best way that we've been able to sort of answer this question is look, for example, at hunter-gatherer tribes, whose way of life hasn't changed for thousands of years.
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And they seem to sleep somewhere in this region of about seven to nine hours, perhaps a little bit less, but at night than we would typically sleep.
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But they also have, particularly in the summer, this siesta-like nap behavior.
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So from best we can tell, that is the requirement.
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The other way that we can answer that question is we can take human beings, we can bring them into the sleep laboratory, we can say, tell your friends goodbye, no phone gadgets, no nothing.
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And for the next two weeks, you're staying with us in close quarters.
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And firstly, we let them sleep off the debt that most people bring in to the sleep laboratory, where they oversleep.
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They'll start to sleep nine, nine and a half hours.
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But then at some point, they throttle back to their sweet spot.
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And that sweet spot, for most human adults, seems to be somewhere between seven to nine hours.
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And that range, and there is a range to be important, but that's the other way that we can address the question.
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We can just let human beings, free of all of the trappings of modernity, start to sleep in however they want to sleep.
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And we look at that biological need, and it expresses that same range of seven to nine.
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Now, we are going to talk about the benefits of sleep, but one of the things I've heard you say is that sleep is your superpower.
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And you gave an example of, and I think everyone can relate to this, that sleep is like clicking the save button on the things that you've learned that day, which is why it's so important to do after you're studying or after you're learning.
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So, I mean, it's important in both stages, but I think everybody who's gone through school, college, whatever, law school, understands if you manage to get that eight hours in after you've done your cramming or your reading, you know it's so much better the next morning versus having to pull an all-nighter.
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And that evidence is now so powerful and so well replicated that when it comes to your learning and memory abilities, sleep is actually critical in three unique ways.
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First, we need sleep before learning to get your brain ready to initially lay down those new memories.
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In other words, sleep almost prepares your brain like a dry sponge ready to initially soak up those new pieces of information.
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And without sleep, the memory circuits of the brain effectively become waterlogged and you can't absorb new memories.
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And we did a study, for example, where we asked, is pulling the all-nighter a wise idea?
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And first, what we found was that the memory centers in the brain were shut down by a lack of sleep and they were just bouncing that information almost like a full inbox in your email.
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The second thing that we learned, however, was that you not only need sleep before learning to get those memories into the brain initially, just as you said, you then need sleep after learning to cement and solidify those new memories into the brain.
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And in fact, during sleep, it's a very active process, by the way, we transfer memories from that short-term vulnerable reservoir to a more permanent long-term storage site.
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And that's the process of saving them, as you said, almost like hitting the save button on those memories.
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But then more recently, we've discovered that sleep is much more intelligent than we ever imagined possible.
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That sleep not only saves individual pieces of memories, but sleep will intelligently start to associate and integrate that new information together.
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And it's, you know, I liken it to informational alchemy.
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It's that you wake up the next morning and you have a revised mind-wide web of associations.
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And that's the reason that, you know, I'm sure you've probably experienced this and people listening may have, that you can come up with solutions to previously impenetrable problems.
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And I think it's the reason that no one has probably ever told you, Megan, that you should stay awake on a problem.
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And that's exactly what the evidence is telling us.
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Now, this may be outside of your area of expertise, but when you say that sleep can help move the memory to a more long-term storage part of your brain, do you know whether that place has got all the memories in it, that all the memories are potentially accessible, you know, if only the hardware would work the way we wish it would?
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It's a very challenging question in memory science, and I do a lot of work in this area.
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You know, how much information is actually stored in the human brain and how much capacity do we have for storage of information?
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We don't have the answer yet, but I think what we've learned is a surprising fact that we probably have a lot more information stored in our brain than we ourselves are consciously aware of.
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And you gave a lovely analogy, and I think it's absolutely correct.
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There are some times when someone asks you a question, you say, you know, I just, I can't remember.
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And then all of a sudden, you get a little bit of a cue that you look at something, a label on a bottle, and all of a sudden, it unlocks the memory and it comes flitting back.
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And what that tells us is something fundamental, that the information was in your brain, it was available, but it wasn't accessible.
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And sometimes we make the mistake that a lack of accessibility reflects the fact that the memory is not there.
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It's almost as though sometimes we lose the IP address to that memory, and we can't go and find it.
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And in fact, there was a lovely study done several years ago that demonstrated once again, a role for sleep here.
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That sleep increases the veracity of which you can locate and identify and access those memories.
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So you could have that information stored within the brain, but you just can't recall it during the exam if you haven't had enough sleep.
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I mean, I feel like everyone's had that experience, and you know it's in there.
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You just have to get the keys somehow, close your eyes, get better rested, don't drink.
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There are all sorts of things you can do, but it's fascinating.
00:21:06.740
And I love those stories where you hear about somebody who gets hit on the head, and then they go in for the operation or whatever, and suddenly they can play piano again, which they hadn't been able to do since they were four.
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00:21:50.040
i want to talk about the basis like this you would talk about the stages of sleep and i know
00:22:01.820
there's something that you talk about as you call it sleep pressure and this basically explains why
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we get tired why we get tired in the evening and why we want to wake up in the morning from
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sleeping so why is that what makes us get tired in the evening yeah the two great questions and
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i think certainly if i was not a sleep scientist i never would have asked that question why do i get
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tired in the evening and why is it that after a good night of sleep i'm relieved of that tiredness
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the next morning and i feel awake and we now understand why there is something called sleep
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pressure as you described so from the moment that both you and i woke up this morning and everyone
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listening uh woke up this morning a chemical has been building up in our brain and that chemical
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is called adenosine and the more of that chemical that builds up the sleepier and sleepier you will
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feel and it's what we call sleep pressure now don't worry it's not a mechanical pressure in your head
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it's not going to cause you a headache by any means it's a chemical pressure and after about 16 hours of
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being awake after about 16 hours of accumulation of this adenosine of this sleepiness molecule we feel
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tired and we feel needing to go to bed but what's also interesting is what happens when we sleep and
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it's during sleep that the brain then gets the chance to actually clear away all of that adenosine
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and it's this mass evacuation of all of that chemical sleep pressure and it seems to take
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the sleeping brain about eight hours to jettison 16 hours of accumulated wakefulness and that's why
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we wake up hopefully without an alarm feeling refreshed and it can also be one of the reasons why
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when we wake up we may need caffeine to help get us more awake or we don't feel restored by our sleep
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because we're not giving our brain the right opportunity amount of sleep to get rid of all of
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that sleepiness chemical does the next night what does it do to adenosine great question this helps
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actually explain how caffeine works so by the way it's not a coincidence that those two things sound
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quite similar caffeine and adenosine it's because they both latch on to the same receptor sites or
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welcome sites within the brain now what's interesting however is that when caffeine floods your system
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it doesn't latch onto those receptors of adenosine and say you're sleepy of course it doesn't because
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caffeine makes us alert so how does this work well caffeine races in and it latches onto those
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receptor sites and it hijacks them and essentially it blocks them it inactivates those sleepiness
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receptors and so even though you've been awake for 16 hours and before you had that cup of coffee in
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the evening you were starting to feel really quite tired caffeine races in it blocks some of that signal
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it's almost like caffeine comes in and hits the mute button on the sleepiness signal so now your brain
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caffeine is no longer is no longer aware of that 16 hours of weight of adenosine sort of sinking you
00:25:30.120
down into sleep it may think now after the cup of coffee i've only been awake for seven hours or eight
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hours and so now you're wide awake again and this is why caffeine can sort of keep us more alert and
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wake us up and keep us away from that sleep the problem however is that while caffeine is in your
00:25:51.240
system it doesn't mean that the adenosine stops building up it doesn't it keeps building up and
00:25:58.840
building up and then what happens is that when your body starts to metabolize and clear away that
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caffeine not only do you go back to the same place of sleepiness that you were before you had the cup of
00:26:13.220
coffee several hours ago you're hit with that degree of sleepiness plus all of the additional
00:26:20.880
sleepiness that's been building up while the caffeine is in your system oh no this is called
00:26:27.040
the caffeine crash oh that's why you get with that weight oh i did not realize that there's there's a
00:26:33.340
ricochet rebound effect on caffeine i feel like i'm always tired so it's just like to me that i feel
00:26:40.500
like the caffeine barely makes any difference but you're going to solve for me today all right so
00:26:44.260
let's talk turkey because everyone's wondering do i really need seven or eight hours and you know can
00:26:51.220
you pay a sleep debt and should i nap and the temperature of all the stuff let's do it all so i
00:26:56.680
read that you you go to bed at 10 30 and and wake up at 7 0 4 a.m which is fun so why is that and
00:27:08.300
is that i mean i assume you're giving yourself some time to fall asleep there is that are you
00:27:12.000
trying to go for eight and a half hours you're trying to go for eight yeah great question so
00:27:16.900
first i'm not suggesting that that is the ideal opportunity window for everyone our sleep window
00:27:23.660
is very different and this comes on to something called chronotype which we can come on to in just
00:27:29.260
a second but i'm just someone who i'm in the sort of the middle to maybe slightly higher range in
00:27:36.980
terms of sleep need i usually require somewhere around about eight to eight hours and 15 minutes
00:27:43.800
to function well it could be because i'm especially sensitive to knowing the deficits that come
00:27:49.620
by way of a lack of sleep but my and so let's come on to chronotype the reason i say it doesn't mean
00:27:57.900
that that's the opportunity window that everyone should have and stick to it there is something
00:28:03.260
called chronotype and the underlying thing here is that it's not your fault what i mean by this is
00:28:09.880
whether you're a morning type evening type or somewhere in between and that's what we call
00:28:15.520
chronotype and there are essentially three different versions and if you look across the population it's about
00:28:21.700
a third split between each of those three really yeah and you would this is a night owl that that
00:28:29.880
kind of thing morning person morning type yeah evening type night owl what we call a morning lark
00:28:36.460
and you know the morning types they perhaps want to go to bed say around uh nine o'clock and they're
00:28:43.120
waking up you know five thirty six whereas the um evening types they may want to be going to bed
00:28:50.920
at one a.m or two a.m and waking up at you know nine or ten a.m the next morning i'm sorry going to
00:28:59.080
bed at yeah one a.m or two a.m um there is in sleep science we actually split them even more fine
00:29:04.880
grain to five types which is extreme morning types morning types neutrals evening types and extreme
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evening types so an extreme morning type could be getting into bed at eight p.m and they will
00:29:17.820
naturally wake up at four a.m and they'll wake up like an energizer bunny very happy full of energy
00:29:24.000
it's not a struggle for them whereas an extreme evening type could be almost completely reversed
00:29:29.900
they could be wanting to go to bed at three or four in the morning and then waking up around midday
00:29:36.960
and society of course has a desperate bias and a chastising they have a bias towards the morning
00:29:46.120
types and they chastise the evening types we label evening types as being slothful or being lazy and
00:29:55.020
that's not true and the reason is because it's not a choice it is largely genetically determined and we
00:30:03.040
now know that there are at least nine different genes that determine your chronotype as to whether
00:30:09.160
you're a morning type evening type or a neutral like me um and we i think need to become a lot more kindly
00:30:17.560
to the night owls it's often being said that you know the early bird catches the worm maybe that's true
00:30:24.780
what i would say though is that the second mouse gets the cheese and it's okay to be an evening type
00:30:31.700
and one of when we force evening types to start to sleep against their natural tendency when we force
00:30:40.900
them to sleep out of synchrony with their chronotype some very bad things happen higher rates of depression
00:30:46.980
higher rates of obesity higher rates of diabetes it doesn't have to be this way well it does if you
00:30:53.800
have for example children right i mean i was just lamenting this that i always found it so difficult to
00:30:59.980
get up and you had to be in the homeroom by 720 and i'm not a morning person it was painful for
00:31:06.100
the 13 years i had to do it k through 12 and i remember when senior year ended being so thankful
00:31:12.100
it was over and i was never going to have to do that again in my life i wouldn't have to choose a job
00:31:15.560
that required me to be there at that hour and i forgot all about what happens when that you then have
00:31:20.860
children who have to go through that again they have no choice they they must be morning people they
00:31:26.680
have no choice and what's interesting is that our morningness eveningness preference does change
00:31:35.120
across the lifespan so that as i said it's this is determined by your genetics is gifted to you at
00:31:41.100
birth and you carry it for the rest of your life your chronotype but in general children will typically
00:31:48.340
go to bed earlier and wake up earlier even though they want to stay up later you know they'll say i want
00:31:54.240
to stay up and then all of a sudden you're carrying to bed because they couldn't make it yeah and then
00:31:59.020
when we get into adolescence into those sort of early teen years something very different happens
00:32:06.220
all of a sudden our sort of rhythm of sleep gets pushed forward in time and now adolescents want to go to
00:32:15.280
bed much later and wake up later and this is a biological architected shift it's not their choice again
00:32:23.320
it's not that teenagers if you could just put them in bed at nine or ten o'clock at night and say look
00:32:29.620
just get to sleep it doesn't work like that their biology does not want to be asleep at 10 p.m it's
00:32:36.640
not a choice and if you put them to bed then for the most part they're probably just going to lie in
00:32:41.640
bed awake not being able to fall asleep you can then you're waking them up see it with those teenagers
00:32:46.700
who sleep if you leave them alone on a saturday or sunday they will get up at noon every time either
00:32:51.780
they're all incredibly lazy or something's going on with the biology that's right and it is the
00:32:58.320
biology together with an unfortunate situation that society has developed which is this early
00:33:04.720
morning start time for schools that this incessant model of early school start times which then
00:33:11.400
lumbers are teenagers with a chronic sleep debt so that they're carrying the sleep debt throughout the
00:33:18.380
weekday they're waking up at a time when they don't want to wake up they're having to go to bed at a
00:33:23.100
time that's not natural for their biology and then come the weekend what's going to happen of course
00:33:28.560
they're going to try and binge on that sleep and see if they can get back some of the sleep that we've
00:33:34.740
lumbered with them in terms of a sleep debt and it doesn't the system doesn't work like that it
00:33:40.380
doesn't so for all of us if we only get six hours a night and we really need eight five nights a week
00:33:47.320
the five nights we work or go to school then you can't make up those 10 hours on saturday morning
00:33:55.140
and sunday morning and look at it like a week a week's amount of sleep as opposed to a night's
00:34:00.660
yeah the system doesn't seem to have evolved that way in part because human beings are the only species
00:34:07.700
that will deliberately deprive themselves of sleep for no apparent biological benefit and so we don't
00:34:14.800
have an evolved mechanism in place that helps us sort of almost think about sleep like a bank it's
00:34:22.340
not as though we can accumulate a debt and then hope to pay it off at some later point in time now
00:34:28.620
it's not to say that you can't get some of that sleep back that you've lost during the weekend but a
00:34:37.700
prior view of sleep for an entire night let's just take it to the extreme so i take away eight hours
00:34:43.160
of sleep from you and then the next night i give you all of the recovery sleep that you want you can
00:34:49.060
sleep as much as you like and then i do that on a second night and a third night now yes you will
00:34:55.440
sleep longer on those recovery nights of sleep it's what's called a sleep rebound effect but you will
00:35:01.640
only get back about 50 percent of all of the sleep that you've lost the system just doesn't seem to
00:35:09.400
have the ability to repay the debt we can't develop this debt and then come back at the weekend and see
00:35:18.860
if we can pay it off with some kind of oversleeping uh credit the other danger there too is that we go to
00:35:27.380
bed typically later at the weekend and we sleep a lot later or many people will sleep in at the
00:35:32.800
weekend and then having woken up late on sunday morning now monday comes around and you have to
00:35:40.140
wake up you know 6 a.m again and now you have to get to bed at let's say 10 but the problem is you
00:35:47.120
woke up so late that you're not sleepy why is this it comes back to what we discussed which is sleep
00:35:52.540
pressure that you've only been awake for maybe 12 hours or even 11 hours because you slept in so
00:35:59.000
late on sunday morning and then you're tucking yourself into bed excuse me to try and get your
00:36:05.140
eight hours of sleep and ready for monday morning but you're just not sleepy because you haven't been
00:36:10.720
awake long enough to develop enough of that sleepiness enough of that adenosine chemical and so now
00:36:17.600
sunday evening it feels like insomnia because you're lying in bed at 10 p.m and you can't fall asleep
00:36:24.540
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00:36:33.900
and improving your cognitive abilities discover more ways to see healthy living differently with
00:36:39.480
manulife at manulife.ca slash health okay so i have to ask you about melatonin and whether that
00:36:49.320
could be an aid that's a more natural aid some people will use like a benadryl or a sleeping pill i
00:36:54.660
guess to to solve that um but before we get to that i i wanted to know since you are the sleep expert
00:37:01.800
how regimented are you on that 10 30 to 704 because well like for example we go to montana right and
00:37:09.320
we ski and we have vacations there and that's two hours behind the east coast so when we come back
00:37:15.300
the sleep schedules are all messed up because you know whereas in montana we were waking up at
00:37:20.280
7 a.m that was 9 a.m east coast time and now when we want to have to get up for school at 6 a.m east
00:37:27.440
coast time it feels like 4 a.m and nobody wants to do it we're all hurting and i thought to myself would
00:37:32.040
matt vacation in montana maybe he wouldn't do it maybe he's so regimented he doesn't do intercontinental
00:37:38.120
travel like how seriously do you take the loss of sleep for a night or two so you know i want to be
00:37:46.320
relaxed here i'm not trying to be so puritanical to say don't do anything in life that's really life
00:37:53.820
is to be lived and i certainly travel you know i'll travel back home i live now in california but
00:38:00.200
as you can tell home is england and i also like to go on vacation do lots of different things
00:38:06.580
so i am i am however quite protective of my sleep when i have the ability to control it
00:38:14.080
and there i do stay quite regimented just because i know that if i start to drift in terms of my sleep
00:38:22.360
schedule the quality of my sleep is not good enough and maybe i can feel okay for a day or two
00:38:28.160
but it starts to catch up with me and then it's just not worth it for me because i can see
00:38:32.860
the deficits and i need to be really efficient in the different jobs that i have and i also want to
00:38:40.220
live a long life but i don't just want to live a longer life i want to live a longer healthier life
00:38:46.840
and we know that a lack of sleep and sleep disruption is not only associated with your lifespan
00:38:53.060
it's also associated with your health span so i do keep those things in mind and i'm
00:39:01.180
yes i give myself this you know eight and a half hour-ish sort of sleep opportunity
00:39:07.640
and that's not because i want to be some poster child for the sleep campaign cause it's simply
00:39:14.620
because if you knew what i knew about the benefits of sleep and the harm that happens when you don't get
00:39:19.340
enough it's a very selfish act on my behalf you you would choose not to do anything other than
00:39:23.940
doing that but again i do have some degree of relaxed nature around it but i also know that
00:39:30.820
when i'm traveling for example i know some of the the tricks that i can use to try to get over some of
00:39:36.980
that jet lag or that sleep deprivation and then i'm also just kind to myself on those days when i
00:39:44.040
haven't slept well and by the way it doesn't necessarily take a vacation or transcontinental
00:39:49.180
travel i'm just as vulnerable as most people to having a bad night of sleep and as i get older
00:39:54.980
i'm you know moving solidly into the foothills of middle age right now i know that my sleep is
00:40:01.220
getting harder and it is declining and on those days um i will just try to be kind to myself i'll try
00:40:10.400
not to you know push it quite as hard at the gym um and i'll just take care of oneself what about a
00:40:18.700
sleep a what about a melatonin i i read i don't know i i read you said something like the studies show
00:40:25.760
it only gives you 2.40 two minutes and 40 seconds advanced sleep like it gives you almost no head
00:40:32.920
start it's really not worth doing yeah so perhaps so melatonin for those who don't know is a hormone
00:40:39.760
it's a naturally occurring and naturally released hormone in the body it's sometimes called the
00:40:44.940
hormone of darkness or the vampire hormone um not because it makes you bite into people's necks but
00:40:52.160
when it's released but it's simply because it comes out at night that it's the the signal that
00:40:58.140
the brain uses to communicate to the rest of the brain and to the body that it's darkness now
00:41:03.780
outside and it's time for us to sleep so melatonin helps regulate the timing of our sleep but melatonin
00:41:13.980
doesn't actually help in the generation of sleep itself and i think the analogy that i often use and
00:41:21.480
i don't know if it's helpful but think of the 100 meter race at the olympics melatonin essentially is
00:41:28.220
the starting official who has the starting gun and they begin the great sleep race but melatonin
00:41:34.820
doesn't participate in the race itself that's a whole different set of brain chemicals and brain
00:41:39.320
systems that's helpful if you can't fall asleep because you don't have enough of that chemical
00:41:44.320
built up in you if melatonin just overrides that and says you're sleeping start isn't that helpful
00:41:49.720
and that is it is helpful under certain circumstances and jet lag is one of those where we've seen
00:41:55.800
melatonin being effective and people can strategically use it when melatonin is either going to be delayed
00:42:02.560
many hours in the past because you're in a new time zone and you need to get that signal of melatonin
00:42:08.620
to trick your brain into realizing in the new time zone it actually is time to be falling asleep
00:42:14.380
however when we come back to people once they're stable in a new time zone and we ask does does
00:42:22.260
melatonin help improve the speed with which you fall asleep and the answer seems to be no there
00:42:27.200
was a big metric what's called a meta-analysis where you gather together all of the smaller
00:42:31.800
scientific studies and you put them in a big statistical bucket to look at the grand average
00:42:37.300
and what we found was that melatonin only increased the speed with which people fell asleep by about 3.9
00:42:45.100
minutes and then it only improved the efficiency of your sleep so how much sleep you are packing in
00:42:52.680
to that sort of sleep opportunity window it only increased your sleep efficiency by 2.2 percent
00:42:59.040
so it melatonin this is why you know it's just not an effective sleep aid for people with uh insomnia
00:43:07.020
and then we have to also be careful about the dosing as well as the purity yeah and then just
00:43:13.520
developing any sort of dependency on an aid to go to sleep is not not a great idea but there are
00:43:19.560
things that can help you fall asleep naturally that we do for example our babies but we might not do
00:43:28.320
for ourselves like you are in favor of a bath or a shower in the evening and it's not because you get
00:43:37.400
all warm and then you get into bed feeling toasty to the contrary it's something else can you explain
00:43:43.240
yeah so one of the things that we've realized the critical factors that controls your sleep and
00:43:50.220
also the quantity and the quality of that sleep is temperature and many people will know this because
00:43:56.480
you need to drop your core body temperature by somewhere between about one degree celsius or about
00:44:03.320
two to three degrees fahrenheit to fall asleep and then stay asleep and it's the reason everyone
00:44:09.040
watching will find it a lot easier to fall asleep in a room that's too cold than too hot because the
00:44:17.240
room that's too cold is at least taking you in the right temperature direction for good sleep which is
00:44:22.640
to drop your core body temperature and you mentioned the hot bath or you know hot shower it this is so
00:44:31.300
reliable in sleep science we actually call it the warm bath effect but it's working for the exact
00:44:38.080
opposite reason that you think when you get into the bath what happens is that all of the blood
00:44:43.260
races to the surface of your skin and so that blood races from the core of your body where it's trapped
00:44:51.160
deep down inside and it all floods the surface you get sort of these rosy cheeks and you know red hands
00:44:58.140
and then when you get out of the bath because all of that blood is now close to the surface of the skin
00:45:05.140
you get this huge radiation of heat out of the core of your body and your core body temperature plummets
00:45:13.480
after a hot bath and that is why you often fall asleep easier and stay asleep more soundly across the
00:45:21.920
night do you have to go right to bed i mean how long does that effect last in your body it's actually
00:45:27.340
quite a slow effect it the effect can take you know 30 or up to 90 minutes in terms of its slow trajectory
00:45:34.700
now of course some of that depends on how hot the bath was and how long you were in the bath
00:45:39.380
have we done those studies to actually slice and dice that sort of that question so that i could say
00:45:45.380
to you megan you know you need to aim for a bath temperature of exactly this much and you need to set
00:45:51.040
your timer for 16 minutes and 23 seconds we haven't done those scientific studies yet it's just very
00:45:57.840
difficult to get the funding but we do know that that seems to benefit my notes on having read all of
00:46:04.100
your stuff say that i need to set my thermometer to 65 degrees in my bedroom and that's what i've been
00:46:09.840
doing ever since i read all these materials 65 degrees and i've been putting my my kids thermometers
00:46:14.540
in 65 degrees but i if you have a smart thermometer or smart home which sadly we do not but if you've got
00:46:21.540
one of those thermometers that lets you change the temperature right before you wake up you say warm
00:46:28.060
it up to 70 about 30 minutes before we wake up do i have my temperatures right yeah you're spot on so
00:46:36.580
in fact the the story of temperature comes in three parts regarding sleep that as i just described we
00:46:44.060
need to warm up at the surface of our skin at the shell of our body we need to warm up at the surface
00:46:51.800
to cool down the core to fall asleep and then we need to stay cool to stay asleep which is the
00:47:00.300
recommendation of the ambient temperature being around 65 degrees 65 to 67 degrees but then we need
00:47:07.940
to warm up to wake up we need to reverse engineer the trick and in fact that seems to be one of the
00:47:15.720
triggers if you let people naturally wake up whenever they would want to one of the determining factors
00:47:21.160
is the rise in their core body temperature so you can help yourself perhaps wake up more easily and
00:47:29.380
many of us of course struggle to wake up even if we're having or we're getting sufficient sleep
00:47:34.720
some people will have what's called sleep inertia and i actually suffer from this too which is that
00:47:40.680
idea where you know when you wake up for the first 30 minutes or the first hour you say to your
00:47:47.640
partner look darling i am i am not the best version of myself in the first hour of the morning yes
00:47:54.520
yes you know please i i know i left the dishes in the sink i'm at i promise i'll get to them but
00:47:59.520
please just just give me the first hour to wake up this is all i can manage matt doug will be chatting
00:48:04.920
his sink is there mine's neck down he'll be chatting he'll be wanting to go over agenda and this is all i
00:48:08.860
can manage so much talking yeah exactly yeah it's just quiet please just let me you know we you and
00:48:18.700
i were probably almost like you know a classic car engine where it just needs time to warm up to
00:48:25.440
operating temperature before you can really start to rev it and you know get the good stuff um but
00:48:31.180
warming up can actually help and by the way this is the reason that um uh people think that a cup of
00:48:38.660
coffee in the morning helps them very quickly and it's absolute nonsense it actually takes somewhere
00:48:44.420
between about um if you look at the data somewhere between nine to 15 minutes for caffeine to reach
00:48:52.740
its peak plasma concentration but after a couple of sips of your morning first cup of coffee people
00:49:00.060
will say after five minutes okay now i'm feeling fine i'm ready to go how is that because the caffeine
00:49:06.480
hasn't even really entered your system it's not working yet the reason is because the cup of coffee
00:49:12.480
is usually hot in its temperature and one when you when you're drinking that hot uh drink it warms the
00:49:20.100
core of your body much more quickly within a couple of minutes and it's the increase in your core body
00:49:25.900
temperature that you are thinking is the benefit of caffeine when in fact it's the temperature benefit
00:49:32.560
of that warm drink that's giving you the alertness improvement so you could absolutely try doing this
00:49:38.600
with a decaf tea or just a warm water just just a warm water from the tea kettle and maybe feel the
00:49:46.240
same you can see that in people who are caffeine naive but the problem is that in those people who are
00:49:53.380
used to their cup of coffee they develop a dependency and a lot of people say look when i'm having a cup of
00:50:00.360
coffee i work better my focus is better that's also not true if you look at the data what's happened
00:50:06.880
is that over time they've become dependent on caffeine and when they don't have caffeine their
00:50:12.840
performance is worse than it naturally would be at baseline so when they have the cup of coffee they
00:50:18.800
say i am better in my performance and technically they're correct they are better but they're not
00:50:24.760
above and beyond their baseline they're simply getting back to where they naturally are based
00:50:30.700
on the deficit that's happened because of the abstinence of caffeine that's happened overnight
00:50:36.640
so you're not doing you're not doing caffeine so i am someone who unfortunately is quite sensitive
00:50:44.000
to caffeine and we know that different people have different sensitivities it's based on a specific
00:50:50.400
enzyme and you can do these genetic tests and you can figure out are you a caffeine sensitive person
00:50:55.440
or not and there is a set of liver enzymes called the cytochrome p450s um which i always thought would
00:51:04.540
be a great name for a band you know sort of uh please welcome you know to new york city no it would not
00:51:11.160
cytochrome p450s you know uh yeah i should never clearly i'm a scientist um and so these liver enzymes
00:51:17.920
and there's a mutation on or a variant on one of these genes it's called the cyp1a2 gene and if you
00:51:28.420
have a version of that gene it will speed up the clearance of caffeine so you can you know not be as
00:51:35.400
sensitive i am of a version of that enzyme that is slow in its clearance of caffeine and that means i'm
00:51:42.540
someone who is especially sensitive to caffeine now i do sometimes have a cup of coffee in the morning
00:51:48.680
in part because there are many benefits of coffee many health benefits that's got nothing to do with
00:51:54.940
caffeine though it's because the coffee bean contains a whopping dose of wonderful things
00:51:59.920
called antioxidants and most people in modern society we eat what's called the standard western
00:52:08.540
diet which is not ideal from a nutritional perspective it's not full of whole foods and
00:52:14.420
natural foods some processed food and we have therefore become reliant on the humble coffee bean
00:52:21.580
to carry most of the herculean weight of all of our antioxidant needs and you can see and a great
00:52:30.860
example of this is decaffeinated coffee you see almost the same health benefits from drinking
00:52:36.260
decaffeinated coffee than you do caffeinated coffee what's common between those two is that
00:52:42.020
they both contain antioxidants so it's not the caffeine it's the antioxidants so okay sometimes
00:52:47.660
you can go for decaf okay that's good to know go for decaf too yeah and i usually drink throughout
00:52:53.060
the day my husband and i used to have a cup of coffee every morning together and you know what helped
00:52:58.380
him kick his coffee habit covid he got covid he didn't want coffee and he had it you know for like
00:53:07.520
10 days it was kind of lingering and he just and he did have a headache but you know you have a headache
00:53:12.240
when you have covid and uh he was done and i was just like i'm kind of envious except isn't caffeine
00:53:18.660
an appetite suppressant so i kind of like i'm kind of drawn to the coffee for that reason too
00:53:23.980
yep it does have appetite suppressing uh effects as well and people will use that as well as as a
00:53:31.140
way to regulate pick your poison yeah exactly and you know caffeine is a good demonstration of this
00:53:37.300
which is once again not being so puritanical that when it comes to caffeine i would say the dose and
00:53:43.580
the timing make the poison so try to stay away from having more than let's say two and certainly or
00:53:49.700
certainly three cups of coffee once you get past three cups of coffee the health benefits actually
00:53:53.440
start to go in the opposite direction the downward direction and then timing because we know that
00:53:58.920
caffeine has a certain duration of action and the recommendation is try to stop caffeine at least
00:54:07.320
beat beat beat boxing actually has hidden health benefits it can help strengthen strengthen strengthen
00:54:20.740
and protect protect protect protect your voice from injury discover more ways to see healthy living
00:54:26.980
differently with manulife at manulife.ca slash help now let's get that beat
00:54:31.660
all right so now we didn't close out that loop on going to bed because i know you've said if you
00:54:46.620
remember nothing if you remember nothing else that you get from from your talks from your books from
00:54:52.340
your interviews it's that you need regularity regularity is king it's not just you that should
00:54:58.820
go to bed at 10 30 and wake up at 7 0 4 everyone should pick it doesn't have to be those times but
00:55:03.920
everyone should pick a bedtime and a wake-up time you should set an alarm for your bedtime so that you
00:55:11.280
stay on schedule and you should keep this schedule even on the weekends which will have a lot of
00:55:17.900
people recoiling right like oh that's the time to sleep in why why is that so important i think when
00:55:26.400
i'm offering these suggestions these tips for better sleep i try to stay away from giving just rules
00:55:32.740
because people don't respond to rules people respond to reasons not rules and so i'll i'll explain it a
00:55:39.440
little bit set deep in the middle of your brain and my brain and everyone's brain there is a master
00:55:46.040
24-hour clock and it drums out what we call the circadian 24-hour rhythm and it just goes back and
00:55:52.860
forth every 24 hours and your circadian rhythm your 24-hour master clock within the brain expects
00:56:00.420
regularity and it thrives best under conditions of regularity and when we give it the signal of
00:56:08.400
regularity including going to bed at the same time and waking up at the same time that will anchor
00:56:14.360
your sleep and therefore improve the quantity and the quality of that sleep and that's why i usually
00:56:21.920
recommend regularity as king and yes it does come on to the weekend as well with some you know with
00:56:31.220
some degree of wiggle room yeah you can't tell me that you're going you're not going out to dinner
00:56:35.620
with friends at eight which spills oh you know you don't even get home till 10 30 11
00:56:41.640
are you are you saying to friends like no we're having dinner at seven because i have to hit my time
00:56:46.780
i will usually i'm people of course all my friends know uh what i do and so if i say you know rather
00:56:55.620
than going out to dinner at you know 8 30 is there any chance we could do seven seven thirty or what if
00:57:01.860
you're going to the theater yeah so you know usually then what will happen is that if i go to bed late
00:57:08.320
i will typically still try to wake up at approximately the same time now of course that sounds like heresy
00:57:14.700
because it means that i am then going to be short changed on my sleep by 30 minutes maybe and not just
00:57:21.080
any sleep but your rem sleep but you know including my rem sleep or if i'm going to bed later i'll be
00:57:26.960
losing some of my deep sleep because it's the opposite end of the spectrum but the reason is
00:57:32.420
this because if i go to bed late and then i wake up late now it creates this vicious cycle yeah
00:57:39.740
because i've woken up late that following morning i'm not going to be tired at my regular bedtime the
00:57:46.200
following evening so now i'm going to stay awake even longer i'm going to go to bed later which means
00:57:51.480
that then i have to wake up even later and all of a sudden my sleep window starts sliding forward
00:57:57.100
and at some point you've just got to draw the line in the stand and you've just got to call it quits
00:58:02.440
you've got to have a shorter night of sleep to get back into set and i will nip it in the bud very
00:58:08.160
quickly i'll just say look i'm out with friends and we had a great night i'm going to get to bed late
00:58:13.140
that's okay next day i'm still going to try and wake up at the same time so that i get myself
00:58:18.420
back into my schedule and i don't let this get out of control because that can be a spiral that's
00:58:24.040
very difficult to get back into control once you release it we have joked it's true uh john
00:58:29.620
stossel uh who was formerly with abc then he was with fox for a number of years while i was there
00:58:33.680
he if you have dinner over at john's house he will literally just stand up from the dinner table and
00:58:39.460
say i'm going to sleep right now you can stay if you'd like but i'm going upstairs it's like the
00:58:44.360
night's over i think john and i would get along very well indeed yeah simpatico okay so but what
00:58:50.180
about the nap because sometimes if you're off and your sleep schedule you're barely making it through
00:58:55.420
the day and you think oh i could just get that little nap in the middle of the afternoon and we
00:58:59.960
all know if you go two hours you're screwing up your night's sleep but what about if you go 45 minutes
00:59:06.580
like what's what's your theory on napping so what you're describing there is what we call
00:59:11.920
prophylactic naps or strategic napping to try to help placate maybe a bad night of sleep or a short
00:59:20.540
night of sleep and you have to be very careful with naps naps are a double-edged sword certainly
00:59:27.920
what we've discovered we and many other scientists we've done lots of studies at my sleep center looking
00:59:32.440
at the benefits of naps and they have some great benefits improvements in learning and memory they can
00:59:37.880
help reset the emotional magnetic north of your compass so that life looks a little bit more rosy
00:59:45.260
as a consequence we've also found that naps have wonderful cardiovascular benefits that they can
00:59:51.440
lower blood pressure they can reduce heart rate but as i said there is a danger here and it comes back
00:59:58.740
once again to our story of sleep pressure and that chemical adenosine so as we're awake across the day
01:00:06.340
we're building up that adenosine that sleepiness and as we said when we sleep we remove that sleepiness
01:00:12.760
well if you take a nap that's either too long or it's too late in the afternoon that nap acts almost
01:00:22.400
like a pressure valve on a cooker and when you take that nap you open up the pressure valve and you
01:00:29.100
jettison some of that healthy sleepiness that's been building up what that means is that when it comes to
01:00:35.500
your time to try to fall asleep normally in the evening at your normal bedtime for me let's say
01:00:40.740
it would be 10 30 p.m i'm no longer going to feel sleepy so because i took the nap i'm going to get
01:00:47.080
into bed at 10 30 and then i'm just going to be tossing and turning for the first hour feeling like
01:00:52.420
i've got insomnia which is miserable because i've lost some of that sleepiness that normally would be
01:00:58.580
nice and heavy and pull me down into sleep and help me sleep with you know remarkable alacrity
01:01:05.520
so i think the the advice is probably this with naps if you are not struggling with sleep at night
01:01:13.380
and you can nap regularly during the day then naps are just fine i would try to limit them to around
01:01:20.920
20 minutes and no more because this comes back to as we were describing the cycles of sleep if you go
01:01:27.560
longer than 20 minutes you start to go down to those deeper stages of deep non-realm sleep and if
01:01:32.920
you wake up after 40 or 50 minutes from a longer nap you're going to have this terrible sleep inertia
01:01:38.840
the sleep hangover where you can almost feel worse for the first hour when you wake up because your
01:01:45.100
brain was thinking oh you know megan is in it for the long haul she's going down for a 90 minute or
01:01:50.680
you know a full night of sleep and so keep the nap short and then finally don't nap too late in the
01:01:57.580
afternoon try not to nap after about 2 p.m in the afternoon assuming a typical bedtime because if you
01:02:03.980
nap late in the evening it's a little bit like snacking before your main meal it just takes the
01:02:10.620
edge the appetite off your sleep hunger you know that if you've ever had a baby and your baby's so tired
01:02:17.340
and you can see he wants to sleep and it's it's not bedtime yet you will not let that baby take a nap
01:02:22.400
but you will play with that baby it's like oh no keep that exactly yeah yeah yeah you're bouncing
01:02:28.100
them you're doing everything you're doing pantomimes you know anything to keep them awake to build up that
01:02:33.900
sleepiness and i would note two final things if you as i said if you are struggling with sleep at night
01:02:40.600
then you should absolutely not nap during the day that's the best advice we can give people
01:02:46.020
give yourself build up all of that healthy sleepiness to try to guarantee the highest chance
01:02:52.100
of an ease with which you fall asleep and then stay asleep the other thing sometimes when we're
01:02:58.160
taking in research participants or patients into the sleep center we'll do an interview you know and
01:03:03.720
i can say to people do you nap you know during the day and they say no i i really never nap and then
01:03:09.660
i'll ask them a different question as you're watching television in the evening before bed do
01:03:14.620
you ever fall asleep on the couch watching tv and they'll say yeah i sometimes do that's what we call
01:03:20.500
an accidental nap and that is the worst of all kind of naps because when is it happening it's happening
01:03:27.400
right before you're going to bed and once again that's going to shave the appetite off your sleep hunger
01:03:34.940
okay but what about this is one of the items i showed to doug on the plane the siesta which is
01:03:43.340
leading to men in foreign countries like spain living to 90 i'm like doug all you have to do is take a 20
01:03:50.700
minute nap in the middle of the day you're gonna live to be 90 yeah it's this you know it's the
01:03:54.960
mediterranean siesta culture and what we've discovered is that there's a greek island a great
01:04:00.560
example called icaria and there people live extraordinary long lives and what we found is
01:04:08.680
that men who are there in icaria who take these mediterranean naps frequently they are four times
01:04:16.840
more likely to reach the age of 90 than their american counterparts wow now i'm not suggesting that
01:04:24.380
all of that is simply because they're taking a nap during the day it's because in part of their
01:04:28.640
active lifestyle it's their diet it's the mediterranean diet but some of that is a
01:04:33.380
contribution by way of sleep so certainly there are benefits to naps if you're taking them regularly
01:04:39.900
and you're building them into your sleep structure which leads to a more fundamental question which i
01:04:45.980
think is you're elegantly hinting at how were we designed to sleep as a species and maybe we were
01:04:53.920
never designed to sleep in the way that we currently sleep now in modernity which is what we call
01:04:58.740
monophasic sleep where we try to get this long eight hour bout throughout the night because as i said
01:05:05.540
if you study those hunter-gatherer tribes they don't sleep in the way that we do in many different ways
01:05:11.940
some of that is timing that they're usually going to bed somewhere around on average about 9 p.m.
01:05:18.320
and they're waking up just before dawn and they wake up not as light is emerging as we've said what
01:05:24.820
triggers them to wake up is the rise in temperature which comes before the emergence of light it turns
01:05:32.180
out but the other thing that we notice is that they do frequently nap during the hotter summer months
01:05:38.700
now you can also then say well but that's hunter-gatherer tribes what about us in modern
01:05:46.100
society well we can see it in all of us because somewhere between about 1 to 4 p.m in the afternoon
01:05:53.340
if i place electrodes on top of your head i will see a genetically pre-programmed drop in the electrical
01:06:01.580
alertness of your brainwave activity and it's this sort of after lunch thing you know you're in meetings
01:06:07.780
in the office after lunch and all of a sudden you start to see those telltale head nods where people
01:06:13.360
yes all of a sudden you know and it's not that they're listening to good music with the head bobs
01:06:18.800
it's they're actually falling prey to this what we call the post-prandial drop in alertness which
01:06:26.280
means usually post-meal drop now by the way it's got nothing to do with food you can prevent people
01:06:32.700
from having lunch and they still have this drop in their oh yeah i mean haven't you heard people say
01:06:36.840
it's something in turkey it's some chemical in turkey that makes you yeah yeah it has nothing
01:06:41.920
to do with that okay i can have no it turns out that it's very difficult to um for tryptophan to
01:06:48.580
actually cross the blood brain barrier um which is this protective sort of filter that um you some
01:06:56.880
chemicals will get into your brain some won't when you digest that tryptophan if you look at the data
01:07:02.500
it's really very equivocal as to whether or not that tryptophan actually gets into your brain
01:07:07.100
what's usually happening during thanksgiving where people mistake they say oh it's because i had a big
01:07:12.000
turkey dinner that i'm falling asleep no it's that everyone usually then goes through to the living
01:07:16.620
room everyone is coming into thanksgiving with a chronic sleep debt everyone is feeling full no one
01:07:23.280
wants to move so you just sit down and what happens finally you give way on a thursday when you normally
01:07:30.060
would be at work to your sleep debt and you're lying there still what's going to happen you're going to
01:07:36.760
fall asleep well there's one other thing so normally at thanksgiving dinner people will have a glass of
01:07:41.820
wine or maybe they had a glass of champagne and alcohol we must discuss as well because i'm trying to
01:07:49.140
remember how you put it it's it's not it's not a sleep aid it's a it's a depressant it it basically
01:07:55.220
knocks you out and then you wake up at two in the morning and you're you don't feel restored you
01:08:02.440
didn't get good sleep and your whole night is off the alcohol is not good for sleep no it it's really
01:08:09.660
not and alcohol is probably the most misunderstood sleep aids that there is out there it's not a sleep
01:08:16.560
aid at all it's desperately damaging to your sleep but it's very natural that people once they've
01:08:22.500
tried over-the-counter medications things like melatonin which won't work or valerian root or
01:08:27.340
magnesium these things that really don't have any significant science behind them they turn to
01:08:33.580
alcohol and what alcohol will harm your sleep in three ways the first is that alcohol is in a class
01:08:41.720
of drugs called the sedatives or a depressant and what we mean by that is not necessarily a
01:08:46.920
depressant in terms of your mood although sometimes it can be alcohol many people think no it actually
01:08:53.740
makes me more alive and sort of alert what's happening there is that it's the depressant the
01:08:59.840
the brain cell depressant effects that it actually shuts down what's called your frontal cortex or your
01:09:06.340
prefrontal cortex which is what usually helps keep us with our inhibitions and so we become
01:09:12.040
disinhibited by way of alcohol that's why we people become the life of the party because alcohol is
01:09:18.340
depressing the brain activity in that part of the brain that normally makes you more reserved especially
01:09:23.840
if you're british um but but let's come back to sleep one of the problems with alcohol as i said is
01:09:31.080
it's a class of drugs that we call the sedatives and sedation is not sleep but when you have a couple
01:09:37.540
of nightcaps in the evening what you mistake is sedation for sleep that it just knocks out your
01:09:44.900
cortex it just sedates your brain cells and so you think well i fell asleep so much more quickly
01:09:51.220
when i had a couple of drinks in the evening it's not you're just knocking your cortex out you're losing
01:09:57.200
consciousness more quickly but to argue that you're in naturalistic sleep is really a fallacy if i were
01:10:03.340
to show you the electrical signature of your brainwave activity with versus without alcohol
01:10:08.580
they're not the same they're quite different so that's the first issue with alcohol the second issue
01:10:14.620
with alcohol is that it fragments your sleep so you wake up many more times throughout the night
01:10:20.680
it litters your sleep with these awakenings the problem is those awakenings are usually so brief
01:10:27.100
that you typically don't commit them to memory so you wake up the next morning you feel unrefreshed
01:10:32.920
you feel unrestored by your sleep but you don't remember having a hard time falling asleep and you
01:10:37.460
don't remember waking up throughout the night you think it's just a hangover but it's it's much more
01:10:42.200
than just a hangover it's it it could be one glass of wine and you're still getting a bad night's sleep
01:10:47.000
because of this that you don't even remember precisely that yep and so it's and we know the reason why
01:10:53.560
alcohol will spike the fight or flight branch of the nervous system which will jag the brain awake
01:11:01.420
at night alcohol will also release alerting chemicals which normally are lowering during
01:11:08.080
sleep chemicals such as cortisol for example a stress-related chemical alcohol will jack that
01:11:13.520
back up during sleep hence increasing the likelihood of you waking up and the fragility of your sleep
01:11:20.380
the third and final issue with alcohol is that it seems to be very good at blocking your dream sleep
01:11:26.920
or your rapid eye movement sleep and as we've discussed rapid eye movement sleep is critical for
01:11:33.520
many things for things like learning in memory and rebalancing your emotions and steering you away
01:11:40.040
from things like depression and anxiety because we've learned that dream sleep particularly REM sleep
01:11:45.640
is a form of emotional first aid it's overnight therapy and if you're not getting that dream sleep
01:11:52.000
because you're suppressing with alcohol then you can have these next day consequences also by the way
01:11:59.460
REM sleep is the time when we release many of our peak hormones including growth hormone once that he
01:12:06.360
looked at giving people a dose of alcohol in the evening they sort of got them tipsy and as a consequence
01:12:13.280
they had a 50% reduction in the release of growth hormone during the night which is critical for
01:12:20.320
the restoration of our body it's one of the other main functions of sleep we also know it's during REM
01:12:26.720
sleep that males release their peak levels of testosterone we don't release testosterone across the day
01:12:33.600
in a constant amount we release it during sleep and particularly during dream sleep and if you're not
01:12:39.260
getting that dream sleep you're going to be testosterone deficient you use this is another
01:12:44.520
thing i showed up so something about um be having the testosterone of somebody who is 10 years older
01:12:51.200
if you if you're not getting enough sleep right is that i'm trying to remember exactly how you put it but
01:12:57.060
basically a 50 year old man can look more like a 60 year old man when it comes to
01:13:01.420
um testosterone if he is not getting enough sleep and enough quality sleep that's right that's what
01:13:08.460
we found and this brings on us onto a topic that actually is fascinating um you know my friend dr
01:13:15.460
wendy troxel in the sleep field has said that sleep is the new sex and she's absolutely right that
01:13:20.420
there's a very intimate and bi-directional relationship between sleep and sex we can talk
01:13:24.880
about but one of the problems when it comes to insufficient sleep is that a lack of sleep will
01:13:31.340
decrease the levels of these what we call these sex related hormones so if you take a group of
01:13:37.740
healthy young virile men and you limit them to just four or five hours of sleep for a night for one week
01:13:44.980
their levels of testosterone will be that of someone 10 years their senior so just as you said a lack
01:13:53.260
of sleep will age a man by almost a decade in terms of that critical aspect of wellness and virility
01:13:59.580
and i should note by the way that we see equivalent impairments in female reproductive health caused by a
01:14:05.300
lack of sleep a lack of sleep in a woman will decrease things such as estrogen luteinizing hormone
01:14:12.000
follicle stimulating hormone all of these things are essential for a healthy and vibrant reproductive
01:14:18.940
system and also a vibrant reproductive and sex life so i mean if we do all these tips we're going
01:14:25.840
to be so healthy because we're not going to be really boozing it up and we're not going to be on drugs
01:14:30.400
and we're going to be limiting caffeine and the other pieces of it are we are going to be ideally
01:14:37.860
having sex more before we go to sleep and then not eating not overeating the next day because if you
01:14:45.920
don't get enough sleep you tend to overeat i think most people can understand that anecdotally and if
01:14:52.140
you're having sex before you go to bed your odds of having a good night's sleep and of falling to
01:14:57.160
sleep relatively easily are pretty good they go up yeah so this is where this this is probably one of
01:15:03.940
the only topics in terms of sleep and sex where i bring good news for the most part i'm pretty you
01:15:09.260
know a bit of a downer when it comes to caffeine and alcohol and sleep i'm desperately unpopular but
01:15:14.520
um so coming back to it what we have found is that um when you are getting sufficient sleep
01:15:22.180
firstly your relationship is better because when you're not getting enough sleep you have firstly
01:15:28.280
more conflict in your relationship with your partner second and this was a study done here at
01:15:33.160
uc berkeley second your ability to resolve that conflict is nowhere near as effective you can't move
01:15:39.980
past those arguments and what we discovered is the reason why because when you're not getting
01:15:45.820
sufficient sleep you lose what's called your empathetic sensitivity your ability to understand
01:15:52.000
we know that's true particularly your partner and that's the why that we have yeah more conflict
01:15:57.240
we've also known however more physiologically at a basic level that when women are getting
01:16:03.740
sufficient sleep firstly the sensitivity of their bodies to sexual um interaction is actually heightened
01:16:12.240
and furthermore what we found is that one hour of extra sleep for a woman will increase her desire
01:16:19.780
her likelihood to want to be intimate with her partner by 14 percent i showed that to doug on the
01:16:26.860
plane too so you know if if he's thinking look can we not just go out tonight and stay up a little bit
01:16:33.280
late you can say one hour of extra sleep and i'll i'll leave it and you can take your bedroom chit chat
01:16:40.500
all you want uh after that but um but then you know conversely what we know is that it's not just that
01:16:46.620
sleep improves your sex life but sex improves your sleep life what we found is that people who have
01:16:54.420
sex as long as it results in orgasm which is a big caveat and maybe i could be a stereotypical and say
01:17:01.460
guys please please do listen to that part of the equation sex as long as it accomplishes orgasm is
01:17:08.620
associated with a faster ability to fall asleep and also a higher quality of sleep at night some of the
01:17:16.560
reasons are because of the release of critical hormones things like oxytocin for women and vasopressin
01:17:22.760
for men both of those things will actually uh will bring about the engagement of the quieting branch
01:17:30.980
of the nervous system and shift you away from the fight or flight branch of the nervous system which
01:17:36.600
is what has to happen for good sleep and we also know that sex with yourself too ah wonderful question
01:17:44.260
and it turns out yes it's not quite as effective it's about 15 percent less effective but what we're
01:17:50.240
talking about here is that masturbation is also an effective tool for helping you fall asleep and
01:17:56.000
get better quality of sleep and if you survey people anonymously because obviously it's somewhat
01:18:00.420
of a taboo topic unfortunately even in this day and age nevertheless some people will use it as a sleep
01:18:06.560
aid when they're struggling with sleep so that's the story with sleep and sex but yeah i think we and we
01:18:13.200
can then come on to maybe sleep and weight gain and i'm happy to sort of dive into that too well i mean i've
01:18:18.360
noticed that myself because i can be i'm pretty good about my willpower when it comes to eating you know
01:18:24.200
i've always found tv to be a good regulator you know it's like oh you can see it if you gain it so i'm
01:18:29.720
usually pretty good about but not if i'm not well rested i'm i i can't control it i need to eat it feels
01:18:36.740
like the only thing that will make me feel better when i'm under rested is food yeah and this
01:18:44.420
relationship we've known for now almost two decades is that when you're not getting sufficient sleep
01:18:51.640
you may find yourself to be more hungry and have a higher hunger and want to eat more and it's no
01:18:59.060
coincidence first what we know is that there are two appetite regulating hormones in your body
01:19:04.660
and they are called leptin and ghrelin now leptin is a hormone that when it's released signals to
01:19:12.400
your brain that you're full that you're satisfied with your food and you don't want to eat anymore
01:19:18.560
it's what we call the satiety hormone ghrelin does the opposite ghrelin is the hunger hormone and when
01:19:27.120
ghrelin levels are high you don't feel satisfied with the meal that you've eaten even if it's a big meal
01:19:34.080
you still feel hungry and you want to eat more how are these two things related to sleep well what we
01:19:41.200
find is that if you limit people to let's say four or five hours of sleep for one week or even just for
01:19:46.140
several nights those two hormones go in opposite directions firstly what we find is that the signal
01:19:53.280
of leptin which is the signal that says you're no longer hungry you're satisfied you don't want to
01:19:59.200
eat anymore that signal of satiety is lost it decreases by 18 percent if that wasn't bad enough
01:20:08.120
the signal of ghrelin which is the hunger hormone that increases in fact it increases by almost 28
01:20:15.340
percent so i almost think of it like it's double jeopardy that you're getting punished twice for the
01:20:22.140
same crime of a lack of sleep once in the sense that you're losing the signal of being full and being
01:20:29.140
satiated by a food and once by the increase in ghrelin which is the revving up of your hunger and
01:20:36.480
therefore you can eat the same food that you would normally eat but you won't feel satisfied you'll
01:20:42.420
continue to feel hungry and as a consequence people will eat when they're not getting sufficient sleep
01:20:48.440
somewhere between an extra 250 to 400 calories each and every day so it's a really you know it doesn't
01:20:56.520
maybe it doesn't sound so much you know it's it's one extra chocolate bar every day but if you add that
01:21:02.580
up you know even just across the five days during the week when most people are short sleeping and
01:21:07.840
you do that week after week month after month year after year it's like compounding interest on alone
01:21:13.660
and that's why we see very strong relationships between short sleep duration and the risk for being
01:21:20.120
obese we also discovered more recently that it's not just about these two hunger hormones called
01:21:26.640
leptin and ghrelin something else comes into play and it's called the endocannabinoid system now many
01:21:34.120
people have heard of cannabis of course and they may have also heard that when people take cannabis
01:21:40.000
they get the munchies they get hungry and we know why because those cannabis chemicals increase your
01:21:47.520
appetite but what many people don't realize is that we have our own naturally occurring cannabinoids
01:21:54.860
inside of us they're called endocannabinoids and they're critical for many functions within the
01:22:00.960
brain and what we've learned is that when you're not getting sufficient sleep those naturally occurring
01:22:06.780
cannabinoid chemicals also start to increase they increase by somewhere between about 30 percent
01:22:14.060
when you're not getting sufficient sleep so you get that almost munchy feeling but without having had
01:22:21.180
the cannabis itself think about it if you if you are taking in an extra 400 calories a day as you say
01:22:27.180
let's just say monday through friday that's 2 000 calories a week uh there's 3500 calories in a pound
01:22:33.880
so call it one pound every two weeks to be nice to you right because it could be more if you if you do
01:22:40.060
the actual math so let's say one pound every two weeks and that's well i mean there's 52 weeks in a
01:22:46.680
year so let's call it 26 so you're looking at upwards of 20 pounds that you could gain in one
01:22:52.580
year just because you can even get enough that you know even if it's just 200 calories that's you know
01:22:59.460
10 pounds of extra weight gain or maybe you're not sleep maybe you're just getting six and a half hours
01:23:04.300
of sleep so maybe it's just 100 calories well that could still be five pounds of you know extra um added
01:23:10.260
and that's just that's just this first year that you're dealing with that what about the year after
01:23:13.420
that now you have a five pound heavier base to start from right and then you've got another five
01:23:17.680
on top of that that's why my my primary care physician who i always talk about it was such a
01:23:21.800
character but he that's why he's very um he's just strict when it comes to weight gain because he's
01:23:28.160
like gotta understand especially now that you're in your 50s you gain two pounds this year it's going
01:23:33.520
to be there next year when you come back and then you're gonna gain two on top of that you know
01:23:37.660
that's how people get to a problem you know where it's just spun out of control yeah and i you know
01:23:43.780
it is a it's a really interesting problem too because it's born not just out of the fact that
01:23:49.500
you want to eat more but you also change your desire for food preferences so you start to want
01:23:56.540
to eat different things when you're deprived speaking of the cannabinoid right you know the
01:24:02.500
the first issue is that you lose control we did a brain imaging study where we sleep deprived people
01:24:08.120
and we looked at how they started to make their food choices and they started to become much more
01:24:13.240
impulsive and a deep emotional brain center uh sort of a hedonic based emotional center started to erupt
01:24:21.200
in its activity and so i believe that i feel like we've all had that you feel deprived you feel like sad
01:24:27.360
because you haven't had your sleep and you're looking for a substitute high yes that's right
01:24:33.100
and you self-medicate in part by way of food and so when we look at what people it's not just that
01:24:38.380
they start to eat you know an extra two or three hundred additional calories or 400 calories it's that
01:24:43.840
they change what they want to eat they start to try to eat about 30 to 35 percent more of what we call
01:24:50.780
um the um obesogenic uh type foods so sugary treats simple sugars such as ice cream and cookies as well
01:24:59.860
as chocolate and then they also have a 30 increased desire for the heavy hitting carbohydrate foods
01:25:06.920
such as bread and pasta all of these things are foods that we know lean you more towards what's
01:25:13.640
called the obesogenic profile of food intake that's what they ought to put on wrappers from now on the
01:25:19.840
obesogenic that's what you see that on your food you're not going to select it yeah you know it's
01:25:24.760
almost like you know that sort of the lung that they used to put on on cigarette packets it would
01:25:28.840
be the equivalent for food um and speaking actually of of different organs we also know that there's a
01:25:34.660
45 percent increased desire for salty snacks when you're not sufficient sleep and we know that salt
01:25:40.640
can significantly increase your blood pressure and set you on a path towards hypertension that's right and
01:25:46.600
it just makes you look bad it makes you look bloated and unattractive and you retain water because of
01:25:51.400
that sodium concentration so so you're not just eating more food you're starting to eat the foods
01:25:57.200
that will increase your desire to actually gain um obese mass and then finally let's just say
01:26:05.260
um that you're trying to be careful and you're trying to diet but you're not getting sufficient sleep
01:26:12.240
what we've learned is that dieting becomes far less effective because 60 percent of all of the weight
01:26:19.540
that you lose when you're dieting but when you're not getting sleep will come from lean muscle mass
01:26:26.380
and not fat so in other words when you're not getting sufficient sleep your body will become stingy
01:26:33.680
and giving up its fat so you retain what you want to lose which is the fat and you give away
01:26:40.700
what you want to keep which is the muscle and so the way that your body starts to partition
01:26:47.440
the calories that you're taking on board also changes when you're not getting sufficient sleep
01:26:53.540
and this is why we see these links between a lack of sleep and quite significant weight gain
01:26:59.400
nature sounds actually have hidden health benefits like calming your nervous system
01:27:08.500
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manulife at manulife.ca health i'm just thinking about partners out there who you know when you get
01:27:22.600
married you sleep with your spouse and a lot of people especially when they get older they have
01:27:28.180
that sleep apnea you know where you you wake up you know you haven't been breathing or you snore what
01:27:33.960
what have you would you would you sleep in a different room from your is you know you're the sleep master
01:27:39.760
so like would you say i love you honey but we're gonna have to have separate bedrooms because i need
01:27:46.800
you know you're on your own i need my sleep it seems to be happening and it's certainly i think a very
01:27:54.860
viable option and one that people should explore and if nothing else actually embrace if it's working
01:28:00.740
for them because if you survey people anonymously what you find is that one out of every four people
01:28:08.100
will complain that their bed partner causes some form of sleep disruption and based on some of those
01:28:15.200
surveys it seems to be that almost 30 percent of people will actually sleep in separate beds or
01:28:22.700
separate locations in couples and it's what we've called the sleep divorce now some people have argued
01:28:28.040
that that's not an ideal phrase but sometimes you need a sleep divorce to prevent you from having a real
01:28:33.220
one and what we've also found is that of those people who do at least go to sleep together
01:28:38.300
in the same bed almost 40 percent of them will end up waking up in a different location
01:28:44.980
so it does seem to be a non-trivial problem and part of the issue here is the stigma that's
01:28:53.300
associated with it which is that as a couple if you admit to not sleeping together then are you
01:29:00.260
actually sleeping together people are like oh you got marital problems right and if you come back to
01:29:06.920
what we just described regarding sleep and sex it's quite the opposite that when two couples sorry well
01:29:13.420
when two people are in a couple are sleeping well their sex hormones are increased their desire to be
01:29:20.460
physically intimate with each other increases and the quality of their sex increases and the quality
01:29:26.260
of their relationship is improved so if anything it's an investment in that you could argue now
01:29:32.860
one of the other aspects of the reason that it has stigma or that people don't like the idea and by the
01:29:39.300
way i'm not suggesting that this is for everyone this is not a one size fits all many people find
01:29:45.060
incredible comfort sleeping together in the same bed some people find that there is safety in it some
01:29:52.260
people find that there is warmth and emotional bonding what i would say though is that if you are
01:29:57.820
finding that your sleep is markedly disrupted or even modestly disrupted by your partner have a
01:30:05.480
conversation and then build in a clever routine because when you think about what sleep is
01:30:11.520
and as a couple it's the front and the back end it's the bookends of sleep that you miss you miss
01:30:18.560
getting into bed and sort of cuddling and saying good night and then you miss waking up in the morning
01:30:23.600
and saying good morning and having a kiss and a cuddle so what you can do if you have a sleep divorce
01:30:29.400
is that the person who goes to bed a little bit earlier the person who's let's say more of the
01:30:34.580
morning type who's going into bed earlier they get into bed and then the person who um is more of the
01:30:41.200
evening type they get a text from their partner saying look i'm in bed i'm ready to go to come on
01:30:45.780
in and give me a cuddle give me a kiss and say good night and then on the reverse end when you know
01:30:52.220
the the morning type will have woken up before the evening type the evening type is obviously sleeping
01:30:56.720
in a different location then it's the time for the evening type to send a text and say darling i'm just
01:31:02.340
waking up come on in say good morning to me and so you can essentially get you know 80 90 percent of
01:31:07.780
the way there of all of the benefits because the rest of the middle part most of us are not conscious
01:31:12.300
we're not really consciously aware we're having our rem stage our deep sleep and our rem stage
01:31:18.040
yeah and can i just ask a question because i meant to ask you this when we were talking about
01:31:21.520
the rem stage and the dreaming um my kids they often have scary dreams and i've just said to them
01:31:29.740
without really knowing whether it's true i just believe it that that's your your brain is working
01:31:35.320
out your fears you know like that's it's good to have a scary dream because that's your brain working
01:31:40.660
out something that's scaring you and the next day you'll be a little bit less afraid of it whether you
01:31:45.600
whether you know it or not now i'm really kind of just making this up based on life experience matt but
01:31:50.260
is there any truth to that you should be a sleep scientist megan there's absolute truth to it uh and
01:31:58.700
we've this is a part of sleep science that we've been doing a lot of work in over the past 20 years
01:32:03.460
which is sleep and your emotions your moods and also sleep and mental health i'll start with the
01:32:09.220
latter and come back to your good advice on the former firstly when it comes to psychiatric disorders
01:32:14.340
we have not in the past 20 years been able to discover a single psychiatric condition in which
01:32:20.340
sleep is normal oh and i think that tells us a profound story about the intimacy with which these
01:32:28.160
two things go hand in hand sleep disruption and mental illness what we've also started to learn
01:32:35.240
however is that when you sleep deprive people who don't have psychiatric conditions you can produce
01:32:42.220
a pattern of brain activity that is very similar to anxiety disorders as well as depression and
01:32:48.640
we've done some of these studies too what happens is that when you are sleep deprived the deep emotional
01:32:54.660
centers of your brain particularly the regions that are involved in the direct generation of strong
01:32:59.860
negative emotional reactions those become hyper reactive and irrational in that in terms of their
01:33:06.520
emotional sensitivity and that deep emotional center it's a structure called the amygdala
01:33:11.860
is 60 percent more reactive when you are not well slept and that's the reason that we become so
01:33:18.520
unbuckled in terms of our emotional stability and our emotional integrity when we're not getting
01:33:25.640
sufficient sleep you know that notion of i just snapped dot dot dot it's often the sentence that comes
01:33:32.120
after a bad night of sleep now we can turn the tables on that and say not what's the bad that happens
01:33:41.000
when we're not getting sufficient sleep what's the good that happens when we do get sleep which comes
01:33:45.680
on to your your sort of wise advice to your children what we've discovered is that there is a very intimate
01:33:51.960
relationship between your sleep health and your mental health that it's during sleep and specifically
01:33:56.700
during dream sleep that we receive a form of emotional first aid and i've described this as
01:34:03.900
overnight therapy and it's dream sleep that will take these difficult painful experiences sometimes
01:34:10.400
even traumatic experiences that we've been having during the day and dream sleep acts almost like a
01:34:16.660
nocturnal soothing balm and it just takes the sharp edges off those difficult painful sometimes even
01:34:24.240
fearful events and experiences that we've had so that we come back the next day and they don't feel as
01:34:31.960
emotional anymore so in other words it's not time that heals all wounds but it's time during dream sleep
01:34:41.100
that provides that form of emotional convalescence as it were and it's as though dream sleep and the act
01:34:50.260
of dreaming itself acts almost like a it strips away the bitter emotional rind from the informational
01:34:58.620
orange of the experience and it divorces the emotion from the memory and that's why we feel better and
01:35:06.800
there's a wonderful quote by an american entrepreneur called e joseph costman and he once said that the
01:35:14.620
best bridge between despair and hope is a good night of sleep that's exactly what we're finding
01:35:21.760
believe that so we have to wrap it up because we're almost out of time but the number of sleep benefits
01:35:28.900
i mean you you really have to read matt's book and you'll see them all but i mean immunity to disease
01:35:35.820
goes up chances of contracting diseases go down the i mean they're the number of things that they now
01:35:43.320
think can be potentially prevented just by you getting steady sleep night after night throughout your life
01:35:49.780
it's it seems significantly long to take us back to where you started this like on on maybe alzheimer's
01:35:55.480
or parkinson's or you tell me just in to sum up how how important is it to your health your well-being
01:36:02.880
you can think of sleep essentially like the swiss army knife of health there is almost no ailment in
01:36:10.640
your brain in your body that sleep doesn't have a tool for sleep is your life support system and i think
01:36:18.380
it's mother nature's best effort yet at immortality and if you look as you said almost every disease
01:36:26.020
that is killing us in the developed world from things such as cardiovascular disease to cancer
01:36:32.440
to immune deficiencies and then upstairs in the brain alzheimer's disease stroke diabetes obesity
01:36:40.920
as well as also suicidality which we which we've been looking at too all of these things have
01:36:47.140
significant and many of them causal links to a lack of sleep it's amazing gosh when you think about
01:36:54.400
that they've done studies to see even everything from you know immunity to other diseases to to
01:37:00.660
vaccines it does it go up with more sleep they've studied it all and the bottom line is get your sleep
01:37:06.340
prioritize it ideally eight hours but you got to figure out what what's right somewhere between seven to
01:37:13.380
seven to nine but yeah you can think of sleep essentially sleep is the very best health
01:37:18.280
insurance policy that you could ever wish for and it's there for you to take in repeat prescription
01:37:24.180
every single night and it feels so good on so many levels dr matt walker thank you so much again i want
01:37:31.580
to remind everybody that if they want to listen they can hear you on the matt walker podcast which is
01:37:35.140
about sleep among other things and you can buy his international best bestseller why we sleep or you can
01:37:41.920
enroll at ucal berkeley and take one of his classes in neuroscience and psychology what a pleasure
01:37:47.320
thank you so much it's been a delight and thank you so much and thank you for being a wonderful sleep
01:37:52.880
ambassador um you are wonderful megan so thank you again all the best see you soon wasn't that
01:37:58.880
fascinating i want to tell you a little about what's coming up the rest of this week because we have
01:38:03.180
good stuff for you as we dig into wellness first we've got oliver berkman tomorrow who has written
01:38:10.080
several books but one in particular that we're going to dive into is on time management it's a
01:38:15.720
wide-ranging discussion on how we can be productive and on the power of limits and frankly on how to
01:38:22.620
build a meaningful life let me tell you something funny about this interview with him when i was
01:38:27.700
reading the packet getting ready for i said to my team i don't i'm not gonna be able to talk to this
01:38:31.320
guy for two hours i don't have like the the problems he's outlining i can't really relate to
01:38:36.260
these aren't my things well it turned out to be like the funniest most charming back and forth like
01:38:42.940
he had he was adorable and brought out so many stories and we started like laughing about that
01:38:48.800
it's just like i know you're gonna love it and if you do share these issues of time management and so
01:38:53.840
on i think you'll find it helpful and even if you don't i think you're really gonna enjoy it was a
01:38:57.340
sort of a sleeper it was a sleeper on my list of really enjoyable conversations uh and he was
01:39:02.740
terrific and then on friday we're gonna be joined by peter atiyah now do you know this guy he was
01:39:08.320
like a big hit on joe rogan and a lot of people in the health circles know and like revere peter atiyah
01:39:14.240
who talks about exercise and well-being the way matt walker talks about sleep and well-being and that
01:39:20.460
exercise is everything but he has a great explanation for actionable ways to make exercise part of your
01:39:28.440
life and why you need to and not just that like the device you can put under your arm to help you
01:39:35.320
not get type 2 diabetes which he says is at the root of all evil he calls it type uh he calls it
01:39:41.480
the fourth horseman and sort of the four things you really need to worry about and how it's never too
01:39:47.200
late to get started on exercise or some of his eating programs he's not like a dieter but he he has
01:39:53.220
ways of approaching food that are really helpful lots and lots of great tips and the magic of saunas
01:39:59.100
i could go on just listen to it you'll love it so join me the rest of the week and let's help each
01:40:03.800
other because i want to hear from you too love to know your feedback on any of these interviews or
01:40:09.680
shows the best way right now to do that is to go to apple to subscribe and download the show
01:40:15.420
and then leave a note in the apple reviews i read every single one of them we're over 22 000 now
01:40:21.820
it works on many levels because it helps us with apple which gives us no love because we're not
01:40:26.440
named oprah or hillary or michelle um so it helps us but it also is a great way for me to get your
01:40:32.240
feedback and you can also uh in the alternative just email us at questions at devilmaycaremedia.com
01:40:40.200
we read every single email that comes in sometimes they make it on the air
01:40:43.400
and uh or it could just be feedback on the shows right what you want us to focus on a guest
01:40:47.920
suggestion what you like what you didn't like uh we welcome all of it thank you guys so much for
01:40:53.100
listening and we'll talk to you again next time
01:40:56.120
thanks for listening to the megan kelly show no bs no agenda and no fear
01:41:03.520
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