The Megyn Kelly Show - Alcohol and Caffeine, Naps, and the Science of Sleep, with Dr. Matt Walker ｜ Ep. 284

00:00:00.000 When I found out my friend got a great deal

00:00:02.160 on a wool coat from Winners,

00:00:03.760 I started wondering,

00:00:05.440 is every fabulous item I see from Winners?

00:00:08.560 Like that woman over there with the designer jeans. 1.00

00:00:11.260 Are those from Winners?

00:00:12.780 Ooh, or those beautiful gold earrings?

00:00:15.260 Did she pay full price?

00:00:16.600 Or that leather tote?

00:00:17.620 Or that cashmere sweater?

00:00:18.840 Or those knee-high boots?

00:00:20.280 That dress?

00:00:21.060 That jacket?

00:00:21.740 Those shoes?

00:00:22.760 Is anyone paying full price for anything?

00:00:25.720 Stop wondering.

00:00:26.980 Start winning.

00:00:27.920 Winners.

00:00:28.500 Find fabulous for less.

00:00:30.620 Welcome to The Megyn Kelly Show.

00:00:32.520 Your home for open, honest, and provocative conversations.

00:00:41.940 Hey everyone, I'm Megyn Kelly.

00:00:43.620 Welcome to The Megyn Kelly Show.

00:00:45.340 You're not getting enough sleep and it's killing you.

00:00:48.600 Sorry to be so blunt,

00:00:49.640 but lack of quality sleep is a very serious issue.

00:00:54.400 You're gonna love today's show.

00:00:55.840 It's so fascinating.

00:00:57.680 We are going to learn all about the science of the world

00:01:00.000 of sleep and why this mysterious chunk of our 24-hour day is so important to every aspect

00:01:07.000 of our biology, indeed, our lifespan.

00:01:11.240 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.

00:01:23.540 Welcome, Matt.

00:01:24.780 So good to have you here.

00:01:26.000 It's a delight and a privilege to be with you, Megyn.

00:01:28.420 Thanks so much for having me.

00:01:29.680 Oh my gosh.

00:01:30.380 I was reading the packet that my team prepared for me, you know, get me started on the research.

00:01:35.460 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.

00:01:42.460 I said, you got to read this.

00:01:43.280 Read this.

00:01:43.880 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.

00:01:50.860 I'm showing my little guy about how it can perform.

00:01:53.260 It can affect test performance.

00:01:55.340 And so it's just every part of how we live starts right here in our bed at night.

00:02:01.560 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.

00:02:13.240 And I think I was wrong.

00:02:14.640 I used to think of sleep almost like the third pillar of good health alongside things like diet and exercise.

00:02:21.120 But I've changed my tune.

00:02:23.520 When you look at the data, it really tells the story that sleep is the very foundation on which those two other things sit.

00:02:31.520 And we can talk about why that's the case.

00:02:33.420 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.

00:02:43.760 And yet people don't tend to be thoughtful about it.

00:02:47.340 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.

00:02:56.600 But you argue for a very different approach, which we're going to get into, and gave really specific recommendations, which I love.

00:03:04.020 I love just, you know, an action plan.

00:03:05.600 Okay, these are the hours.

00:03:06.860 This is the temperature.

00:03:07.900 This is sort of the setting.

00:03:09.160 This is how to ease into the sleep and so on.

00:03:11.180 We're going to go through all of it.

00:03:12.080 But before we get to all that, just tell us a little bit about your background.

00:03:15.900 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.

00:03:24.460 This one has a different disease.

00:03:26.020 And how did that spark your interest in sleep?

00:03:30.480 Yeah.

00:03:30.880 During my initial PhD work, I was trying to differentially diagnose people with dementia very early on in the course of their disease.

00:03:38.100 And I was using brainwave recordings to see if I could do that.

00:03:41.740 And I was failing miserably.

00:03:43.320 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.

00:03:54.280 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.

00:04:02.840 And I realized that I was measuring the brainwave activity of my patients at the wrong time.

00:04:08.100 Which is when they were awake.

00:04:09.280 And I should be measuring it when they were asleep.

00:04:11.840 So I started measuring the sleeping brainwave activity, got some fantastic results.

00:04:17.780 And at that point, I wondered, perhaps the sleep problems are not just a symptom of the dementia.

00:04:25.140 I wonder if it's an underlying cause of the dementia.

00:04:28.600 And 20 years ago, which is when I was doing that work, no one could actually answer a very simple fundamental question.

00:04:36.660 Why do we sleep?

00:04:38.640 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.

00:04:47.940 Well, that doesn't really tell you much about the benefits of nutrition.

00:04:52.240 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?

00:05:04.580 And as I said, the answer seems to be no.

00:05:08.200 And so that's how I was essentially an accidental sleep researcher.

00:05:12.660 I didn't think about sleep until I got to that stage.

00:05:16.560 And then I just fell desperately and deeply in love with this thing called sleep.

00:05:21.960 It is a love affair that has remained with me for the past 20 years.

00:05:26.500 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.

00:05:36.140 It's funny because I think to myself before we choose any topic for a show, will people be interested in this?

00:05:43.060 You know how I mean, we did a show on love.

00:05:45.640 Of course, everyone is interested in love in general.

00:05:47.760 They tend to want love in their life and have love in their life.

00:05:50.420 But would they listen to a show for two hours about love?

00:05:53.420 I don't know, you know, figure, OK, I like it, so we'll do it.

00:05:56.840 This one, I know everybody will listen.

00:05:59.020 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.

00:06:09.540 And you really tend to be rather thoughtless about it unless it creeps up as a problem in your life.

00:06:15.420 And then, you know, it needs tending to.

00:06:17.720 So let's start with that question then.

00:06:19.840 Why do we sleep and what is sleep?

00:06:24.400 So sleep, at least in human beings, is broadly separated into two main types.

00:06:30.720 On the one hand, we have something called non-rapid eye movement sleep or non-REM sleep for short.

00:06:36.380 And then on the other hand, we have rapid eye movement sleep or REM sleep.

00:06:41.160 And non-REM sleep has been further subdivided into four separate stages.

00:06:45.900 They are unimaginatively called stages one through four, increasing in their depth of sleep.

00:06:53.300 So stages one and two of non-REM sleep, that's what you would think of as light non-REM sleep.

00:06:59.260 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.

00:07:07.240 And then we have rapid eye movement sleep, as I said, and that's the state of sleep principally associated with dreaming.

00:07:14.180 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.

00:07:29.080 And that cerebral war between non-REM and REM was won and lost every 90 minutes.

00:07:37.260 And then it was replayed every 90 minutes.

00:07:40.700 And what that produces is this standard cycling architecture of sleep.

00:07:46.380 And as I said, in humans, at least it's 90 minutes.

00:07:49.080 It's different in different species.

00:07:50.380 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.

00:07:57.740 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.

00:08:04.180 And then down you go again, down into non-REM and then up into REM.

00:08:09.100 What changes, however, is the ratio of non-REM to REM within that 90 minute cycle as you move across the night.

00:08:17.660 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.

00:08:31.360 But as you push through to the second half of the night, now that seesaw balance actually shifts.

00:08:38.320 And the majority of those 90 minute cycles are comprised much more of rapid eye movement sleep or dream sleep.

00:08:45.120 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.

00:08:56.360 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.

00:09:05.080 And you normally wake up at 6 a.m.

00:09:07.540 So there's your eight hour sleep opportunity.

00:09:09.740 But tomorrow morning, you have to wake up for an early morning flight.

00:09:14.000 So you have to wake up two hours earlier.

00:09:16.260 So you wake up at 4 a.m. rather than 6 a.m.

00:09:19.040 How much sleep have you lost?

00:09:21.040 Well, you've lost two hours from your eight hour window.

00:09:23.860 So you've lost 25% of your sleep.

00:09:26.880 Well, yes and no.

00:09:28.800 You've lost 25% of your total sleep.

00:09:31.400 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.

00:09:43.120 And as we'll perhaps discuss, dream sleep is critical for many functions.

00:09:47.340 It's critical for your mental and emotional health.

00:09:51.240 Downstairs in the body, it regulates particular hormones, including things like testosterone and other sex-related hormones.

00:09:59.180 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.

00:10:09.220 So it's not just academic that we think about these different stages of sleep, but there are also practical implications too.

00:10:15.960 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.

00:10:26.280 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.

00:10:32.640 Um, does it, does it, does it, does it behoove me to stay up later?

00:10:40.980 And you know what I mean?

00:10:41.500 Can you, can you work it such that, um, you're getting up at the same time and still getting more REM stage?

00:10:48.580 So unfortunately you can't shortchange sleep on either end of the initiation or the ending of the spectrum.

00:10:57.540 What we've discovered is that all stages of sleep are important.

00:11:02.540 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.

00:11:13.500 And if we remove any one of them, we can see selective impairments in those different functions.

00:11:19.600 And from, you know, from an evolutionary perspective, that makes a lot of sense because think about sleep. 0.95

00:11:26.900 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. 0.98

00:11:38.600 And worst of all, you're vulnerable to predation. 0.98

00:11:41.660 So on any one of those grounds, sleep should have been strongly selected against in the course of evolution.

00:11:48.340 But sleep, and at least in every species that we've carefully studied to date, sleep appears to be present.

00:11:55.640 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.

00:12:07.680 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.

00:12:15.620 And we're now realizing that Mother Nature didn't make a spectacular blunder in creating this thing called sleep.

00:12:21.540 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.

00:12:39.480 Because sleep is so deleterious from that evolutionary standpoint.

00:12:43.860 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.

00:12:54.500 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.

00:13:02.480 So every living animal sleeps.

00:13:06.160 I mean, everything, like sharks, elephants, they all sleep.

00:13:11.700 Every species that we've studied to date, yep, sharks will sleep.

00:13:16.040 We also know, and it's actually interesting, sharks will sleep typically with their eyes open.

00:13:22.340 Elephants will sleep, but different species will sleep different amounts.

00:13:26.220 Elephants are a great example.

00:13:27.400 They will only need somewhere between four to five hours of sleep a night.

00:13:33.280 For those big bodies.

00:13:35.100 Yeah, it's remarkable.

00:13:37.200 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.

00:13:49.880 My hero.

00:13:50.620 Could you imagine?

00:13:51.640 Yeah, I know.

00:13:52.300 And so we human beings, we sit somewhere in the middle, our sleep need is somewhere between seven to nine hours a night.

00:13:59.000 Has it always been that way?

00:14:00.000 You know, talk about evolution, and we'll get to, you know, how many hours are ideal.

00:14:03.560 But has it always been that, you know, around seven or eight is pretty much what a human body will do if left alone?

00:14:10.500 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.

00:14:21.840 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.

00:14:31.920 But they also have, particularly in the summer, this siesta-like nap behavior.

00:14:37.860 So from best we can tell, that is the requirement.

00:14:41.640 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.

00:14:53.060 And for the next two weeks, you're staying with us in close quarters.

00:14:56.200 And firstly, we let them sleep off the debt that most people bring in to the sleep laboratory, where they oversleep.

00:15:03.520 They'll start to sleep nine, nine and a half hours.

00:15:06.320 But then at some point, they throttle back to their sweet spot.

00:15:10.480 And that sweet spot, for most human adults, seems to be somewhere between seven to nine hours.

00:15:16.840 And that range, and there is a range to be important, but that's the other way that we can address the question.

00:15:21.840 We can just let human beings, free of all of the trappings of modernity, start to sleep in however they want to sleep.

00:15:29.060 And we look at that biological need, and it expresses that same range of seven to nine.

00:15:35.460 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.

00:15:43.000 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.

00:15:58.740 But it also can prime your brain for learning.

00:16:03.000 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.

00:16:21.580 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.

00:16:32.140 First, we need sleep before learning to get your brain ready to initially lay down those new memories.

00:16:39.940 In other words, sleep almost prepares your brain like a dry sponge ready to initially soak up those new pieces of information.

00:16:49.260 And without sleep, the memory circuits of the brain effectively become waterlogged and you can't absorb new memories.

00:16:56.320 And we did a study, for example, where we asked, is pulling the all-nighter a wise idea?

00:17:01.480 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.

00:17:12.680 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.

00:17:32.080 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.

00:17:43.280 And that's the process of saving them, as you said, almost like hitting the save button on those memories.

00:17:47.840 But then more recently, we've discovered that sleep is much more intelligent than we ever imagined possible.

00:17:57.260 That sleep not only saves individual pieces of memories, but sleep will intelligently start to associate and integrate that new information together.

00:18:08.780 And it's, you know, I liken it to informational alchemy.

00:18:13.600 It's that you wake up the next morning and you have a revised mind-wide web of associations.

00:18:21.480 Definitely.

00:18:22.460 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.

00:18:34.140 And I think it's the reason that no one has probably ever told you, Megan, that you should stay awake on a problem.

00:18:41.260 They don't.

00:18:42.220 Instead, they tell you to sleep on a problem.

00:18:45.580 And that's exactly what the evidence is telling us.

00:18:48.000 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?

00:19:11.100 It's a very challenging question in memory science, and I do a lot of work in this area.

00:19:16.880 You know, how much information is actually stored in the human brain and how much capacity do we have for storage of information?

00:19:24.980 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.

00:19:36.900 And you gave a lovely analogy, and I think it's absolutely correct.

00:19:39.960 There are some times when someone asks you a question, you say, you know, I just, I can't remember.

00:19:46.220 No, it's gone.

00:19:47.960 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.

00:19:57.140 And what that tells us is something fundamental, that the information was in your brain, it was available, but it wasn't accessible.

00:20:08.980 And sometimes we make the mistake that a lack of accessibility reflects the fact that the memory is not there.

00:20:16.420 That's perhaps not true.

00:20:17.840 The memory is there.

00:20:19.060 It's available.

00:20:20.420 It's just not accessible.

00:20:21.680 It's almost as though sometimes we lose the IP address to that memory, and we can't go and find it.

00:20:28.840 And in fact, there was a lovely study done several years ago that demonstrated once again, a role for sleep here.

00:20:35.260 That sleep increases the veracity of which you can locate and identify and access those memories.

00:20:43.720 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.

00:20:52.940 Wow.

00:20:53.520 I mean, I feel like everyone's had that experience, and you know it's in there.

00:20:58.080 You just have to get the keys somehow, close your eyes, get better rested, don't drink.

00:21:03.780 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.

00:21:16.880 Unlocking the mystery of our brains is fun science.

00:21:20.040 Beat, beat, beatboxing actually has hidden health benefits.

00:21:30.300 It can help strengthen, strengthen, strengthen and protect, protect, protect, protect, protect, protect your voice from injury.

00:21:38.140 Discover more ways to see healthy living differently with Manulife at manulife.ca slash help.

00:21:43.320 Now let's get that beat. 0.63

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

00:22:08.500 we get tired why we get tired in the evening and why we want to wake up in the morning from

00:22:14.280 sleeping so why is that what makes us get tired in the evening yeah the two great questions and

00:22:19.300 i think certainly if i was not a sleep scientist i never would have asked that question why do i get

00:22:26.320 tired in the evening and why is it that after a good night of sleep i'm relieved of that tiredness

00:22:32.920 the next morning and i feel awake and we now understand why there is something called sleep

00:22:39.260 pressure as you described so from the moment that both you and i woke up this morning and everyone

00:22:44.080 listening uh woke up this morning a chemical has been building up in our brain and that chemical

00:22:50.160 is called adenosine and the more of that chemical that builds up the sleepier and sleepier you will

00:22:56.880 feel and it's what we call sleep pressure now don't worry it's not a mechanical pressure in your head

00:23:02.640 it's not going to cause you a headache by any means it's a chemical pressure and after about 16 hours of

00:23:10.360 being awake after about 16 hours of accumulation of this adenosine of this sleepiness molecule we feel

00:23:17.560 tired and we feel needing to go to bed but what's also interesting is what happens when we sleep and

00:23:26.300 it's during sleep that the brain then gets the chance to actually clear away all of that adenosine

00:23:32.660 and it's this mass evacuation of all of that chemical sleep pressure and it seems to take

00:23:40.280 the sleeping brain about eight hours to jettison 16 hours of accumulated wakefulness and that's why

00:23:49.740 we wake up hopefully without an alarm feeling refreshed and it can also be one of the reasons why

00:23:56.340 when we wake up we may need caffeine to help get us more awake or we don't feel restored by our sleep

00:24:03.280 because we're not giving our brain the right opportunity amount of sleep to get rid of all of

00:24:11.360 that sleepiness chemical does the next night what does it do to adenosine great question this helps

00:24:19.920 actually explain how caffeine works so by the way it's not a coincidence that those two things sound

00:24:26.140 quite similar caffeine and adenosine it's because they both latch on to the same receptor sites or

00:24:33.820 welcome sites within the brain now what's interesting however is that when caffeine floods your system

00:24:41.160 it doesn't latch onto those receptors of adenosine and say you're sleepy of course it doesn't because

00:24:49.180 caffeine makes us alert so how does this work well caffeine races in and it latches onto those

00:24:56.140 receptor sites and it hijacks them and essentially it blocks them it inactivates those sleepiness

00:25:03.480 receptors and so even though you've been awake for 16 hours and before you had that cup of coffee in

00:25:09.760 the evening you were starting to feel really quite tired caffeine races in it blocks some of that signal

00:25:16.220 it's almost like caffeine comes in and hits the mute button on the sleepiness signal so now your brain

00:25:22.880 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

00:25:35.940 hours and so now you're wide awake again and this is why caffeine can sort of keep us more alert and

00:25:44.000 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

00:26:05.960 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

00:29:11.500 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 1.00

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 nature sounds actually have hidden health benefits like calming your nervous system

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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

00:54:04.380 12 hours before you expect to go to bed

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 1.00

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 0.89

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 1.00

01:14:05.300 lack of sleep a lack of sleep in a woman will decrease things such as estrogen luteinizing hormone 1.00

01:14:12.000 follicle stimulating hormone all of these things are essential for a healthy and vibrant reproductive 0.93

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 0.66

01:14:57.160 sleep relatively easily are pretty good they go up yeah so this is where this this is probably one of 0.58

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 1.00

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 0.97

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 0.57

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 0.68

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 0.95

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 and improving your cognitive abilities discover more ways to see healthy living differently with

01:27:14.080 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 0.92

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

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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

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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

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01:40:56.120 thanks for listening to the megan kelly show no bs no agenda and no fear

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01:41:33.400 you

The Megyn Kelly Show - March 23, 2022

Alcohol and Caffeine, Naps, and the Science of Sleep, with Dr. Matt Walker ｜ Ep. 284

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