#58 – AMA with sleep expert, Matthew Walker, Ph.D.： Strategies for sleeping more, sleeping better, and avoiding things that are disrupting sleep
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Summary
In this episode of The Drive, I talk about why we don't run ads on this podcast, and why we rely entirely on listener support to sustain it. This week's guest is Matthew Walker, host of the popular Ask Me Anything (AMA) podcast.
Transcript
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Hey everyone, welcome to the Peter Atiyah Drive. I'm your host, Peter Atiyah.
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The Drive is a result of my hunger for optimizing performance, health, longevity, critical thinking,
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along with a few other obsessions along the way. I've spent the last several years working with
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some of the most successful, top-performing individuals in the world, and this podcast
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is my attempt to synthesize what I've learned along the way to help you live a higher quality,
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more fulfilling life. If you enjoy this podcast, you can find more information on today's episode
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Hey everybody, welcome to this week's episode of The Drive. I'd like to take a couple of minutes
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to talk about why we don't run ads on this podcast and why instead we've chosen to rely entirely on
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listener support. If you're listening to this, you probably already know, but the two things I care
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most about professionally are how to live longer and how to live better. I have a complete fascination
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and obsession with this topic. I practice it professionally, and I've seen firsthand how
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access to information is basically all people need to make better decisions and improve the quality of
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their lives. Curating and sharing this knowledge is not easy, and even before starting the podcast,
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that became clear to me. The sheer volume of material published in this space is overwhelming.
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I'm fortunate to have a great team that helps me continue learning and sharing this information
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with you. To take one example, our show notes are in a league of their own. In fact, we now have a
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full-time person that is dedicated to producing those, and the feedback has mirrored this. So all of
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this raises a natural question. How will we continue to fund the work necessary to support this? As you
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probably know, the tried and true way to do this is to sell ads. But after a lot of contemplation,
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that model just doesn't feel right to me for a few reasons. Now the first and most important of
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these is trust. I'm not sure how you could trust me if I'm telling you about something when you know
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I'm being paid by the company that makes it to tell you about it. Another reason selling ads doesn't
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feel right to me is because I just know myself. I have a really hard time advocating for something
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that I'm not absolutely nuts for. So if I don't feel that way about something, I don't know how I can
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talk about it enthusiastically. So instead of selling ads, I've chosen to do what a handful
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of others have proved can work over time. And that is to create a subscriber support model for my
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audience. This keeps my relationship with you both simple and honest. If you value what I'm doing,
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you can become a member and support us at whatever level works for you. In exchange, you'll get the
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benefits above and beyond what's available for free. It's that simple. It's my goal to ensure that no
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matter what level you choose to support us at, you will get back more than you give.
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So for example, members will receive full access to the exclusive show notes, including other things
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that we plan to build upon, such as the downloadable transcripts for each episode. These are useful
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beyond just the podcast, especially given the technical nature of many of our shows. Members also get
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exclusive access to listen to and participate in the regular ask me anything episodes. That means
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asking questions directly into the AMA portal and also getting to hear these podcasts when they come
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out. Lastly, and this is something I'm really excited about. I want my supporters to get the best deals
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possible on the products that I love. And as I said, we're not taking ad dollars from anyone, but instead
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what I'd like to do is work with companies who make the products that I already love and would already
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talk about for free and have them pass savings on to you. Again, the podcast will remain free to all,
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but my hope is that many of you will find enough value in one, the podcast itself and two, the
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additional content exclusive for members to support us at a level that makes sense for you. I want to
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thank you for taking a moment to listen to this. If you learn from and find value in the content I
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produce, please consider supporting us directly by signing up for a monthly subscription. My guest
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this week is Matthew Walker. Many of you are familiar with Matthew because in April of this year,
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we released a three-part series with him. The response to this was overwhelming. In fact,
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it was among our most popular podcasts to date. And as a result, we decided to do a special AMA
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with Matthew hosting and me asking the questions on behalf of our subscribers. So what you have here
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today is what I would describe as three hours of the best Q and a I've ever heard on sleep imaginable.
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I was super impressed with the questions that came in from people. I couldn't resist, but sprinkling in
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a few of my own questions and many of my team did the same thing. And we had a hard stop imposed by his
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flight departure. And that forced us to just be ruthlessly efficient and accomplish a lot. We
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actually got through about 80% of what I thought would take probably six hours. So as a quick
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refresher, Matthew is a professor of neuroscience and psychology at Cal Berkeley. He's the founder and
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director of the Center of Human Sleep Science. He's earned his degree in neuroscience from Nottingham
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University in the UK, his PhD in London before becoming a professor at Harvard and ultimately moving to
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Berkeley. You may know him more from being the international bestselling author of the book,
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Why We Sleep. He has also very recently given a TED talk that was incredibly well received this year at
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the conference. And we will link to that, of course. As a reminder, of course, AMAs are for subscribers
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only. So if you're not a subscriber, you'll only be able to listen to a little bit of this episode,
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but hopefully episodes like this and all of the other AMAs and benefits will at least convince you of the
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benefits of supporting our work here in an ad-free environment. And you can do that at
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peteratiamd.com forward slash subscribe. In this episode, we talk about a ton of stuff. So the questions
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dive in with how do we get the best amount of sleep? How do we specifically go about targeting
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different stages of sleep? We talk a lot about what it means to create the perfect sleep environment.
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So if the first episodes that we did with Matt focused a lot on why you want to sleep, we focused
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much more today on how you want to sleep. Timing of sleep with respect to food, exercise, what does a
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wind down routine look like, sound, temperature, light, all of these things. We got really deep on
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supplements, melatonin, CBD. We talked about GHB, THC, all of these things. We went into strategies for
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what to do when you blow it. We all do. We have a horrible night of sleep. What can you do about that?
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This was something that actually I found very helpful personally. What can you do to help your
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kids? Unfortunately, kids are often in an environment educationally that is actually not
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in the best interest of their school. So one of the best takeaways from this entire episode was
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what can you do as a parent to make it better for your kid if you don't have the luxury of simply
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moving them to a school that has a better sleep strategy. It would take me another 10 minutes
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to go into even at the topic level, what we talked about. So you'll have to take my word for it.
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This was a great episode, totally worth your while. And without further delay, I'd love to
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welcome you to my discussion as a follow-up with Professor Matthew Walker.
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Hey Matt, thank you so much for coming all the way down to San Diego
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Yeah. For the sake of time, because we're going to try to do this in under three hours. I won't
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get to ask you how much fun you had last night in the simulator, but I think in a word, it looked
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like it was pretty fun. Extra ordinary. Maybe we can convince you to do monthly AMAs if we throw in
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the simulator. I mean, either or I'll come down for simulator or AMA or both, but it's a pleasure to
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be back and thank you again for having me and hosting me here at your home. Yeah. Well, this is kind
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of a first. I know we have never done it where we've taken someone who's been on before as a
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guest and then brought them back specifically to do an AMA. I know Tim has done stuff like this in
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the past. It's been quite popular. I think it's safe to say that your three episodes probably
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generated more questions than any other topic we've covered. And I think that's why we realized
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this was an important thing to do. And I know how passionate you are about this. In fact, in the
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interim, since we did our first interview and this one, you've given a Ted talk and I think it just
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came out, right? Yeah. It just came out. Yeah. We'll be sure to link to that. That's a tough talk
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to give, huh? That's pretty intimidating. It was a lot of fun, but it was work to being a professor.
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You know, I lecture most weeks. So you think that you know what you're doing. Ted is different. It has
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a special aura around it. And then they have a particular sort of style that they would like.
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So it was something different, but I like that because it stretches you. Just when you think you're
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starting to perfect a craft, you realize that there's something else left. And to me, it's the
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difference between being an exceptional public speaker and then being a speaker who has wonderment.
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And I would rank people like Carl Sagan, Richard Feynman, and then probably Sir Ken Robinson, who's
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done some fantastic Ted talks. They transcend being an exquisite public speaker into being someone who is
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just so compelling because they add this sprinkle layer on top called wonderment. And I've yet to
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ascend that pinnacle of wonderment in my public speaking capacity. I'm getting a little better,
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but I'll never hit their perfection. Yeah. That's an interesting way to put it. I've heard all of them
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speak, of course. In fact, Robinson's talk on education is probably the second or third, at least
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at the last time I ever looked, was probably one of the five most viewed Ted talks. That's right.
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And we're both from Liverpool. Yeah. Yeah. I got to watch it over and over again. I think you guys
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have the accent advantage, by the way. I just think like I can listen to the accent all day long.
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So we've got questions, some of them that are kind of high level, some of them that are super nerdy,
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and we're going to get through, I think all of these. And you've, I know we have an imposed hard
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stop so you can get a flight back home. Otherwise I realized this would take easily six hours. So we'll get
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through what we can and whatever we can't get through. Maybe, you know, you offered to graciously just
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take a microphone and start recording stuff, which I think people will lap up.
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I will keep being a repeat offender on the show for as long as you and the listeners have me.
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Yeah. So let's start with some of the sort of high level questions, right? So this was posed by a
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reader. So for a healthy adult who wants to optimize their sleep and is willing to do everything they
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can to get the A plus effort, gun to the head, pick a flawless sleep setup for an unknown healthy adult
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using the intuition you have built. And so we've talked about some of these things, but how much time
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should they be sleeping? How consistently do you want to see them hitting deep sleep or asleep?
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And, you know, now that I think about it, before we ask this question, many of these questions come
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through the lens of people using devices like Aura, Whoop, Fitbit, probably the Apple watch has
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something comparable. What I heard you say in our last discussion was those devices are probably
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pretty good at estimating duration of sleep, probably less good at estimating stage of sleep. Is that a
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fair assessment? Yeah, I think it is right now. And especially the segregation between sort of rapid
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eye movement and non-rapid eye movement. You can think of it as a sort of like a three-step level,
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total sleep time. Are you awake? Are you asleep? Essentially that's kind of like a two-class
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algorithm, wake sleep. And they're pretty good at that. Step down, then you can do a three-class
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algorithm. Are you awake? Are you in non-REM sleep? Or are you in REM sleep? And they're pretty good
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at that. Four-class model is, are you awake? Are you on light non-REM sleep? Are you in deep non-REM
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sleep? Or are you in REM sleep? That's where they sort of fail. And that's where something like my
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sleep laboratory continues to be the gold standard. So somewhere between sort of a two-class model and
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a three-class model, that's where those devices right now are sort of rate limited. So I wouldn't get
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too nervous about some of your sort of deep sleep versus light sleep numbers. Some of them could be
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accurate within an individual, but for others, it can be more tricky because of the physiology that's
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not giving the right signals for class accuracy. Yeah. And what about the relative changes? I mean,
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this is sort of the way I explain things to my patients, which is probably there's no question I
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get asked more than, Peter, why is my deep sleep only 17 minutes a night? It should be an hour and a
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half to which I don't have a great answer other than let's not assume that that's necessarily the
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case. It may be, it might not be. And unless we did a polysom, I don't think we can know,
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but what about relative changes? So the most obvious example is alcohol, which we've talked about.
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There is no doubt that alcohol impacts the model. That's right. In the wrong direction,
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which gives you some confidence that the model is at least picking up a signal that makes sense.
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This is a great point, which is overall from one individual to the next, it may be somewhat inaccurate
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for that real deep classification of varied stages of sleep. But within an individual from one night
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to the next, it may be routinely inaccurate. Meaning that once you establish some kind of baseline and you
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see a deviation from that baseline, it's more than likely that that deviation is a real deviation rather
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than a problem of the technology. Because the technology, even though it's errorful, is consistently
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errorful night after night after night. And so any variance from that, you're absolutely right.
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That's probably where you want to focus more of your attention.
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Yeah. So what I try, and again, please tell me if you disagree, what I try to get people to think
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about is once you've had these rings or whatever for a few months, you pretty much have a sense of
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what your baseline is on deep sleep, light sleep, REM, time in bed, et cetera. Don't judge those numbers.
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Now judge yourself against relative changes from those numbers.
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Absolutely. So the way I think about this is don't follow headlines, follow weekly trend lines.
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That's the way that you should really sort of think about this type of data set. Now I can follow
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headlines in my sleep laboratory because we have that degree of precision and accuracy. But when it
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comes to these trackers, and I wear them too, and I love the APIs, I just data hungry download it,
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I will plot all sorts of those trends, but it's the trends to follow, not those sort of daily
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headlines. Try not to be too worried, except when you see a marked deviation away from the trend line
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and you think that you can pinpoint the cause, alcohol, great demonstration, jet lag, perfect
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demonstration, et cetera, et cetera. So that's how you can see it. Yeah.
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Yeah. I also tell patients they're much better at measuring the raw inputs because at least for
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Aura, which is the one that I can speak to, because I know the most about it. I mean, they're very
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good at measuring heart rate, heart rate variability, temperature movement. And those
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things matter when you're resting heart rate is up seven beats per minute and your heart rate
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variability is down 20%. Yeah. That's going to impact the algorithm negatively and whether or not
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the fidelity with which its prediction is perfect, we don't know, but those are bad things. Your heart
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rate shouldn't be up 10 beats. Your heart rate variability shouldn't get crushed. And as you said,
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I don't think I've ever seen those things where I couldn't point to the Y. The room was boiling hot.
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Ate a monster meal 10 minutes before bed. I had two drinks or more. Those are the things that sort
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of consistently do it, which actually now brings us back to our questions. What is the optimal time
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to stop eating before bed? So I would say probably about three hours before bed is where I would really
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cut it off. And the principal reason is just because when you lie down, more likely to get acid reflux,
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more likely to have digestive issues. That's the first principal reason a lot of people will just get
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reflux if they eat too much closer to bedtime. The other reason, however, is to be mindful of core
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body temperature. So the advice generally is don't go to bed too full. Don't go to bed too hungry.
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And if you do feel as though you ate earlier in the evening and you just need something to take the
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edge off, try to stay away from sort of simple carbs. The reason being is that those will actually
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just get translated more quickly into a sort of an energy and ultimately a heat index. And when you
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need to fall asleep, you need to drop your core body temperature. So if you're fueling yourself
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with simple carbs right before bed, let's say that you just have a nice big bowl of cereal, sugary sort
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of nonsense, you will actually see a slight increase in core body temperature because of that sort of
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sugar caloric burning. That raises core body temperature. That makes it harder for you to
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fall asleep. Why? Because you need to drop your core body temperature by about two to three degrees
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Fahrenheit to initiate sleep and then to stay asleep. And that's the reason you'll always find it easier
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to fall asleep in that room that's too cold than too hot. So that's the second reason that I would
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say try to back away from food. If you do need to eat, try to maybe lean more towards protein if you can
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and away from simple sugars just before bed. But for the most part, cut off about three hours.
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Okay. And I want to come back to temperature in a moment with sleep environment, but let's go to
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another question, which is the same question, but with respect to exercise. We certainly learned in
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our first discussion that exercise has many benefits, but vis-a-vis sleep, it generates more
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adenosine. And adenosine is one of these three pillars that creates this drive for sleep. But can it
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backfire if you exercise too close to bed? We think it can. I mean, the evidence I would say is
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moderate to strong and the following reasons. Firstly, you actually get an increase in core
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body temperature, of course, and then you get this nice sort of down shoot sort of later on and that's
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good. But if you're exercising, let's say in the last two hours before bed, your core body temperature,
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depending on what you've done, may still be too high and working against what it would normally like to do
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from a circadian perspective, which is start to drop down and lull you into sleep by sort of
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evacuating the core temperature from your body. So be a little bit careful with exercise. Too close
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to bed, I would say a cutoff of about two hours. The other reason is not just temperature though,
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but also a whole cascade of hormones. You can typically get epinephrine, norepinephrine, or
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adrenaline, noradrenaline. They're the same things.
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Cortisol usually has a time decay of exercise. And again, it depends on what you're doing,
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of course, but sort of somewhere between 90 to 120 minutes. So those things can actually work
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against you in terms of sleep. But for the most part, exercise, anything that is before two hours
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of sleep is a fantastic tool in terms of sleep promotion. What I would say though, is that the data
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in the opposite direction is even more powerful. And I think we chatted a little bit about this.
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It's not just that exercise helps sleep. Sleep profoundly helps exercise. And in fact,
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that is a two-way street. But if the traffic is flowing more dominantly, I would argue the evidence
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is that sleep is better for exercise and they're both reciprocally beneficial. And what we know is that
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when you're sleeping well, firstly, just your motivation to do anything, and especially exercise,
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is increased dramatically. So forget anything thereafter, the likelihood that you're going
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to get into the gym, get out on the bike, get out on the road and start pounding the pavement
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far higher when you've slept well. Thereafter, it's great. Peak muscle strength increases.
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Your ability to respire and expel carbon dioxide is improved the more sleep that you're getting.
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Likelihood of injury risk, markedly decreased. Your ability to even sweat and perspire is determined
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by how much sleep that you get. And we sometimes forget how critical perspiration is for optimal
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exercise. So it's just a peak muscle strength, all of those things. It's just this cascade of benefit
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that you get from sleep from the point of getting out of bed, getting started. And then once you get
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started, exactly what your performance will be, including time to physical exhaustion, which we
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mentioned last time too. Beautiful relationship there between those two.
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Yeah. Two nights ago, I flew back from New York and I almost always take the morning flight back
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because one, you're more productive on the airplane. It's just the morning. There's a far
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less chance of delay on the first flight out of New York than the last flight out. But occasionally you
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just, whatever the schedule on. So I had to do what I hate doing, which is take the 8 PM flight
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from JFK back. And as is the case, at least 50% of the time crew shows up late. By the time the crew
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gets there an hour and a half later, you're number 317 on the runway. I mean, we didn't get back until
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like two and a half hours later than planned. So, and I have a pretty fixed wake up time just both
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because of the jet lag coming back, but also the kids. So I woke up yesterday morning only having
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five hours of sleep, which was I think good, all things considered, but it's less than what I've now
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become accustomed to. And it's interesting you say this because I worked out in the morning and my wife
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asked me later in the day, she was like, how was your workout? And I was like, I got to tell you,
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it was miserable. Not for any other reason than I didn't want to even be in the gym.
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It was like two hours of how quickly can I be done with this? I just don't want to be here.
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For what it's worth, I didn't perform well either. But what caught my attention was how
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little I wanted to be in the gym. If that's not bad enough, what you also do is get a compounding
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set of problems atop of that, which is your appetite. And I think there was a question that
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maybe I can try to weave in here, which is when you are sleep deprived, essentially what the brain
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receives is a signal that is not dissimilar to starvation. And it releases a cascade of hormones
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that change your appetite profile. You want to eat more and you're less satisfied with your food.
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Why is this? The reason is the following, and we've mentioned it before, I think briefly,
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human beings seem to be the only species that will deliberately deprive themselves of sleep for no
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apparent reason. Only other time that we see this in the wild where it does seem to have an impact
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is when animals are under conditions of starvation. When you get a starvation signal, it usually is
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sort of the cause of saying you need to forage in a larger perimeter area for you to survive. And the
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way that you're going to do that is probably to stay awake for longer hours so you can forage further.
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So what happens when the body undergoes sleep deprivation is that the brain thinks,
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oh, I must be under conditions of starvation. From an evolutionary perspective, the only time
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I'm ever sleep deprived is when I'm starving, when I'm under conditions of starvation. Now,
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human beings, when they sleep deprive themselves, they're not under conditions of starvation. So it's
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a fake starvation signal. So when you're deprived, your brain thinks, oh my goodness, I must be under
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starvation. It increases a hormone called ghrelin, which makes you want to eat more. It suppresses a
00:23:03.200
hormone called leptin, which says you're satisfied with your food, don't eat more. So overall hunger
00:23:08.620
levels go up, you start to eat more. Now we combine that with this lack of motivation of exercise in all
00:23:15.540
sorts of obesogenic directive territory, eating more, wanting to exercise less, you're burning fewer
00:23:21.880
calories. That usually is why we're starting to understand part of the sleep dependent obesogenic
00:23:27.500
equation. And the other hormone that plays, I think, at least for me, an increasingly greater and
00:23:32.780
greater role in that cascade is cortisol. Because of its role directly on the adipocyte, it is a very
00:23:40.560
anabolic hormone to adipose tissue and a very catabolic hormone to muscle tissue, but also its
00:23:46.020
effect on the liver and glycogen stores via hepatic glucose output. So it's raising glucose,
00:23:50.500
which in turn is raising insulin, which is now acting alongside cortisol. I mean, it seems intuitive
00:23:56.920
to me, but I don't know what the evidence is that sleep deprivation would tend to also run with
00:24:02.900
hypercortisolemia. We can see why hypercortisolemia would drive sleep deprivation. Do we think that there's
00:24:08.600
a feedback loop that is in the wrong direction, i.e. the more sleep deprivation you have, the more
00:24:14.760
cortisol that the animal or human tends to produce? That's exactly what we see typically. Yeah. And if
00:24:20.100
you can go into that state chronically, which is what most of society is not pulling all-nighters,
00:24:24.940
most of society is chronically underslept. So what you end up doing is having this kind of chronic
00:24:30.760
mid to high level of hypercortisolemia. And that is leading to all of this cascade of biology that
00:24:39.140
is non-optimal, part of which is a collection of changes, not just in the brain, but also in the body
00:24:46.300
too. That cortisol spike can actually lead to things like anxiety. And what you should not have if you're
00:24:54.440
looking for good sleep is a high level of cortisol. And so it's bidirectional that the less that you're
00:25:00.660
sleeping, the higher that cortisol level. If that cortisol level stays high at night, it's very
00:25:05.720
difficult to get the good sleep that you need and so on and so forth. And that might also be
00:25:10.500
evolutionary, right? It might be that when the animal is sleep deprived, the evolutionary trigger is
00:25:15.620
there's a reason you're sleep deprived. You will need more cortisol. That's right. I had this discussion
00:25:20.140
with Robert Sapolsky where we went into great detail about the role of cortisol in the subacute
00:25:25.340
level of stress, which is actually for many people, not the stress we're under, but evolution doesn't
00:25:31.720
know the difference. Right. Yeah. We've imposed sort of the mental saber tooth tiger, which is called
00:25:37.500
societally triggered anxiety. I should put fangs on my phone. You know, it's nothing more than a
00:25:43.780
collection of electronics. And yet it induces in me the same feeling as a saber tooth tiger would
00:25:50.000
if it were just growling around me from a hundred yards away in perpetuity.
00:25:54.660
Yeah. And just like that, you have night shift on your iPhone. Those fangs during the day should
00:25:59.080
switch to a sign with a lots of Z's and then a big strike against them over there, because that's
00:26:04.760
essentially what it's going to do to your sleep as well.
00:26:06.920
Well, let's talk a little bit about the wind down routine then. That's a nice foray into that. So
00:26:10.680
I think anybody listening to this who is obviously so curious about sleep has thought about this idea of,
00:26:16.880
okay, you've made a very compelling case in our first discussion that if you want to sit there
00:26:22.680
on your phone, glued to your phone in bed until you put it down, that's just a recipe for disaster.
00:26:28.300
So we accept the fact that we've got to get the electronics out of the way because of two reasons,
00:26:34.380
at least, right? The blue light itself is damaging and it prevents the pineal gland from getting ready
00:26:38.660
to give us that surge of melatonin. But also there's kind of an emotional piece of that as well.
00:26:43.560
So if you were giving somebody advice on the perfect wind down routine, and this is a real
00:26:48.760
person. So this isn't someone who has the luxury of being on a meditation retreat their whole life.
00:26:53.400
This is someone who has a job. This is someone who has a boss. This is someone who is still
00:26:58.560
accountable and lives in a world that unfortunately demands paying attention to their phone, but they're
00:27:04.280
committed to getting the best sleep they can. How would you counsel them at 6 PM? They just finished
00:27:09.660
dinner or 6 30, whatever. What should they be doing between now and say 9 30?
00:27:14.860
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