The Peter Attia Drive - Qualy #129 - Evolutionary reasons to sleep

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00:00:40.680 Firstly, you know, it took Mother Nature 3.6 million years to put this eight-hour thing called

00:00:46.100 a night of sleep in place. And within the space of 70 years, if you look at the data,

00:00:51.720 we've lopped off almost 20 to 25% of that. You know, imagine coming along and saying,

00:00:56.900 you know, in the next hundred years, I think what I'm going to do is for the entirety of human

00:01:03.220 society, I'm going to reduce their oxygen saturation by about 20 to 25%. Do you think

00:01:08.960 that's a good idea? And the answer is no.

00:01:12.260 No, it's such a great example. I'll pause for a moment just to tell a funny story that you and

00:01:16.460 I have talked about off mic, which is up until about 2012, I was in the I'll sleep when I'm dead

00:01:22.080 camp. And I know what led to that. It wasn't that there was a very deliberate decision at the end

00:01:28.640 of medical school when a good friend of mine with all the best intentions, who was a year ahead of

00:01:33.480 me. So he was now in at the end of his internship, as I was about to begin mine, he said, and this is

00:01:40.460 in the days when we didn't have the 80 hour work week requirement in residency. So we averaged,

00:01:47.040 I think about 114 hours a week in the hospital. So he said to me, look, Peter, you're, you're signing

00:01:53.560 up for, you know, whatever, five, seven years of this thing. If you spent every moment outside of

00:01:59.820 the hospital sleeping, you would still be tired. The only difference is you wouldn't have any fun.

00:02:04.260 So make sure you live every moment that you're not in the hospital to the fullest. And so for me,

00:02:12.360 that basically meant if I wasn't in the hospital, I was swimming, I was going out with my friends,

00:02:16.920 I was trying to meet girls, like I was doing anything, everything such that during that period

00:02:22.040 of my life, I, I just know, cause I was pretty adamant about recording how much time, like I was

00:02:27.380 very wed to this idea. There's 168 hours in a week. If I'm spending, you know, 114 of them here and I

00:02:32.820 spend this many driving and I spend this many getting groceries and I spend this many swimming

00:02:36.160 and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. I think I was about 28 hours a week of sleep. So it wasn't four

00:02:42.300 every night because you'd have none and then six and then three and then eight. Like you,

00:02:48.240 you could binge sleep from time to time, but it was pretty much 28 a week. I'll come back to some

00:02:53.560 of the implications of that. But fast forward a few years, I'm talking to a good friend of mine,

00:02:57.260 Kirk Parsley, who's a physician who like you is adamant about, you know, the importance of sleep.

00:03:01.780 And we're having dinner one night and he says, he's challenging me on this. And he says,

00:03:06.840 so let me get this straight. You've just decided that you're going to sleep half of what is

00:03:11.420 evolutionarily programmed. And I said, yeah, because does it strike you as odd that evolution

00:03:19.020 would have designed us to spend a third of our life, not mating, not watching out for predators,

00:03:25.480 not hunting for food, but doing this thing for some other purpose. Do you think that thing must

00:03:31.660 have been important? And it was such an obvious argument, but it really overnight changed the way

00:03:37.400 I thought about this, which was evolution went to great lengths to do this and superficially at

00:03:45.340 great cost to us, right? I mean, you could argue, well, imagine you didn't need to sleep and you could

00:03:49.480 spend 24 hours a day foraging for food or a mate or some other thing, but it didn't.

00:03:55.120 So it's sort of, it's sort of like, there's probably a reason we are not anaerobic to your point

00:04:01.120 about reducing oxygen saturation by 25%. You know, if you were to think about that,

00:04:04.900 you know, during sleep, just as you said, you're not eating, you're not finding food,

00:04:10.640 you're not finding a mate, you're not reproducing, you're not caring for your young,

00:04:14.820 you're vulnerable to predation on any one of those grounds, but especially all of them put

00:04:20.740 together as a collective. It's completely anti-evolutionary.

00:04:23.660 It sounds like the dumbest thing. And, you know, often said, and it has been said before,

00:04:28.320 if sleep doesn't serve an absolutely vital set of functions, it's the biggest mistake that the

00:04:35.160 evolutionary process has ever made. And we now realize from this constellation of evidence that

00:04:42.020 mother nature did not make a spectacular blunder in putting this thing called an eight hour sort of

00:04:47.920 need of sleep in place. It is the greatest life support system that you could ever wish for.

00:04:53.920 It is a remarkable health insurance policy. And what's great is that it's largely democratic,

00:05:00.280 it's mostly free. And in terms of a prescription from a doctor, it's largely painless.

00:05:06.680 So I almost wanted to title the book, consciousness is overrated,

00:05:11.100 or just sometimes dot, dot, dot, consciousness is overrated. But when you really look at the evidence

00:05:18.220 in terms of risk, de-risking just about every disease that is killing us in the developed world,

00:05:25.380 it's very hard to look no further than sleep. And that's why I don't want to trivialize diet,

00:05:31.660 and I don't want to trivialize movement and activity. But what I would say is that if you

00:05:37.240 want to put sleep up against either one of those two and kind of play the whole head to head game,

00:05:42.560 which I don't think we need to do here, I would simply say that sleep is the foundation

00:05:48.380 on which those two other things sit. It's not the third pillar of good health. I think it is the

00:05:53.340 foundation. That's a really interesting way to think about it, because I typically describe

00:05:57.360 four pillars, or five if you include all of the exogenous molecules that you could lump together.

00:06:03.240 But another way to think about it, which again, I don't think is necessarily the right way to think

00:06:07.780 about it, but sometimes it makes the point. If you deprive yourself of food, how long can you

00:06:12.680 survive? Well, we have one person up to 382 days. Even someone who's as lean as you could survive 30

00:06:20.720 days with no food. How long could you survive without water? Depends greatly on the temperature,

00:06:25.640 etc. But you could make the case that deprivation of sleep would result in the quickest reduction of

00:06:33.900 health. Certainly more than not eating or not exercising for, you know, a period of time.

00:06:39.380 And those studies have been done in rats.

00:06:40.780 Yeah. And actually, we know some of this from humans who have been trying to, in fact,

00:06:44.580 didn't the Guinness Book of World Records, I can't remember if I read this in your work,

00:06:48.460 they've actually banned attempts at longest period of sleep deprivation.

00:06:53.140 So I mentioned this. Yeah.

00:06:54.100 Yeah. There was a time when you could still try and beat the world record of sleep deprivation. And it

00:06:58.860 got up to about sort of, I think the last true effort was about 24 days. But I think it was

00:07:07.440 debatable that one. But based on the weight of the scientific data, the relationship with between

00:07:14.100 sleep loss and mental health, sleep loss and cancer, sleep loss, cardiovascular disease,

00:07:20.820 sleep loss and metabolic syndrome, Guinness started to feel very, very uncomfortable. And then when suicide

00:07:27.420 came on the table, it pulled it. So in other words, think about this, you know, there was a

00:07:32.740 gentleman, Felix Baumgardner, I think his name was, who sponsored by Red Bull, went up in a capsule in

00:07:39.280 a hot air balloon to the outer surface of our planet.

00:07:43.140 This was about four years ago.

00:07:44.300 Four years ago.

00:07:44.580 This was remarkable.

00:07:45.000 He opened the door and then he jumped out and he fell back down to earth at over a thousand kilometers

00:07:53.820 an hour. Using his body alone, he broke the sound barrier and he successfully came down. And now

00:08:00.760 Guinness says for that, just fine. However, to sleep deprive yourself, no, much more unsafe.

00:08:11.720 We're not going to let it happen.

00:08:13.140 You are allowed.

00:08:13.900 Just to put it in context.

00:08:15.360 You're allowed up to 12 jumps off Niagara Falls.

00:08:19.060 Basically.

00:08:19.540 But that's okay. But no, no, you're not going to, that's such a great point.

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The Peter Attia Drive - March 17, 2020

Qualy #129 - Evolutionary reasons to sleep

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