Qualy #129 - Evolutionary reasons to sleep
Episode Stats
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176.3362
Summary
In this bonus episode of The Qualies, Dr. Peter Atiyah talks about the importance of sleep, and why we should all be trying to get as much of it as we can in order to be the best we can.
Transcript
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Welcome to a special bonus episode of the Peter Atiyah Qualies, a member exclusive podcast.
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The Qualies is just a shorthand slang for qualification round, which is something you
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do prior to the race, just much quicker. The Qualies highlight the best of the questions,
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topics, and tactics that are discussed in previous episodes of The Drive.
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So if you enjoy the Qualies, you can access dozens more of them through our membership
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program. Without further delay, I hope you enjoy today's Qualies.
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Firstly, you know, it took Mother Nature 3.6 million years to put this eight-hour thing called
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a night of sleep in place. And within the space of 70 years, if you look at the data,
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we've lopped off almost 20 to 25% of that. You know, imagine coming along and saying,
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you know, in the next hundred years, I think what I'm going to do is for the entirety of human
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society, I'm going to reduce their oxygen saturation by about 20 to 25%. Do you think
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No, it's such a great example. I'll pause for a moment just to tell a funny story that you and
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I have talked about off mic, which is up until about 2012, I was in the I'll sleep when I'm dead
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camp. And I know what led to that. It wasn't that there was a very deliberate decision at the end
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of medical school when a good friend of mine with all the best intentions, who was a year ahead of
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me. So he was now in at the end of his internship, as I was about to begin mine, he said, and this is
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in the days when we didn't have the 80 hour work week requirement in residency. So we averaged,
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I think about 114 hours a week in the hospital. So he said to me, look, Peter, you're, you're signing
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up for, you know, whatever, five, seven years of this thing. If you spent every moment outside of
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the hospital sleeping, you would still be tired. The only difference is you wouldn't have any fun.
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So make sure you live every moment that you're not in the hospital to the fullest. And so for me,
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that basically meant if I wasn't in the hospital, I was swimming, I was going out with my friends,
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I was trying to meet girls, like I was doing anything, everything such that during that period
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of my life, I, I just know, cause I was pretty adamant about recording how much time, like I was
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very wed to this idea. There's 168 hours in a week. If I'm spending, you know, 114 of them here and I
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spend this many driving and I spend this many getting groceries and I spend this many swimming
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and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. I think I was about 28 hours a week of sleep. So it wasn't four
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every night because you'd have none and then six and then three and then eight. Like you,
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you could binge sleep from time to time, but it was pretty much 28 a week. I'll come back to some
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of the implications of that. But fast forward a few years, I'm talking to a good friend of mine,
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Kirk Parsley, who's a physician who like you is adamant about, you know, the importance of sleep.
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And we're having dinner one night and he says, he's challenging me on this. And he says,
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so let me get this straight. You've just decided that you're going to sleep half of what is
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evolutionarily programmed. And I said, yeah, because does it strike you as odd that evolution
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would have designed us to spend a third of our life, not mating, not watching out for predators,
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not hunting for food, but doing this thing for some other purpose. Do you think that thing must
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have been important? And it was such an obvious argument, but it really overnight changed the way
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I thought about this, which was evolution went to great lengths to do this and superficially at
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great cost to us, right? I mean, you could argue, well, imagine you didn't need to sleep and you could
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spend 24 hours a day foraging for food or a mate or some other thing, but it didn't.
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So it's sort of, it's sort of like, there's probably a reason we are not anaerobic to your point
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about reducing oxygen saturation by 25%. You know, if you were to think about that,
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you know, during sleep, just as you said, you're not eating, you're not finding food,
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you're not finding a mate, you're not reproducing, you're not caring for your young,
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you're vulnerable to predation on any one of those grounds, but especially all of them put
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together as a collective. It's completely anti-evolutionary.
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It sounds like the dumbest thing. And, you know, often said, and it has been said before,
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if sleep doesn't serve an absolutely vital set of functions, it's the biggest mistake that the
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evolutionary process has ever made. And we now realize from this constellation of evidence that
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mother nature did not make a spectacular blunder in putting this thing called an eight hour sort of
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need of sleep in place. It is the greatest life support system that you could ever wish for.
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It is a remarkable health insurance policy. And what's great is that it's largely democratic,
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it's mostly free. And in terms of a prescription from a doctor, it's largely painless.
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So I almost wanted to title the book, consciousness is overrated,
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or just sometimes dot, dot, dot, consciousness is overrated. But when you really look at the evidence
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in terms of risk, de-risking just about every disease that is killing us in the developed world,
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it's very hard to look no further than sleep. And that's why I don't want to trivialize diet,
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and I don't want to trivialize movement and activity. But what I would say is that if you
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want to put sleep up against either one of those two and kind of play the whole head to head game,
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which I don't think we need to do here, I would simply say that sleep is the foundation
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on which those two other things sit. It's not the third pillar of good health. I think it is the
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foundation. That's a really interesting way to think about it, because I typically describe
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four pillars, or five if you include all of the exogenous molecules that you could lump together.
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But another way to think about it, which again, I don't think is necessarily the right way to think
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about it, but sometimes it makes the point. If you deprive yourself of food, how long can you
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survive? Well, we have one person up to 382 days. Even someone who's as lean as you could survive 30
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days with no food. How long could you survive without water? Depends greatly on the temperature,
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etc. But you could make the case that deprivation of sleep would result in the quickest reduction of
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health. Certainly more than not eating or not exercising for, you know, a period of time.
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Yeah. And actually, we know some of this from humans who have been trying to, in fact,
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didn't the Guinness Book of World Records, I can't remember if I read this in your work,
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they've actually banned attempts at longest period of sleep deprivation.
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Yeah. There was a time when you could still try and beat the world record of sleep deprivation. And it
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got up to about sort of, I think the last true effort was about 24 days. But I think it was
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debatable that one. But based on the weight of the scientific data, the relationship with between
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sleep loss and mental health, sleep loss and cancer, sleep loss, cardiovascular disease,
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sleep loss and metabolic syndrome, Guinness started to feel very, very uncomfortable. And then when suicide
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came on the table, it pulled it. So in other words, think about this, you know, there was a
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gentleman, Felix Baumgardner, I think his name was, who sponsored by Red Bull, went up in a capsule in
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a hot air balloon to the outer surface of our planet.
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He opened the door and then he jumped out and he fell back down to earth at over a thousand kilometers
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an hour. Using his body alone, he broke the sound barrier and he successfully came down. And now
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Guinness says for that, just fine. However, to sleep deprive yourself, no, much more unsafe.
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You're allowed up to 12 jumps off Niagara Falls.
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But that's okay. But no, no, you're not going to, that's such a great point.
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