Everyday Habits That Make You Smarter: How To Master Memory, Focus & Learning | Dr. Gina Poe PT 1

Summary

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Podcast Summary:

Impact Theory with Tom Bilyeu ft. Dr. Gina Poe
Episode: Everyday Habits That Make You Smarter: How To Master Memory, Focus & Learning | Dr. Gina Poe PT 1
Date: June 22, 2023

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Overview

This episode of Impact Theory, hosted by Tom Bilyeu, features sleep neuroscientist Dr. Gina Poe, Director of UCLA's Sleep and Memory Lab. Together, they dissect the science of sleep, exploring its deep ties to learning, memory consolidation, emotional health, metabolic regulation, and overall performance. With a focus on practical application, Dr. Poe empowers listeners to optimize their cognitive abilities and well-being through everyday sleep habits—dispelling common myths and revealing just how essential sleep is for thriving in today’s demanding world.

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Key Discussion Points & Insights

1. The Relationship Between Sleep, Learning, and Memory

• Sleep as Essential for Learning:
  Dr. Poe emphasizes that sleep isn’t just about rest, but is deeply intertwined with our ability to consolidate and integrate new information.
  • “You actually have to have sleep in order to consolidate the things that you've learned during the day and integrate the items into your schema of the world.” — Dr. Gina Poe [02:07]
• Forgetting Is Necessary:
  Sleep enables not just memory retention but also forgetting, which is vital to refine and update knowledge.
  • “You also need sleep in order to refine what you know, reducing the power of things that you now know are not true…” — Dr. Gina Poe [02:07]
• Schemas and Chunking:
  The brain organizes information into schemas—mental frameworks that allow efficient interaction with the world. Sleep helps update these schemas as life changes.
  • “It's kind of a loose term to say how you view the world, how things fit into the story that you build in your brain.” — Dr. Gina Poe [03:28]
  • “Updating of our schema doesn't work as well” as we age, due in part to declines in sleep quality. — Dr. Poe [06:06]

2. Stages of Sleep: What Happens in Each Phase?

• Stage 1: The Transition
  • Characterized by alpha rhythms (8-11 Hz), promoting a calm, relaxed state.
  • The hippocampus (critical for memory) “turns off” to outside learning before the rest of the brain, prioritizing internal consolidation.
    • “One of the first things that turns off...is the hippocampus...that goes to sleep minutes before the rest of our brain does.” — Dr. Gina Poe [11:50]
  • You cannot learn new things from the outside during sleep—listening to audiobooks while asleep will not result in learning.
    • “You really want to turn off to the outside world in order to consolidate the things that you learned all day long.” — Dr. Poe [12:43]
• Stage 2: K-Complexes and Sleep Spindles
  • Larger brain waves (K-complexes) and bursts of neural activity (spindles) support communication between brain areas.
  • Crucial for memory consolidation—information is “taught” from the hippocampus (short term memory) to the cortex (long term storage). [16:06–22:46]
• Stage 3: Slow Wave (Deep) Sleep
  • Marked by synchronized firing and silencing of neurons—thought to drive the brain's 'cleaning' process.
  • Key for eliminating metabolic waste, like beta-amyloid and tau proteins, which if not cleared, can lead to neurodegenerative diseases.
    • “It's a normal part of phosphorylating this tau...But if we don't clean it up, it starts to gunk up our office of our brain.” — Dr. Poe [24:53]
• REM (Rapid Eye Movement) Sleep / Dream State
  • Cortex as active as in wakefulness—but processing is internally generated (dreams), not externally.
  • REM enables unique creative states and emotional processing.
  • Critical for pruning redundant connections, reinforcing meaningful information, and emotional regulation.
    • “The one thing that you can do during that dream state you can't do during wakefulness is you can do erasure. So you can delete and eliminate pathways that no longer work for us or are redundant.” — Dr. Poe [33:56]
  • Dreams are hypothesized to help “back out to just dots” before re-integrating experience into updated schemas.
    • “...if in the REM state, what my brain is doing is going, your schema is held together with this narrative. But for a minute, I need to come back out to just dots.” — Tom Bilyeu [38:39]

3. Sleep, Brain Health & Disease

• Link to Dementia/Neurodegeneration:
  Poor sleep, especially deep sleep, links to cognitive decline and dementia.
  • “Those who have the worst cognition when they're older also have the worst sleep.” — Dr. Poe [07:04]
  • Arresting sleep degradation could help arrest dementia. [07:38]
• Sleep and Metabolic Health:
  Sleep disruption immediately disrupts metabolism, hunger, and can set you on a path towards metabolic syndrome and type 2 diabetes.
  • “One night of full sleep deprivation will set you on the path toward type 2 diabetes.” — Dr. Poe [55:33]

4. Sleep, Creativity, and Mental Health

• REM and Emotional Processing:
  The dream state allows emotional and cognitive processing without real-world risk.
• Schizophrenia/Psychedelics:
  Hallucinations in schizophrenia may result from a “dream-like state” where the brain’s normal processes for labeling internal vs. external experience are disrupted.
  • “It might be that your distal cortical, cortical communication is happening without instruction.” — Dr. Poe [44:15]
  • Sleep spindle abnormalities are linked to cognitive performance and psychiatric disease.
    • “People with schizophrenia...don't have those beautiful sleep spindles that I talked about.” — Dr. Poe [40:16]

5. Sleep, Circadian Rhythms, and Hygiene

• Light Exposure:
  Early morning sunlight (especially blue light around 470nm) is critical for setting circadian rhythms.
  • “Get outside in the morning, expose yourself to that outside light. There's nothing stronger than the sunlight, even when it's behind a cloud.” — Dr. Poe [64:31]
• Bedtime Consistency:
  Quality sleep is tied to consistent sleep/wake times and matching your schedule with your circadian clock.
  • Misaligned sleep (e.g., weekends or night shifts) disrupts hormone release and healing processes.
    • “You're misaligning your circadian and homeostatic needs.” — Dr. Poe [75:10]
• Sleep Needs:
  Most adults require 7–8 hours, best in a consolidated block, though naps are common in some healthy cultures.
  • “If you put someone in a semi darkened quiet room with nothing else to do...people will average out...to 8 hours and 15 minutes of sleep per night.” — Dr. Poe [71:37]
• Listening to Your Body:
  The best strategy for optimal sleep is to heed natural tiredness and sleepiness.
  • “If you listen to your body, you'll be all right.” — Dr. Poe [62:19]

6. Sex Differences and Hormones in Sleep

• Variation Across Lifespan & Cycle:
  Sleep patterns differ by sex, especially after puberty—hormonal fluctuations affect sleep need and quality, but compensation appears in "efficiency."
  • “Women...cycle through the monthly cycle, there will be times when sleep is more elusive. And that's probably adaptive and a good thing.” — Dr. Poe [78:04]
  • “That's when we're getting the least amount of sleep...But when they do sleep, their sleep is super efficient and really high quality.” — Dr. Poe [80:00]

7. The Consequences of Sleep Deprivation

• Physical and Mental Health Consequences:
  • Extended sleep deprivation leads to hallucinations, rapid metabolic failure, and even death in mammals within weeks.
    • “Sleep deprivation will target different organs, and where you're most vulnerable will be the one that hurts you fastest.” — Dr. Poe [54:19]
  • Short-term deprivation impairs performance, mood, immune function, and metabolic health.

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Notable Quotes & Moments (w/ Timestamps)

• On the necessity and duality of sleep for memory:

  “Sleep is implicated both in memory retention and erasing memory.” — Tom Bilyeu [02:37]

• On active internal brain processes during sleep:

  “The ones that were doing the best had the most of this alpha rhythm, which is the dozing rhythm, while flying.” — Dr. Poe [10:35]

• On dreams and creativity:

  “What those dreams allow us to do is things that we can't do during wakefulness...Our brains are learning. It's just as plastic as when we're most alert and learning the best during the daytime.” — Dr. Poe [31:30, 33:23]

• On REM and selective memory pruning:

  “REM sleep...you can do erasure. So you can delete and eliminate pathways that no longer work for us or are redundant.” — Dr. Poe [33:56]

• On sleep deprivation as lethal:

  “Can you kill somebody by not letting them sleep?” — Tom Bilyeu [53:20]
  “Yeah.” — Dr. Poe [53:22]

• On early light and circadian sync:

  “Our circadian system is set so that when we see a bright blue light, our circadian system says that's morning.” — Dr. Poe [66:31]

• On sleep necessities:

  “Seven to eight hours...seven was the best for these adults.” — Dr. Poe [72:26]

• On making up sleep debt:

  “Once they fulfilled that sleep debt, 8 hours and 15 minutes, and again, on average, some people slept a lot less, some people slept a lot more, but on average it was eight hours and 15 minutes.” — Dr. Poe [73:29]

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Suggested Actions & Takeaways

• Prioritize Consistent Sleep: Make 7–8 hours per night a non-negotiable and stick to the same sleep/wake times.
• Get Morning Light: Especially natural, blue-rich light—ideally within one hour of waking—to set your circadian rhythm.
• Listen to Your Body: Honor biological cues for sleepiness, illness recovery, or after major learning.
• Minimize Nighttime Disruptions: Avoid late-night light (especially blue light) and keep sleep schedule regular, even on weekends.
• Appreciate the Bigger Picture: Sleep is not indulgence—it's necessary for memory, creativity, emotional regulation, metabolic health, cellular repair, and even survival.

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Timestamps for Important Segments

• [02:07] – Why sleep is essential for memory and learning
• [06:06] – Aging, sleep, and reduced cognitive flexibility
• [11:00] – Alpha rhythms, “the zone,” and relaxed wakefulness
• [15:46] – Transition from hippocampal wakefulness to sleep
• [16:06–22:46] – Stages 2 & 3: Neural rhythms, cleaning & consolidating
• [24:53] – Brain cleaning; neurodegenerative risk and sleep
• [33:56] – REM sleep’s unique capacity for forgetting/pruning
• [38:39] – Dream logic, schema updating, business analogy
• [55:33] – Sleep deprivation, type 2 diabetes, and health risk
• [62:19] – Fundamentals of sleep hygiene and listening to your body
• [71:37; 72:26] – True sleep need; the “8 hours” myth and reality
• [78:04] – Sex differences, hormones, and sleep efficiency

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Note: This summary covers the primary content of the episode, excluding advertisements and introduction/outro promotional materials. The conversational, accessible tone of Tom and Dr. Poe is maintained, with science broken down into actionable, digestible points, and plenty of memorable analogies for clarity.

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Transcript

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[Tom Bilyeu]

I hope you're ready for the Ultimate Sleep Transformation as we dive into this two part conversation on one of the most mysterious but powerful things your body does sleep. Today, Dr. Gina Poe, director of UCLA's Sleep and Memory Lab, joins me to uncover the connection between sleep, memory and peak performance. We're not just talking about catching some Z's here. We're talking about mastering your sleep and optimizing your ability to learn and process information to realize your brain's true potential. If you haven't experienced the magic of an actual good night's sleep on your memory and performance, stay tuned for Part two. By the way, Impact Theory is now available on Amazon Music, so head over to Amazon Music to hear more Impact Theory episodes just like this, the conversations that really matter. Don't wait. Subscribe to Impact Theory now on Amazon Music and be legendary. I'm Tom Bilyeu and welcome to Impact Theory. What is the relationship between sleep and learning, which is I think, one of the most, certainly for me, one of the most important things?

[Dr. Gina Poe]

Yeah, you actually have to have sleep in order to consolidate the things that you've learned during the day and integrate the items into your schema of the world. And you also need sleep in order to refine what you know, reducing the power of things that you now know are not true in light of the new information and to refresh your synaptic circuitry in your brain so that you can fit new things in the next day.

[Tom Bilyeu]

Okay, so sleep is implicated both in memory retention and erasing memory.

[Dr. Gina Poe]

Yes.

[Tom Bilyeu]

Talk to me about what is the importance importance of forgetting. So I I Forget a lot. A lot, a lot. I'm very distressed by how much I forget. But my wife will often say, I wish I had your brain, because I don't get hung up on things. So even though it is like, I'm not kidding, it's somewhat traumatic for me, the amount of information that I encounter versus what I retain. But I don't get stuck emotionally.

[Dr. Gina Poe]

Yeah. And I think you actually probably retain more than you think you may not be.

[Tom Bilyeu]

It's not how it feels. I'll tell you that.

[Dr. Gina Poe]

You may not be able to call it to mind the specific names of things, but I believe you've probably integrated these things into your schema and how you view the world.

[Tom Bilyeu]

What is a schema?

[Dr. Gina Poe]

Exactly? So it's kind of a loose term to say how you view the world, how things fit into the story that you build in your brain of what the world is about. And so, for example, there's a schema we have of Christmas and what it involves. There's all kinds of pieces of information in that schema, or a schema of what a university is or a schema of what a center of town looks like. And so we have things that may or may not be in any particular town, but we have an idea of what a town center should look like, you know?

[Tom Bilyeu]

So are you familiar at all with the idea of chunking?

[Dr. Gina Poe]

Yeah. Yeah. It's kind of like chunking. Okay.

[Tom Bilyeu]

For people that don't know. Explain what chunking is.

[Dr. Gina Poe]

Oh, boy. I think you could probably explain it better than me. But it's. It's a way to simplify the world by sticking related things together in a chunk as.

[Tom Bilyeu]

It's pretty good.

[Dr. Gina Poe]

Okay.

[Tom Bilyeu]

I think the idea comes from chess. So where a chess master will look at a board and he's not seeing the individual pieces, they just see that setup of where you are versus where I am means that we're at this point in the game, roughly, and that these moves have been played and these moves are yet to be played, which is how they're able to play so many games at one time. I have a feeling, though I'm certainly not an expert in this, that this is part of the problem that AI will face as we try to get to general intelligence. The thing that we call common sense, I have a feeling is. Is largely tied to not only the things you can infer, but how much you can reduce something to a set of, like, Christmas. It's not exactly Christmas. Snow, the glow of Christmas lights. Maybe you do in a red coat. Cookies, you Know, and it could be a lot of different things, but yet there's some overarching organizational principle that we put things in. So hearing you tie that to sleep, that we're constantly updating that schema.

[Dr. Gina Poe]

Yeah.

[Tom Bilyeu]

Why is that so important?

[Dr. Gina Poe]

Well, I mean, what we learn throughout our lives changes us, and it should, because we are constantly evolving our knowledge. As new things get known, we change where we live. And we need to update our schema with the new place that's home instead of the old place. If we go to the old place and knock on that door or try and walk in, it would be bad. Right. So we need to constantly update our schema with new information. And in fact, that does get harder as we get older because.

[Tom Bilyeu]

Just to update the schema.

[Dr. Gina Poe]

Just to update the schema. And possibly one of the reasons why that gets harder is because our sleep starts to degenerate, degrade a little bit. Now, it's variable whose sleep gets worse at what age. But we do know that we wake up more often. We have fewer big, deep, slow waves of slow wave sleep, and we are more prone to get sleep apnea, which was. Really makes us wake up a lot. And so our sleep just the quality can get bad. And then the updating of our schema doesn't work as well. And that means that we can't learn new things as the world changes around us as. As easily. So I would.

[Tom Bilyeu]

Do you know, is. Is it the breakdown of sleep that causes the breakdown of brain plasticity, or is it just that the brain moves through phases and when you're younger, you're super plastic and as you get older, it just gets more and more rigid?

[Dr. Gina Poe]

That's a good question, and I don't think we know the answer to that yet. We do know a lot of things change with age and aging, but we don't know if they are linked to sleep. The two go hand in hand so much. But we do know that those who have the worst cognition when they're older also have the worst sleep. So again, it's a guess. Yeah.

[Tom Bilyeu]

Which is causing which?

[Dr. Gina Poe]

Maybe a ratchet like progression, but it's

[Tom Bilyeu]

a positive feedback loop.

[Dr. Gina Poe]

A positive feedback loop. So. But if you can arrest sleep degradation, you could probably arrest dementia as well.

[Tom Bilyeu]

Okay, that's very interesting. All right, so then as we tease that apart, walk us through what are the phases of sleep?

[Dr. Gina Poe]

Right.

[Tom Bilyeu]

And what are we doing in our lives that begin to disrupt those phases?

[Dr. Gina Poe]

Right. So the first phase we go into when we're dozing is called stage one. And that's a lot of alpha in our brain, which is 8-11 Hz activity.

[Tom Bilyeu]

And is it a quieting down or a revving up of the mind?

[Dr. Gina Poe]

It's a. I guess it would be considered perhaps a quieting down. There's actually no change in neural activity, but it's a change in pattern of activity.

[Tom Bilyeu]

So let me ask. Sorry. And we will go through all of these stages. But I find this very interesting. So the brain doesn't end up conserving energy while we sleep, which would have been my sort of childhood thought.

[Dr. Gina Poe]

Yeah.

[Tom Bilyeu]

Oh, my brain is going offline.

[Dr. Gina Poe]

Right.

[Tom Bilyeu]

But is it. I'm assuming the difference between conscious activity and subconscious activity, or even during the day? Is my brain activity primarily subconscious?

[Dr. Gina Poe]

That's a difficult one. We don't really have a good physiological definition for what subconscious is. Interesting. So I think our subconscious is working all day long in terms of what we define as the subconsciousness is thoughts and feelings and gut feelings and emotions that occur beneath our perception of how we feel or what we're thinking.

[Tom Bilyeu]

If I showed you a brain scan of somebody spaced out.

[Dr. Gina Poe]

Yeah.

[Tom Bilyeu]

They're totally in the default mode network, they're driving to work, but they're not really aware because they've done it so many times. And I showed you a brain scan of somebody in phase one, maybe is the closest. Would you be able to tell the difference? Like, is it obvious this person is daydreaming versus this person is sleeping?

[Dr. Gina Poe]

Yeah, yeah. They're different. Yeah. And even daydreaming, I mean, it depends on what you're daydreaming about. Right. What your brain is going to be doing, which parts of your brain are going to be activated. Interestingly, the very first research project I ever did before I was involved in brain research, I was just working in a research lab was for pilots who were flying a really difficult flight simulator at Northrop Aircraft Corporation. And these were really good test pilots. And we gave them really difficult problems to solve while they were flying, flying the simulator. And then we'd freeze and blank out their screen and ask them questions about their awareness, their situational awareness, about how much fuel they had and all of that. Where the bogeys were, how far away they were from base. And those that were doing the best had the most of this alpha rhythm, which is the dozing rhythm while flying. Yes. The ones that were doing the best were the ones that were most relaxed in their brain pattern. And the ones that were doing the worst were the ones that looked most alert, awake, engaged, involved.

[Tom Bilyeu]

That's really interesting.

[Dr. Gina Poe]

Isn't that interesting?

[Tom Bilyeu]

Now, would you call that the zone?

[Dr. Gina Poe]

Yeah, I think that's what you would call that. They were in the zone.

[Tom Bilyeu]

That's really interesting. So, needless to say, I'm not a fighter pilot. I don't play professional sports. Sports. But I do play video games. And every now and then, you find yourself in a position where you can just read the map effortlessly. You know where people are going to be. It feels so different. It feels awesome. First of all, your reflexes, your ability to just intuit where things are going to be happening at. That's really interesting that. That most closely mimics the first stage of sleep. I would not have guessed that.

[Dr. Gina Poe]

I know.

[Tom Bilyeu]

Very interesting. Okay, so stage one, we're in. We're in an alpha wave phase.

[Dr. Gina Poe]

Yeah.

[Tom Bilyeu]

Which you would liken to being more relaxed.

[Dr. Gina Poe]

Relaxed, yeah.

[Tom Bilyeu]

Okay. But we're. We are asleep at that point.

[Dr. Gina Poe]

No, it's called stage one because it's a transition between wakefulness and sleep. Actually, we have found in my research lab that one of the things that turns off. One of the first things that turns off, quote, unquote, off or changes mode is the hippocampus, which is involved with learning and memory, and that goes to sleep minutes before the rest of our brain does.

[Tom Bilyeu]

Even though in the night I'm going to be consolidating my memories.

[Dr. Gina Poe]

Yeah. So I say turned off, but in fact, it's not turning off. It's just turning off to learning new things coming in from the outside world.

[Tom Bilyeu]

Okay. So that was one of the questions I was going to ask you later, but this now feels like the perfect time. Can we learn things at night? Could I play a calculus book and wake up better at math?

[Dr. Gina Poe]

It would not be. No, that would not be a good idea.

[Tom Bilyeu]

Just. There's nothing that you can do if you're sleeping. That's off.

[Dr. Gina Poe]

You really want to turn off to the outside world in order to consolidate the things that you learned all day long. So there is a. Just like, there's a time for everything. There's a season for everything. You want to turn off what's coming in from the outside world so that you can process what you already have.

[Tom Bilyeu]

Interesting. I have a conundrum for you.

[Dr. Gina Poe]

Okay.

[Tom Bilyeu]

I work a lot. While I love what I do, it can be very stressful. And in the last few years, I've been working so much that it was just completely disrupting my sleep, and it was miserable. It would take me eight hours to get five hours of sleep, and it was really not fun. And there were times where if I was getting my hair cut, if I stopped moving, I would just start falling asleep. Absolutely miserable. I hated it. And I'm somebody who prioritizes sleep, so I'm not. I don't have an alarm set, nothing. I'm going to bed. But I just could not shut off my brain. I couldn't get into that. Where I was. I felt relaxed enough to fall asleep. Or I would fall asleep, but then wake up after one to two cycles, and then I would be awake for two hours. Is about normal.

[Dr. Gina Poe]

Right.

[Tom Bilyeu]

And then. So by the time I fell back asleep, I just. I did not feel good. I was tired all the time. So one day, I don't remember what made me try this. I started listening to an audiobook out like a light.

[Dr. Gina Poe]

Yeah.

[Tom Bilyeu]

I would wake up, fall back to sleep within 30 seconds. I mean, just magically delicious, right?

[Dr. Gina Poe]

Yeah.

[Tom Bilyeu]

But I've got the outside world coming in.

[Dr. Gina Poe]

Yeah. So it's not a pressing out. So I think what that did, that audiobook is it helped distract your mind from the loop it was in. Like, oh, I've got to do this and this, and did I tell somebody to do this or. So it distracts your mind from those alerting and alarming things that were keeping you awake and instead let the trail of consciousness follow this story that wasn't going to affect you one way or another. And that was enough to allow your parasympathetic nervous system to relax as you relaxed and enjoyed the story. And then sleep could just take over. And I do the same thing. I don't do podcasts because I'm interested in every story. I just. I just play a kind of a mindless little video game on, you know, a math video game.

[Tom Bilyeu]

And your mind doesn't spark back up when you put that down and go

[Dr. Gina Poe]

to sleep, you know? No. You know, I just basically thank the video game for making me sleepy and just. I don't do a lot. I don't, you know, take my thing and walk to another room and put it away. I just lay it down, and sometimes I don't even get that far. It falls onto my pillow.

[Tom Bilyeu]

That's hilarious. Okay, so stage one alpha relaxed. We can begin to tune out the outside world. And our alerting mind begins to quiet. The hippocampus switches into some other internal mode.

[Dr. Gina Poe]

Yep.

[Tom Bilyeu]

And could you. Can you actually see the hippocampus change its wave pattern, Electrical pattern? What do we.

[Dr. Gina Poe]

Yeah.

[Tom Bilyeu]

Is it a wave pattern or an electrical.

[Dr. Gina Poe]

It is a electrical wave pattern.

[Tom Bilyeu]

Okay. So same.

[Dr. Gina Poe]

Yeah.

[Tom Bilyeu]

Got it. Okay. And then how long are we in stage one?

[Dr. Gina Poe]

So we're in stage one just for a few minutes, you know, Five minutes.

[Tom Bilyeu]

Very quick.

[Dr. Gina Poe]

Yeah, yeah, very quick. And then we go into stage two, which has called K complexes and spindles, which are bigger waves that. Where all the neurons are silent and then they're all active at the same time. And then spindles are a little buzz of activity that come once every 10 seconds or so, and they last about 1 1/2 seconds, something like that. It's 10 to 15 cycles per second. And it starts small and it builds up and then it goes small again,

[Tom Bilyeu]

unless you smoke weed. And then you get these weird monster spindles that we're unsure what they do, which will be something I'm sure we will get into later because I have a wife that likes to partake.

[Dr. Gina Poe]

Yeah.

[Tom Bilyeu]

Okay, so the brain is pulsing, which is very interesting. That's. Is that because of the need for the glial system to clean out?

[Dr. Gina Poe]

Yeah, that's actually mostly happening in the deeper stage of sleep, we call it.

[Tom Bilyeu]

Okay, so this is different.

[Dr. Gina Poe]

Yeah, this is stage three. So stage two is what we're talking about now.

[Tom Bilyeu]

So what's the pulsing then?

[Dr. Gina Poe]

So the K complexes are. We don't know exactly. In animals, they are married to something that also starts during that state, which is called P waves. These are big excitatory drives from inside of our own brain stem that go to our forebrain. So K complexes and P waves may or may not, there's some controversy, be the same thing, but they're big glutamatergic drives. It also happens because our thalamus, which is our gateway of consciousness, it's kind of sitting right in the middle of our brain and allows the outside information to reach our cortex. It relays, starts to close and become more hyperpolarized, more negative. And what does that mean? I don't understand. That means. So when, okay, so our neurons are electrical as well as chemical, and the inside of the neuron is very negative related to the outside, the electrical potential is very negative. When outside information comes in, it's excitatory. So it actually makes the inside of the cell more positive. And then when it gets to a threshold, when it gets so positive, it gets to a threshold which is negative 55 millivolts, then it fires an action potential. A whole lot of things that are voltage dependent open up. So sodium channels open, allow a lot of sodium to come in to really depolarize, and that's called an action potential. And those, each One of those are the way neuron communicates with the next neuron and how our whole brain works together. And why we can see these electrical patterns because the more neurons that are involved in firing at the same time, the more our electrodes that are out here on our skull can see this positive potential go by. Then as they're all filing silent and becoming negative together, you can see this negative potential.

[Tom Bilyeu]

So if you had to guess, is there a metronome effect going on? Is it trying to synchronize something?

[Dr. Gina Poe]

It's. It is kind of like a metronome in that it's also a positive feedback. So you have the. All the neurons firing at the same time and then there's a bunch of other things happen once they fire, they things that close, that are deactivated and then everything becomes negative together. And then when it becomes negative enough, there are other voltage dependent channels that open and all becomes positive.

[Tom Bilyeu]

And then do we have this kind of synchronicity when we're awake?

[Dr. Gina Poe]

In some places, yeah. For example, if you're walking or doing anything rhythmic, moving your body, there's a lot of synchronicity in your spinal cord that allows that to be a rhythmic, normal movement. Fishes swimming there.

[Tom Bilyeu]

So interesting. But we don't yet know why that metronome is going off.

[Dr. Gina Poe]

We don't, but. But when I started 30 something years ago, we really didn't. We thought maybe it was just something that was a signature of something else going on. But now we know that actually that synchronous firing and synchronous silence that happens during this non rem, we call it non REM sleep, stage of sleep could be the thing that actually cleans our brain. And these P waves, these big excitatory P waves target a different part of our brain than our thalamus during wakefulness targets. And the part of the brain that it targets is out in the parts of the brain that form our schema where cortex talks to cortex instead of outside world talking to.

[Tom Bilyeu]

And this is coming from the brainstem.

[Dr. Gina Poe]

Comes from the brainstem. The excitatory urge comes from the brainstem and it targets out these cortical. Cortical connection.

[Tom Bilyeu]

Okay, so I imagine this is very conserved over evolution.

[Dr. Gina Poe]

Yeah, it appears to be. Yeah. Zebrafish, we. There are animals that don't have much of a cortex, but they still have sleep.

[Tom Bilyeu]

That's really interesting. So there's probably something very ancient, very primordial that this is going to end up being tied to versus something in the neocortex which is More A higher level cognition, probably not memory. So guessing here, or would it be? Because I guess every animal would need to go, hey, I learned this food is here, this movement work. That thing's a predator.

[Dr. Gina Poe]

Yeah. Okay, so even fruit flies.

[Tom Bilyeu]

Completely false on my part.

[Dr. Gina Poe]

Well, no, no, I mean they. It may. The reason why we can't measure the same brainwave activities through to a. In a fruit fly is because even though they have a lot of neurons that help them move and interact with the world, they're not layered in the same way. So in our cortex, all the neurons are lined up kind of. And then these electrical potentials that I'm talking about work like a battery. You know, when the battery is lined up the right way, you can see the electrical potential. But if they're all jumbled relative to one another, even though they might all be firing and silent at the same time, the way that the electricity is flowing is this way and this neuron and this way and that neuron. Waves cancel each other out, so we can't see it, but.

[Tom Bilyeu]

Right. Okay, so that's stage two is what stage is memory consolidation happening versus forgetting? I assume they're at different stages.

[Dr. Gina Poe]

Yeah. So that stage two is part of consolidation. Those big excitatory waves and those sleep spindles. Where is where our cortex is telling other parts of our cortex or our hippocampus, which is kind of the short term memory structure, is telling our cortex. Hey, this is what I learned today and teaching it. And so that happens in that stage two. In stage three, that's when we have those big slow waves that sweep through regularly. Stage two, we have those K complexes, which are big waves, but they come once every 10 seconds or so. And sleep spindles, which come once every 10 seconds or so. But in that deep slow wave stage of sleep, they're coming all the time. There's still each one comes once a second or so. But that's probably where they're all firing together and they're all quiet together. And that creates when a neuron fires, not only is there electricity and neurochemicals that are released, but also when it fires, when all the sodium is rushing into the cell, the cell expands because it brings water with it. And so it's actually all the cells are expanding and contracting at the same time, which could create a pump like action, pumping out the debris and the waste into our glymphatic system to clean our brain. And that. Yeah, that is probably one of the

[Tom Bilyeu]

functions of stage three, specifically.

[Dr. Gina Poe]

Yeah, of stage three.

[Tom Bilyeu]

Okay. So when we Think about neurodegenerative diseases. You hear a lot about beta amyloid plaques building up tau proteins, things like that one. Where do those come from? And B, it seems like, because I know we were talking earlier, but also knowing your research, that as we get into, like, really bad neurodegenerative diseases, they're also gonna. Massive sleep disruption.

[Dr. Gina Poe]

Yeah.

[Tom Bilyeu]

So, yeah. What. What are the amyloid plaques? What are the tau proteins? Why do they matter? Why do we have to clean them out every night? Do they serve a function? Are they all bad?

[Dr. Gina Poe]

Like, no, no, no, we need them. We. We couldn't survive or learn or do well without them. It's kind of like, I guess you could sort of think of it as making the mess on our desk as we work during the day. Right. And we need that to do the business that we're doing. But we also need to clean it up every night so that the next day we can come in and be organized and efficient and know where things are. So. So it's a normal part of phosphorylating this tau, and it helps us to carry things where they need to go. Same with amyloid proteins. We have to have them, but it's when they become a mess, misfolded and a mess that if we don't clean it up, it starts to gunk up our office of our brain, and then we can't find anything, and our neurons aren't working like they're supposed to, becomes less and less efficient.

[Tom Bilyeu]

That stuff is very interesting to me, especially as it relates to metabolic disease and whether Alzheimer's is metabolic disease in the brain. I'm curious, before we get into stage four, how much of what's going on in here is tied to metabolism? Because I know if you mess up your sleep, you're going to notice it immediately in your metabolic response.

[Dr. Gina Poe]

It really is the first thing that gets messed up is your metabolism. And you get four in the morning, you get hungry for junk food because your body says, I'm not efficiently processing energy anymore and I need more of it. So one of the first things that happens when we go to sleep is we convert the free adenosine that's been freed through the process of metabolism. It gets built back into ATP, which are these packets of energy that our whole body uses. So that is a very important part. And when we sleep, deprive ourselves, our adenosine builds up and up and up and up the longer we're awake. That's what caffeine does. It blocks the receptors for this adenosine. So we don't know how long we've been awake and we don't feel the signal that we're sleepy, but it doesn't. Caffeine doesn't help us to change free adenosine back to ATP. And that happens very slowly and inefficiently when we're awake, but really well and quickly when we're asleep.

[Tom Bilyeu]

That's interesting. So basically you're. Is. Is the adenosine like a hormone where the body's like, I'm going to do this because I need you to go back to sleep. And so it's just sort of a clock and it just produces it. And it knows you'll hit this sense that I must go to sleep. And then, cool, cool. Like it's done its job. I'm going to take it all back. And then, okay, you're awake and I'm going to pump it back out. Or does it have some other function and sleep is just a byproduct?

[Dr. Gina Poe]

It's freed up because of the process of energy use. So ATP, adenosine, triphosphate. When we

[Tom Bilyeu]

utilize the ATP, it basically kicks that off.

[Dr. Gina Poe]

It kicks that off. Interesting. And the next. And then it goes from triphosphate to diphosphate to monophosphate to just free adenosine.

[Tom Bilyeu]

And then we grab it again and

[Dr. Gina Poe]

we grab it again during.

[Tom Bilyeu]

Attach it to ATP. Wow.

[Dr. Gina Poe]

Mitochondria are working hard to talk about

[Tom Bilyeu]

a very simple thing that I've never put together. Okay, that makes a lot of sense.

[Dr. Gina Poe]

That's why power naps are power naps.

[Tom Bilyeu]

Because you can quickly grab some of that free adenosine, turn it into ATP. That is so interesting. Okay, that makes a lot better than.

[Dr. Gina Poe]

Better than a cup of coffee because it's actually building back our energy.

[Tom Bilyeu]

Okay, so the cup of coffee is bamboozling you so you don't feel that you're tired, but the power nap is actually creating ATP with the free identity scenes. So you're lowering the level that tells you that you're tired.

[Dr. Gina Poe]

Yes.

[Tom Bilyeu]

And you're actually producing energy.

[Dr. Gina Poe]

Yeah.

[Tom Bilyeu]

Very interesting. But I also know that you've talked about that some people naps don't work. So why that seems weird.

[Dr. Gina Poe]

We don't know. We don't know yet. It's also true that some people don't get all of the health benefits of exercise. There are just a variety of people out there. Yeah, I know.

[Tom Bilyeu]

Really?

[Dr. Gina Poe]

Yeah.

[Tom Bilyeu]

I've never heard that before. Yeah, yeah.

[Dr. Gina Poe]

Some people, you know, they can exercise all they want. They could train for a marathon and They're. They're. It's not doing the repair and benefits for the body that other people.

[Tom Bilyeu]

Wow. So that's really interesting. I should not be surprised. Everything, we're so individualized, different from one another. That is horrifying to think that you could be doing all of that because I absolutely despise working out. You could be doing all that work and not seeing all of the benefit. I'm sure you get some.

[Dr. Gina Poe]

But yeah, I'm sure you get.

[Tom Bilyeu]

It's very interesting. Okay, so there's more to go into there, but I think it's probably better to wrap up stage four and then we can sort of circle back and get into some of these things, especially what we can do to optimize this stuff.

[Dr. Gina Poe]

Stage three, stage four, they're really the same thing. They've been collapsed into one.

[Tom Bilyeu]

Because you guys don't talk about four stages anymore.

[Dr. Gina Poe]

Oh, no. The fourth stage being REM sleep, but it's not called stage four. It's just called rem. Rapid Eye Movement Sleep. Yeah.

[Tom Bilyeu]

So you're still technically in stage three. 3.

[Dr. Gina Poe]

No, you've just completely switched out of stage three, and you're in a completely thing entirely. REM sleep is also called paradoxical sleep because our cortex looks like we're awake and there's so much activity.

[Tom Bilyeu]

Is that why it's not considered. Stage four is just so different.

[Dr. Gina Poe]

Yeah. Stage one, two, three are all kind of sort of degrees of depth. Our thalamus, that thalamic gate, becomes less and less aware of the world outside of us. I don't know. That's maybe a misnomer too. It's not even stage two and stage three are so different from one another too, in terms of what neurotransmitters are there and what's not there. So we did say, oh, this is how you're marching into sleep. But in fact, we now know as of recently that stage two and stage three are entirely different. As different from one another as wakefulness is from any other state.

[Tom Bilyeu]

Whoa.

[Dr. Gina Poe]

Yeah.

[Tom Bilyeu]

Okay. That's unexpected.

[Dr. Gina Poe]

Yeah.

[Tom Bilyeu]

Okay. And then stage four is different than all of them.

[Dr. Gina Poe]

Yes.

[Tom Bilyeu]

And it looks like we're more wakeful. So describe what is going on in rem.

[Dr. Gina Poe]

Yeah.

[Tom Bilyeu]

Why is it so weird? Why do we dream?

[Dr. Gina Poe]

I mean, this is the weird one, right? We're again closed to the outside world. Instead, we're internally generating our own reality. And that reality is unreal. You know, it's some things that can't happen in the outside world. What we do know is we are generating an internal state, this dream state, all of these dreams. And what those dreams allow us to do is things that we can't do during wakefulness. Fly or, you know, become monsters or fight monsters, or play out all kinds of scenarios in fast kind of forward motion that we can't do. And if we did, we might put ourselves at risk. But because we're safe in our beds not acting out our dreams, we can safely do these things. And so, yeah, so it helps our brain to expand and be imaginative and work through complicated problems and put things together that don't make any sense. During wakefulness, when our logic and judgment and decision making brain is, you know, reigns. Well, hopefully reigns. Instead, we can play out all kinds of crazy scenarios that may allow us to put things together that we wouldn't otherwise.

[Tom Bilyeu]

That's very interesting. So is, are you saying that your hypothesis is that by having what I'll call a narrative component. I don't know if you'd use those words, but by having a narrative component, we go into a more, more creative state where we can connect ideas that somehow when we wake is going to be useful?

[Dr. Gina Poe]

Well, yeah. So that's the really cool thing about this dream state is our brains are learning. We are. It's learning from the dream state. In the dream state, we are learning and our brain is learning from itself.

[Tom Bilyeu]

But not in the way that I'm consolidating memories and quote unquote learning. This is a different type of learning.

[Dr. Gina Poe]

It's, it's, it's an. It's. You're creating new knowledge. But how do you measure from things you already know? Well, we can measure the synapses and the synaptic strengths and which synapses are strengthened and which are weakened.

[Tom Bilyeu]

Interesting. So I'm. When you say learning, you mean mechanistically.

[Dr. Gina Poe]

Yeah.

[Tom Bilyeu]

Neurons are wiring together in the same way that they would if I were to learn a math problem or how to solve a math problem. And those neurons would be strengthened.

[Dr. Gina Poe]

Yeah, I mean, it's really powerful. They call it plastic state. So it's just as plastic as when we're most alert and learning the best during the daytime. But the one thing that you can do during that dream state you can't do during wakefulness is you can do erasure. So you can delete and eliminate pathways that no longer work for us or are redundant.

[Tom Bilyeu]

And that happens during rem?

[Dr. Gina Poe]

Only during REM sleep. Yeah.

[Tom Bilyeu]

I don't understand why that would happen while I'm telling myself some acid induced bizarro narrative. I mean, I don't remember many of my dreams, but the one I remember, they're so weird that I'm just like, yeah, how is this the time and place that I'm going, hey, you know that thing, you don't use that anymore. Let's prune that out. Do we have any sense of why those two happen at the same time?

[Dr. Gina Poe]

Yeah, I think it's because, well, one thing that needs to happen is we need to. We need to prune those redundant pieces of information away. Otherwise, we would just saturate our brains with irrelevant pieces of information and even wrong things that we should tag at least to say yes. I used to believe this, but now I know it's wrong. So it's REM sleep that you can reduce the weight of those things. So it's not the first thing you think of when, you know, someone asks you, where did you park your car yesterday or last night? It's not the place you parked at it last week or the month before. It's where you parked it yesterday. So you need to prune those things away so you know what's current and what's here now. So it's the novelty encoding parts of your brain that need that get pruned. And the reason why that's possible is because that's the state in which brain stem area called the locus coeruleus, which provides norepinephrine. Another word for it is noradrenaline. To our brain, that only lets us. It only puts us in the go mode. It only puts us in the strengthen. Strengthen. Strengthen. When we're awake, when we're asleep, it's gone. And so that's the only time during REM sleep, it's when it's really gone. And you can say yes to these things and no to these things. Be selective. It's kind of like, you know, during the daytime, you. You have a housewarming party and your guests are bringing all kinds of things into your house, right? House plants and, and dishes and all of that. And yes, you accept all of these things when you're awake, but you unwrap them in your. When you build proteins in that stage two and stage three sleep. And then during REM sleep, you put them where they go and you throw out the things that they replace. These new things replace.

[Tom Bilyeu]

Man, this is so interesting to me. I have a hypothesis for you. Okay, let me know. This could be so absurd, but I love talking to people that really know their stuff, so you can correct me where I go wrong when I'm teaching Students about business. I'm always trying to get them to understand that you have all these dots, your market, what you're trying to sell them, what you think they want, how you think you're going to get there, the state of the economy, all this stuff. And your job is to connect those dots with a narrative, which I'll call your schema for how to move your business forward.

[Dr. Gina Poe]

Right.

[Tom Bilyeu]

The problem is, the only thing I can tell you is that your schema is wrong. But you need one in order to move forward with conviction. And if you don't move forward with conviction, then you'll fall prey to what most businesses fall prey to, which is doing nothing is the only sin. So if you do nothing, you'll get bowled over by all the other people that find a way to move forward with, like, real conviction.

[Dr. Gina Poe]

Yeah.

[Tom Bilyeu]

And so when you are getting your team on board, you're going to only talk narrative. You're going to talk about how the dots connect. But when you're alone, you need to come back out to just dots and see if there's another way to connect these in a more efficient narrative. And so getting them to understand the brain is a predictive engine. And when you are able to predict the outcome of your behaviors, you're closer to ground truth. When you can't predict the outcome of your behaviors, you have a flaw in the model. Yeah, man, I'm grasping at straws here, but this makes a lot of internal sense to me that if in the REM state, what my brain is doing is going, your schema is held together with this narrative. But for a minute, I need to come back out to just dots. There's no logic. And so when I hit that point where it's just dots, I'm having these we dreams. Like I had a dream once where it was raining corpses. No idea what that meant. But I'm. I'm back out to. There's. There's no coherent logical cohesion between these.

[Dr. Gina Poe]

Right.

[Tom Bilyeu]

But my brain is now removing things that haven't been serving me.

[Dr. Gina Poe]

Yeah.

[Tom Bilyeu]

And then is going to reconsolidate all this back into a updated schema when I wake.

[Dr. Gina Poe]

Yeah, exactly.

[Tom Bilyeu]

I think that's really interesting if that holds true. Like, that really makes sense to me from just how the world works. Yeah, Very interesting. Very interesting. Okay, so now talk to me. Is there a correlation between either or both schizophrenia and a dreamlike state? Or psychedelics in a dreamlike state?

[Dr. Gina Poe]

Yeah. Yes. The answer is yes. So schizophrenia is long interested sleep researchers because it's the hallucinations are so much like what hallucinations we experience when we're dreaming. And so it was thought to be a dreamlike state. Right. Interestingly, the only real difference that you can see in the brains of people with schizophrenia, well, there are two things. One is during wakefulness, your gamma, which is the cortical, cortical connectivity, is slightly different in frequency. It just, it changes a little bit, almost as though we're being more driven by an internal cortical, cortical connection like we are during REM sleep. And then the second is we don't have those beautiful sleep spindles that I talked about. So people explain to people.

[Tom Bilyeu]

So spindles are way too connected to intelligence. Yeah, I always get very uneasy with stuff like this. Or I want to know, can I, can I somehow now make more of them?

[Dr. Gina Poe]

Right. Well, the reason why you probably get uncomfortable is because we don't really have a good grasp of what intelligence is. We just, we know there are different kinds of intelligences and we know that our ways of testing them are very, very flawed. But, but intelligence is, broadly speaking, what you talked about earlier, which is a way to absorb information, process it, form a schema, and use that schema the next time you encounter the world. So it's a way to use what you know in a very efficient fashion, perhaps is the way you could think

[Tom Bilyeu]

about it if you had to guess if you could turn a dial and increase the amount of spindles that somebody has, would they get smarter?

[Dr. Gina Poe]

It, it's. Yeah, okay, yes. However, qualify that it's not just spindles. Like you said, cannabis increases the length of spindles and can almost replace all of REM sleep with spindles. But it's what's going on during those spindles. The timing is everything. So it's when neurons fire in relation to spindles, it's the neurochemicals that are present or apple absent during spindles that allows us to reshape our schema. And so, so it's not just the rhythm itself. It's what's going on in the background of that rhythm or on top of those rhythms or because of those rhythms. That's the important thing. So I think I'm a little wary of devices, for example, that's going to externally cause your brain to fire in a 10-15 Hz spindle fashion. Because if the rest of your brain isn't doing what it's supposed to do, it's not in the state it's supposed to be in. It's not going to do you any Good. And in fact, it probably could do more harm than good.

[Tom Bilyeu]

Interesting. I've heard you talk about that. That, you know, the brain one, the systems are never that simple. It's like there's redundancies in the systems, and depending on context, it could be doing. Seeming to do the same thing, but in fact, it's actually doing the reverse. And so all very, very complicated, but going back to schizophrenia and psychedelics. So what have we found? Is it a dreamlike state and that's why they're hallucinating and the wires are just getting crossed?

[Dr. Gina Poe]

Or I think it might be a dreamlike state, because that stage two sleep spindle state isn't doing what needs to happen, which is updating your schema with the information that you learned during the day.

[Tom Bilyeu]

Why would that result in hallucinations?

[Dr. Gina Poe]

Yeah, I just had a really fascinating conversation with an undergraduate at UCLA who's really interested in schizophrenia and sleep. And it might be that your distal cortical, cortical communication is happening without instruction. So it's without that instruction, say, where the hippocampus can tell the brain, this is what we learned today. This is. Now we got to tag this with false, and this is true, and we've got to refresh. And all of that happening during that. Those sleep spindles, when the cortex is teaching the. I mean, the hippocampus is teaching the cortex what it knows. Instead, you're staying in perhaps a REM like state in that you're doing all of these free associations. You're backing out. You see the dots and not the schema anymore, like you said. But that's happening without the organization step of this is what I've learned today. First, so.

[Tom Bilyeu]

So the brain is talking to itself, but the brain doesn't recognize I'm talking to myself.

[Dr. Gina Poe]

Yeah.

[Tom Bilyeu]

And so it's misinterpreting. This is a signal coming from the outside.

[Dr. Gina Poe]

Yeah.

[Tom Bilyeu]

When in reality, it's a signal coming from the inside.

[Dr. Gina Poe]

Yeah. Yeah. That was the latest revelation that I had with this undergraduate. It's people with schizophrenia. The more schizotypic they are, the more they can tickle themselves.

[Tom Bilyeu]

And, you know, that's revelatory. Explain what that means.

[Dr. Gina Poe]

Well, because we can't tickle ourselves, because when we do this to ourselves, we are. We have what's called an efference copy. So our brain, our motor cortex says, I'm about to. I'm doing this. I'm getting close to my shoulder, and we can expect it. And the thing about tickle is that it's an unexpected. Well, one of the things about tickles, it's unexpected. And so we can't. But if you don't have that feedback from the outside, your brain telling you this is coming from inside of me and not from the outside, that gave me the chills. Yeah. Isn't that amazing?

[Tom Bilyeu]

So they can tickle themselves. So they have completely lost track. Is this inside or outside? Whoa. Do we have any sense of how you re establish that connection?

[Dr. Gina Poe]

That's a microcircuit question. And that's something that my lab is also looking to in a lot of other labs too. But. So there are sort of two compartments of our neurons that are listening to the outside world. So one, the proximal compartment that's really close to the cell body, is where the outside world talks to our cortex and puts that new information. And then the distal parts of the antenna, which are called dendrites, are where the cortical, cortical information comes in. And normally, when we're awake, our whole brain chemistry waits things to be more attuned to what's coming in from the outside world. And yes, there can be definitely, thankfully, some modification of that based on our schema and the distal dendrite information, where cortex is talking to cortex. But mostly the two compartments are very separated from one another. They're physically separated from another. They're chemically separated from another. They're anatomically connect, connectivity wise, separate from each other. And then during sleep, during this REM state and the spindle state, we switch from that internally or that externally focused, this novelty encoding proximal close to cell body circuit to paying more attention to what's going on in the distal cortical cortical circuit. And so. And what mitigates that, what switches us from this to that is thing called interneurons, which are inhibitory interneurons, which during wakefulness, kind of inhibit that cortical cortical input to some degree in a very regulated and rhythmic fashion. That's what sets up that gamma rhythm that I talked about. That's different in people with schizophrenia. These interneurons. And it's really these interneurons that seem to not be as viable in people with schizophrenia. So if somehow you can restore the health of these interneurons and restore how they're connected with the circuit, they can switch us from external to internal in a fashion that makes sense with what's actually going on in the world around us.

[Tom Bilyeu]

And have we seen any impact on diet? Is anybody looking at that?

[Dr. Gina Poe]

Of course, diet affects everything, you know, neurotransmitters are. And the CO factors, the COENZymes are all part of that. I don't know myself of any studies about diet, but one thing that will definitely cause people with schizophrenia or the tendency to have schizophrenia to tip them over into a break is alcohol.

[Tom Bilyeu]

Doesn't weed also have. I've heard people say, like, yo, yo,

[Dr. Gina Poe]

yeah, yeah, be very careful. Yeah. And it's probably because it's messing up with those sleep spindles that we talked about. And what's exactly what alcohol is doing? Alcohol? No, alcohol inhibits the stage. It interferes with our sleep. It makes our sleep not do what it's supposed to do. So during the steep, slow waves of slow wave sleep, the timing of things isn't right. Alcohol affects our interneurons big time. It's a GABA agonist, which is the neurotransmitter that interneurons use. And so it falsely clamps things down when they shouldn't be clamped down it and takes our forebrain off line, which is why we become.

[Tom Bilyeu]

So it's part of the fun.

[Dr. Gina Poe]

Yeah, part of the fun, but, yeah. And so it interferes with our sleep. And I think if your sleep is already compromised when you have schizophrenia, you don't have good sleep spindles in the first place. It might be that you're able to hang on to reality just barely tooth and nail by the few sleep spindles that you get. And then alcohol wipes those out. And so then you go from the edge of barely hanging on to tip over to the side of hallucinations and all that positive things.

[Tom Bilyeu]

That's so interesting. This is a random side note, but I had a friend, have a friend whose brother is paranoid schizophrenic. And he said he spent like a year, he had to move back home. Spent a year tracking his brother down, finally found him. His brother was convinced, like, the French or Italian government were after him. And he was, you know, running from, like, underpass to underpass, trying to, like, keep away from the satellites, being able to read his mind. Well, wait, though, it gets stranger. He finds his brother, gets him on. Back on his medication. His brother then develops secondary depression. And while taking the medication is able to explain this is less fun than being a paranoid schizophrenic, because at least then I mattered then, like, the governments were after me. I was like, of central importance. And every day my life mattered. And I was rem. Morning, he stops taking his medication and goes back onto the street, right? And I was like, whoa, yeah, like, they're the. The brain is complicated.

[Dr. Gina Poe]

Yeah.

[Tom Bilyeu]

And to think that. I mean, look, it clearly is. There's something just misfiring.

[Dr. Gina Poe]

It's.

[Tom Bilyeu]

It's not working the way that it should.

[Dr. Gina Poe]

Yeah.

[Tom Bilyeu]

But I kind of got what he was saying. Oh. I was like, wow. Yeah. To feel like I. I matter more than anybody else and, like, everything is about me. Governments are after me. I was like, that's spy versus spy.

[Dr. Gina Poe]

Yeah. Yeah. I don't think we as humans need to matter to the whole world. We just need to.

[Tom Bilyeu]

Yeah. Look, I'm not trying to celebrate or say that schizophrenia sounds amazing. Not at all.

[Dr. Gina Poe]

But I think this touches on a very basic human need, which is that we need to matter to one another. We need to matter to somebody. And I think that's. As a parent, that's the best thing we can give our child, is the knowledge that we matter. We matter to them at least, and that we can make a difference in the world, that our actions matter, that, you know, we can make the world a better place and that they hope and expect us to do that. And so that connection between it. I mean, we are social animals, and just like other social animals, we're not the only social animals in the world. There are lots of social animals. We need our clan. We need each other. And when we feel like we don't matter and nobody cares, depression definitely sets in. I think this was a major problem during the pandemic when we were all isolated from each other, especially those people who lived alone. I mean, wow. That's. We are social animals. That is a fundamental part of who we are. Thank God for the telephone. Thank God for zoom. Thank God that we could at least see each other in some way and tell each other that we matter to one another. But I totally get what this friend of yours or this felt.

[Tom Bilyeu]

That's crazy.

[Dr. Gina Poe]

Yeah. And I think that may be one way to help people stay on their meds is let them know that they do matter. Show them that they do matter.

[Tom Bilyeu]

That's really well said.

[Dr. Gina Poe]

Even if they're not the central. Of this central character. Yeah. This big government conspiracy. If you matter to somebody, your nieces and nephews, your brothers and sisters, your mother and father, I think that can make the difference.

[Tom Bilyeu]

All right, let's go dark for a second.

[Dr. Gina Poe]

All right.

[Tom Bilyeu]

If we had to break somebody, like, really break them, isolate them, or deprive them of sleep,

[Dr. Gina Poe]

I think sleep would do it faster.

[Tom Bilyeu]

Can you kill somebody by not letting them sleep?

[Dr. Gina Poe]

Yeah.

[Tom Bilyeu]

That's bananas.

[Dr. Gina Poe]

Yeah. Well, because. Oh, gosh, no one's ever done well that I know of in humans. In other mammals, it's five weeks, something like that.

[Tom Bilyeu]

Oh, I can't. That does not sound fun.

[Dr. Gina Poe]

No.

[Tom Bilyeu]

So what ends up happening? What's the mechanism by which you end up breaking?

[Dr. Gina Poe]

It's because sleep has so many functions, it's not even clear what, what the mechanism is.

[Tom Bilyeu]

But do they get organ failure?

[Dr. Gina Poe]

Yeah, yeah. Multiple organ failure. Immune system degeneration, lesions, sepsis. All kinds of different things would kill you. Just kind of actually kind of like Covid and other very bad viruses, they target different organs depending on who you are and what state they're in. So sleep deprivation will target different organs, and where you're most vulnerable will be the one that hurts you fastest.

[Tom Bilyeu]

Wow. What does that process look like? Because you don't go from I'm a little tired to I'm dead. Like, do they start hallucinating? Do they start.

[Dr. Gina Poe]

Well, people. Well, I mean, people have self deprived or have been unfortunately deprived of sleep and hallucinations are part of it. Yeah. Hunger, your metabolism goes haywire and you get super hungry and you'll continue to lose weight. You'll lose weight with long term sleep deprivation. Yeah.

[Tom Bilyeu]

Even if you're eating.

[Dr. Gina Poe]

Yeah. Yeah.

[Tom Bilyeu]

Whoa.

[Dr. Gina Poe]

So there was one women's magazine who talked to this researcher and said, hey, you know, even though I could eat whatever I want and still lose weight if I lose. And he said, no, but you'll be ugly because your skin doesn't, you know, refresh and renew. Yeah. I mean, you'll be cranky and, and just not look good, not feel good. It's, it's, it's not a good thing. And then type 2 diabetes, insulin regulation goes haywire. One night of full sleep deprivation will set you on the path toward type 2 diabetes. So, yeah, you want to get your sleep.

[Tom Bilyeu]

No joke.

[Dr. Gina Poe]

Yeah. I think actually probably the Nobel prize winning discovery about the function of sleep being that it's important for every, every single living creature, is that it's, it's metabolism. I think it's the mitochondria. And repair of the mitochondria is that

[Tom Bilyeu]

you're saying that will happen?

[Dr. Gina Poe]

I will, I think, yeah. I know a few researchers that are looking to sleep in mitochondria and I think that's, that's where the money is. I mean, cognition, yes, we all want to learn better and understand better, but I think the essential life sustaining function of sleep has to do with energy.

[Tom Bilyeu]

That's interesting. So knowing the little bit about mitochondria that I know they have their own DNA. What's going on at the level of sleep that would impact this little organelle that should have its own setup and its own system.

[Dr. Gina Poe]

It repairs itself. Itself it repairs.

[Tom Bilyeu]

So why, why does my, my. As if I could exist without them. But why does my sleep affect mitochondria so profoundly that you see a Nobel Prize coming?

[Dr. Gina Poe]

Yeah, well, okay, so think of, think of sleep as I think of it as a washing machine. If you don't, or if you don't clean your clothes, ultimately they'll get gunked up, heavy, dirty, won't do their insulation function. They won't help you function if you get sleep. But it's messed up. It's like putting your clothes in the washing machine, but interrupting the cycle, putting all the clothes soaking wet or whatever. So one of the functions of sleep is to actually repair our DNA. And if we can't do that when we're awake, we just can't. So we need to put it in the washing machine. We need to do the things that we do.

[Tom Bilyeu]

DNA repair isn't happening at all times. It's primarily.

[Dr. Gina Poe]

Well, no.

[Tom Bilyeu]

Interesting.

[Dr. Gina Poe]

Yeah.

[Tom Bilyeu]

So I understand how the brain cleans itself with that the pump that you're talking about where I'm basically expanding and contrasting and when I contract it's pulling things in and then when I expand it's letting everything wash out so that I get how there's a mech. Mechanistic thing and that I could only do that when I basically put my body down so that I'm not going to fall off something or whatever while my brain is going through the cycle. But at the DNA cellular level, is there some resource that the cell has to do while it's awake and that it stops doing it?

[Dr. Gina Poe]

Yeah, there's, it's like again like the washing machine. There are things that need to be coordinated and together and timed.

[Tom Bilyeu]

Well, that metronome.

[Dr. Gina Poe]

Yeah, it really is. Timing is everything. So things are happening during waking that allows wakefulness to be waking. Like norepinephrine allows us to be alert and awake and attending to the outside world. And when it's present while we sleep, which happens sometimes in insomnia, especially stress related insomnia, you can have sleep but your norepinephrine system is still going. Post traumatic stress disorder, also your sleep, all of the elements that need to be there to do the job efficiently aren't there or things are in the way, they're in the way that shouldn't be in the way so it's less efficient and Doing its jobless well.

[Tom Bilyeu]

Okay, so now going back to mitochondria and the energy system, sleep playing a primary role in that. So I've heard people say that fat loss happens at night. You think it happens when you're exercising, but in reality it doesn't. What do you think is going on with the energy system at night that is so profoundly important?

[Dr. Gina Poe]

Well, I actually don't know and that's why I think it's in the future.

[Tom Bilyeu]

I'll give you some guesses.

[Dr. Gina Poe]

Yeah, so guessing there are different things. Neuro hormones, cortisol, growth hormone, all of these things change with the sleep wake cycle and with the circadian cycle. So again, it's also better to go to sleep when your circadian cycle and your sleep needs are joined at the same time. So better to sleep at night and expose ourselves to light during the day to help coordinate our circadian and sleep needs together. So growth hormone is one of those things that gets released in a big bolus when we're asleep at the right time. And if we miss that, we won't have that big bolus of growth hormone. And a big bolus does a different thing than eking out over time.

[Tom Bilyeu]

So even if it was the same amount over a 24 hour period, very different impact and the same amount primarily over an 8ish hour period.

[Dr. Gina Poe]

Yeah, and you can understand that because for example, the reproductive cycle also depends on boluses of hormones being released at the right time. If you get a bolus released at a time when the rest of your system isn't ready, it won't produce a fertile situation. And if instead of ebolas, you just eke out a little bit all the time, you also won't develop the follicle and release the egg, that sort of thing. So there's a difference in a bolus versus just a little bit over time. That. Yeah. And it has to be done in a coordinated fashion.

[Tom Bilyeu]

Yeah, that coordination thing that's coming up a lot. Yeah, I had never really thought about that before. That makes a lot of sense. Take the body offline, coordinate everything all at once. Hey, quick, quick, quick. It's kind of like Disneyland. I don't know why this is coming to me. When they, you know, switch over all their lights and they turn on the Christmas season or whatever it's like all at night, everybody descends. You do it really fast. Well, nobody's there.

[Dr. Gina Poe]

Yeah, yeah, that's right. If you tried all those workers, you tried to do that with all those workers while the guests were in the park. It would be chaos. Right. People couldn't find their rides. The workers couldn't get to, you know, take down the big things they need to take down and bring in the big trucks to bring in the big Christmas tree or whatever at Disneyland. You need that to be timed right? Exactly.

[Tom Bilyeu]

Yeah. Very, very interesting. Okay, so talk to me about optimized sleep. We're. It literally can kill you if you don't get it. So how do we make sure that we're not just getting it, but we're really getting it in the right way, the right amounts. How do we prepare?

[Dr. Gina Poe]

Well, you know, our bodies are built to optimize our own physiology. So if you listen to your body, you'll be all right.

[Tom Bilyeu]

Which so few people do, myself included, until I really started taking it seriously.

[Dr. Gina Poe]

Right. Yeah. If you're studying calculus and you're trying to absorb this information and you get overwhelmed with a sense of sleepiness, listen to your body. Put your head down on your textbook if you want to take a nap, because during that time, your brain is doing what it needs to do, which is start to put these. This new information into your schema and build it. And if you deny yourself of that, you won't learn as well. Similarly, if you're feeling sick and you want to go to bed, go to bed. Don't make yourself. Don't just take a bunch of pills and make yourself go through the day, because that sleep is actually doing what your body needs, which is restoring your immune system and helping it to work well. Similarly, after getting a vaccine, you know, people feel a little sick often and want a good night's sleep. Get that good night's sleep, because it's been shown that if you don't get a good night's sleep after you get a vaccine, it's 50% as effective, if anything. So listen, listen, listen to your body. Do what it says to do.

[Tom Bilyeu]

Now, I will say there was a time when I was, I don't know, in my early 20s where my body told me, stay up later, stay up later, stay up later. And it got to the point where I had to set an alarm to make a 10pm movie.

[Dr. Gina Poe]

Oh, wow. Yeah.

[Tom Bilyeu]

I felt so weird.

[Dr. Gina Poe]

Yeah.

[Tom Bilyeu]

Now, thankfully, my body then told me, yeah, not seeing the sunlight is very weird. You need to. To flip your schedule. And so I went back, but that was really me doing what felt natural.

[Dr. Gina Poe]

Yeah.

[Tom Bilyeu]

And my schedule got pushed back, back, back.

[Dr. Gina Poe]

Well, I think that's because you weren't exposing yourself to the outside light in the morning, like when it needs to be. So.

[Tom Bilyeu]

So. But that means that people can listen to their body and get in the wrong place.

[Dr. Gina Poe]

Yeah.

[Tom Bilyeu]

So when we think about sleep hygiene and we think about the optimal. Like what you would do with your kids to make sure that they were on track.

[Dr. Gina Poe]

Yeah.

[Tom Bilyeu]

How would you have people shape themselves? Is it light in the morning? Is it going to bed at a certain time?

[Dr. Gina Poe]

Yeah. And I think, you know, back when we were more agrarian culture, that wasn't a problem. I mean, you just couldn't do that much at night. But now we have computers and false lights and all of this stuff. So, yeah, we can wedge ourselves into a. Into a bad place. But yeah, get outside in the morning, expose yourself to that outside light. There's nothing stronger than the sunlight, even when it's behind a cloud. In resetting our circadian system, does it

[Tom Bilyeu]

count if you're looking out the window?

[Dr. Gina Poe]

Yeah. I mean, just think of. In terms of film. You studied film, right? Or you wanted to. You. You know, the light coming through a window is great for a camera versus false lights. You have to spend a lot of energy to try and reproduce the same amount of light.

[Tom Bilyeu]

So does the light need to actually touch your skin? Because it's my understanding that you do. Some of the UV light light gets bounced back by glass. And so that getting outside does make some difference. I don't know how much amount.

[Dr. Gina Poe]

You know what, getting outside helps for a lot of other things that, like converting to vitamin D that we can use. But the photons, it's actually not UV. It's blue light. Interestingly, 470 nanometers. Is that what it is? That is the wavelength of that. That blue light that really activates our eyes and that doesn't get filtered unless we have a blue light filter on our glass. So. So yeah.

[Tom Bilyeu]

So that still would. There might be other things. The sun hitting your skin, it matters, but you're still going to get that alertness signal just by getting enough blue light in your eyes. Okay. Do you think it matters like time of day? I've heard Huberman and other people point out that, like, light is actually sort of qualitatively different early in the. That sends certain signals to your brain.

[Dr. Gina Poe]

Yeah, it does. So our circadian system is set so that when we see a bright blue light, our circadian system says that's morning. So if you keep yourself indoors all day long and don't go out until the evening, and that's when you get the brightest light. Your circadian system says it's morning and it shifts everything so that that becomes your new morning. Your clock gets reset to that light.

[Tom Bilyeu]

Is there any difference pre sunrise, post sunrise or doesn't matter.

[Dr. Gina Poe]

So normally when you fall asleep at night, say 10 o' clock at night, you get a big surge of melatonin. And that's the hormone of darkness. It's called if you at that time expose yourself to bright light, say you've just flown across the Atlantic and Now what was 10 o' clock at night is now, I don't know, 6 o' clock in the morning, your brain will reset your clock to that. It doesn't do it all at once. It can't shift six hours at once. It needs several days to do that. But it will start switching things so that it says, okay, this is my new morning time. And that's good. We want that, we want to be able to inform our brains of what time of day it is and reset that every day you have your actually own endogenous clock that will free run in absence of any light. So if suddenly someone put you into a cave, you still would have a roughly 24 hour rhythm. It's generally most often a little more than 24 hours, which is very interesting.

[Tom Bilyeu]

I've heard that it's like 25 hours or something.

[Dr. Gina Poe]

Yeah, not 25. That's a lot. It's 24.1 to 24.4. Yeah, it's pretty close. But a free running human will go to bed later and later and later every night just because our clocks are a little longer than 24 hour rhythm. And so it needs to be reset every day.

[Tom Bilyeu]

Yeah. Okay, what time should we go to bed?

[Dr. Gina Poe]

All right, so say you got up at a good time in the morning, six, seven.

[Tom Bilyeu]

Why is that a good time?

[Dr. Gina Poe]

Well, I'll say it's a good time just because that's when the sun rises and that's when the rhythm of the earth is usually aligned for business and other things that you would need to do farming, you know, that's when you would be, that's why it's a good time. I mean actually if you're a shift worker and you work at night, don't go outside in the morning. You want to keep yourself in darkness and just switch your whole circadian rhythm so that you expose yourself to bright light in the evening. Because that's when your circadian rhythm says, oh, okay, this is morning and I'm going to be alert for the next 16 hours.

[Tom Bilyeu]

So don't shift workers though have a higher preponderance of cancer.

[Dr. Gina Poe]

Yeah, but that's probably because they're incompletely able to do that.

[Tom Bilyeu]

So they've not quite switched over.

[Dr. Gina Poe]

Well, and that's often because unfortunately the shifts of shift work give them weekends off. And so then the weekend they want to be around their family. We're social creatures. They'll get up in the morning and so every week your circadian is going back and forth and back and forth or some crazy shift working jobs will have you four days on and three days off. And you know, it's just, that's not good. So if you can actually set your whole life to this new time, it's fine. It's like you've moved to Europe. I mean, interesting. It's fine.

[Tom Bilyeu]

Now, is there data around that? Because I would be very curious to see how the rates of cancer correlate to the rate the level of vitamin

[Dr. Gina Poe]

D. Yeah, there are data. There are data.

[Tom Bilyeu]

And so it doesn't matter. This is really about. If you, you fully shift your schedule, you're going to be fine. The rates of cancer are not elevated anymore.

[Dr. Gina Poe]

So. Right. If you fully sleep, switch your schedule, you'll be okay. All your clocks will be aligned. Now vitamin D is another question though. That's another thing that you get from the sun. You can take supplements though. Depends on how well you absorb those particular supplements, what else you're taking in nutrition at the same time and whether it blocks that absorption of vitamin D or not. So orange juice and vitamin D don't go together for some reason in our guts. Yeah, milk is fine, oil, oil soluble things. But water soluble things don't.

[Tom Bilyeu]

No. Good.

[Dr. Gina Poe]

Yeah. So anyway, so I would hypothesize that if you're able to replace everything that including social connections with that new schedule,

[Tom Bilyeu]

then hang out with other shift workers.

[Dr. Gina Poe]

Yeah, shift. Have a shift working family.

[Tom Bilyeu]

Fair. Okay. So we, assuming we get up at 6 or 7, then we go to bed at. So.

[Dr. Gina Poe]

So the healthy amount of sleep, the healthiest on a population level is about seven to eight hours.

[Tom Bilyeu]

Hours.

[Dr. Gina Poe]

So seven and a half hours to eight hours with an adult. Children need more. Even teenagers need more. As our brains are developing, we need. There's a lot more demands on sleep that they need to. They need. But healthy adults, about seven and a half, eight. If you put someone in a quiet dark room. This is a study done at Wayne State University and Henry Ford Hospital by Tim Rears. If you put someone in a semi darkened quiet room with nothing else to do, just a bed and them for 12 hours a day, for a month, every single day, people will average out this is on average to 8 hours and 15 minutes of sleep per night. And so you can't even oversleep. You can't just say, okay, there's nothing else to do, I'm just gonna sleep for 12 hours.

[Tom Bilyeu]

Your body just won't do it.

[Dr. Gina Poe]

Your body won't do it. Yeah, once you're, your needs of sleep have been fulfilled, you'll wake up.

[Tom Bilyeu]

If you've been sleep deprived though, you would have a period of time and

[Dr. Gina Poe]

that's what happened in this study. The first week or two of the study people did sleep quite a lot more, you know, 10 hours of the 12 or more depending on how sleep deprived they were. But once they fulfilled that sleep debt, 8 hours and 15 minutes, and again, on average, some people slept a lot less, some people slept a lot more, but on average it was eight hours and 15 minutes. So the population based studies show that if you just ask people in chunks, do you sleep 4 hours, 5 hours, 6 hours, 7, 8, 9. 9. Plus those that have the lowest mortality were the ones that chose the seven o'. Clock. So I mean seven hours, eight hours also had low and six hours also had low. But seven, around seven was the, the best for, for these adults.

[Tom Bilyeu]

So need to be all at once. Can you break it up?

[Dr. Gina Poe]

Yeah, I, I, there are a lot of cultures that break it up and they seem to be healthy. They have a nice snap in the middle of the siesta in the middle of the afternoon, not too late to spoil their sleep that night, and they'll

[Tom Bilyeu]

only sleep five or six hours during

[Dr. Gina Poe]

the night and then they'll make make up with another hour and a half or so during the siesta and that's fine.

[Tom Bilyeu]

And is it true that a sleep cycle is about 90 minutes?

[Dr. Gina Poe]

Yeah, on average the first sleep cycle is more like 105 minutes or so, 110. And then later in the night they're shorter, but on average it's about 90 minutes.

[Tom Bilyeu]

All right, so what happens then if you start pushing your sleep back? Is there any difference between. So if I normally go to bed at 9pm and then one night I go to bed at 11pm, is there going to be a problem?

[Dr. Gina Poe]

Yeah.

[Tom Bilyeu]

And does it matter if I just always go to bed at 11, am I going to be fine?

[Dr. Gina Poe]

Yeah. Again, there's that alignment between circadian and homeostatic drive to sleep. Yeah. If you normally go to bed at 11 and wake up at 7 in the morning, that's a healthy amount of sleep. That's eight hours. Right. And, and then waking up at seven. That's when you expose yourself to the bright light versus those who go to bed at ten, wake up at six. They're oppos exposing themselves to brighter light at six. So the alignment between the circadian and homeostatic needs for sleep are different.

[Tom Bilyeu]

So yeah, so that's fine, but pushing. If I miss my normal bedtime by two hours, am I creating a problem for myself?

[Dr. Gina Poe]

You are creating a problem for yourself because you're misaligning your circadian and homeostatic needs.

[Tom Bilyeu]

Even if I get all. So I normally go to bed at 9 and I get 7 hours of sleep, I go to bed at 11, I still get 7 hours of sleep. You're saying just because I switched.

[Dr. Gina Poe]

Yeah.

[Tom Bilyeu]

What, what is that knock on effect?

[Dr. Gina Poe]

Well so, so, so say normally you wake up at six and you did that morning wake up at six, but now you're going to bed at I don't know what is the same 10 to 6, 11. You could say you go to bed at midnight that night, two hours later your circadian rhythm is set to release your melatonin at the normal time, you know, 10, 11 o' clock at night. And once you're nicely asleep and it starts building up before that and so it's trying to do that but you're still awake and you've got lights exposed and so your melatonin release has been dampened. And then when you go to bed two hours later, your already past that peak of when your clock says, you know, let's release this melatonin. And so your sleep will be missing that and you will miss all that growth hormone surge and all of that.

[Tom Bilyeu]

That's why my wife says no matter what time I go to bed, I wake up at the same time. That makes sense because she's doing it as a one off because what will end up happening? My wife, I will a little bit. My wife more than me will stay up quite late on the weekend.

[Dr. Gina Poe]

Hands.

[Tom Bilyeu]

And so because the rest of the week she's on a normal cycle, then she's like, I still wake up at the same time.

[Dr. Gina Poe]

Yeah, yeah, it's her clock, her circadian system waking her up.

[Tom Bilyeu]

Very interesting. So, okay, to encapsulate. I want to get up at a good time, I want to get light in my eyes, I'm going to be all day, I'm going to be building up the adenosine which is going to cue me to go to sleep. I want to go to sleep at roughly the same time.

[Dr. Gina Poe]

Yeah.

[Tom Bilyeu]

Because all of my circadian Rhythms, clocks, everything are used to secreting the different hormones and everything at the same time. And so if I'm awake, like, hey, you missed your window. Sorry. It's not like everything just shifts back on a one off, but I can shift my entire schedule if I want to. But I do need to be getting somewhere around seven hours of sleep for optimal longevity.

[Dr. Gina Poe]

Yeah.

[Tom Bilyeu]

And certainly I will say for optimal performance if you're not getting sleep. It just feels so lame. Oh, God, I hate being tired so much. I do not understand people that chronically sleep deprive themselves. That's just madness from where I'm sitting.

[Dr. Gina Poe]

Yeah. Yeah.

[Tom Bilyeu]

All right, talk to me. What's the difference between the sexes? Do we have different sleep needs? Do we respond differently to perturbations? How does that all work out?

[Dr. Gina Poe]

Yeah, and it seems to be true. In every species we've studied, there are sex differences and the amount and the pattern in which we sleep.

[Tom Bilyeu]

Really?

[Dr. Gina Poe]

Yeah.

[Tom Bilyeu]

Tied to hormones or what's causing that?

[Dr. Gina Poe]

Well, you know. Yes, in, in. So children, as far as I know, the studies that I've, you know, they. Before their hormones kick in, they sleep about the same and their sleep needs are about the same. Once your hormones start kicking in, especially cycling hormones, they definitely affect, well, so much, including when we are sleepy and how much sleep we need. So as we cycle, as women cycle through the monthly cycle, there will be times when sleep is more elusive. And that's probably adaptive and a good thing.

[Tom Bilyeu]

Really. Why?

[Dr. Gina Poe]

I don't know. Maybe seeking a mate. I don't know.

[Tom Bilyeu]

It's fast asleep, by the way.

[Dr. Gina Poe]

Yeah. And then. Or, you know, preparing a nest or whatever it is.

[Tom Bilyeu]

That is so interesting because it's across all animals.

[Dr. Gina Poe]

Yeah.

[Tom Bilyeu]

I'm very surprised by that. So even flies, really?

[Dr. Gina Poe]

Yes.

[Tom Bilyeu]

Whoa, man. I, I don't have a hypothesis for that one. So you may.

[Dr. Gina Poe]

Flies take more naps.

[Tom Bilyeu]

Really?

[Dr. Gina Poe]

Yeah.

[Tom Bilyeu]

If they're already getting more consistent sleep, why would they take more naps?

[Dr. Gina Poe]

Well, so, yeah, I, I don't. It probably has something to do with the reproductive cycle and all the other things a female's body has to do in order to prepare the next generation awake for that. Or, you know, it's. It's. It's not like female flies don't sleep. They sleep. But there's other things that are going on also demanding their.

[Tom Bilyeu]

I've seen some of your. The talks that you give where you show people the different slides and this is where they're at and this part of their hormone cycle. And it seems like there's there's only one part where they just diverge all of a sudden quite dramatically.

[Dr. Gina Poe]

Yeah.

[Tom Bilyeu]

What is that part of the cycle?

[Dr. Gina Poe]

Yeah.

[Tom Bilyeu]

And why. What's going.

[Dr. Gina Poe]

Yeah.

[Tom Bilyeu]

What's happening?

[Dr. Gina Poe]

We don't know. We don't know why there's still. There's a lot of people doing hormones and, and sex differences and other people doing sleep. And the two fields haven't come together nearly as much as they need to. So. Yeah. So during that one hormonal phase in rats, which know there's an equivalent in humans as well, that's when our progesterone and estrogen levels are very high and that's when we're getting the least amount of sleep. That's when in women we complain of the most insomnia. But when you, when they do sleep, their sleep is super efficient and really high quality. So that's when the spindles are aligning themselves across different areas of the brain. That's when our slow waves which are cleaning our brain are even bigger in that high hormonal amplitude stage of our cycle. So, yes, we're getting less of it, but it's more efficient. Which might be another reason why different people need different amounts of sleep, is maybe some people's sleep is more efficient and doing the job faster than other people's. We don't know.

[Tom Bilyeu]

It's very intriguing. Is there any research on a recent mother and how much much sleep she gets? Like, does she sleep more lightly? Because I know there are different phases of your sleep. If you try to wake somebody up, they won't wake up. Like they, I know in REM they'll incorporate noises. I've heard you say that kids will actually sleep through fire alarms. Yeah, like loud fire alarms. What do we know about that? And sex differences. Is there anything?

[Dr. Gina Poe]

Yeah, not much. Especially when you're talking about new mothers. Woefully small amount, amounts of data. There's a lot of things that we don't know. For example, the cerebellum, which is beneath our thalamus. It's. So we don't have that thalamic gate of consciousness in our cerebellum. It learns. It's a really strong learning machine and it might be able to help us wake up even with small noises that are relevant to our survival or our offspring survival. So that might be why some people, most people, parents are lighter sleepers because their cerebellum is attuned to the noises that their baby is making. And that's good, that's adaptive. Right. You, you want that not waking up

[Tom Bilyeu]

when the fire alarm goes off. Those not super adaptive.

[Dr. Gina Poe]

No, that's children. Adults will.

[Tom Bilyeu]

And so again, that's super dangerous for a kid. Like from an evolutionary standpoint, you're out in the Serengeti.

[Dr. Gina Poe]

You're not.

[Tom Bilyeu]

Chill house.

[Dr. Gina Poe]

Kids are very helpless in many, many ways. Right. So it is our, our job as parents to be the ones to wake them up and carry them out of the burning house. Right? Yeah. But they have.

[Tom Bilyeu]

Nature's just like, all right, you can stay knocked out. I'm gonna do the things I need to do. I know your parents are gonna snatch you up.

[Dr. Gina Poe]

Yeah.

[Tom Bilyeu]

Interesting.

[Dr. Gina Poe]

Yeah.

[Tom Bilyeu]

Is that preserved across species that young ones are way harder to wake up?

[Dr. Gina Poe]

Yeah. Yeah. The ones that, that, you know, social species.

[Tom Bilyeu]

Interesting.

[Dr. Gina Poe]

Like rats, for example, too. Yeah.

[Tom Bilyeu]

So it really might be tied to, you know, that somebody else is going to be looking out for you when you're in infancy.

[Dr. Gina Poe]

Yeah. And, well, it's, it's, it's not so much a confidence thing as there are some really important things going on, essential things that are going on in your brain when you're developing. So.

[Tom Bilyeu]

So it's worth rolling the dice.

[Dr. Gina Poe]

It's. It's worth it. You kind of have to. In order for your brain to be continuing to do develop and incorporating all the differences in the world. We, you know, we're born into such different environments. Some of us are born with a silver spoon in our mouths. Some of us are born super poor on the dirt and have to walk miles to get water. So we really need to be able to adapt to the environment in which we're born and the bodies which we're born with. So, you know, some people are born without limbs. You know, you really don't want to dedicate a of lot whole big portions of your brains to a limb that doesn't exist. Right. Instead, you want to repurpose it for something else. During development, we are incorporating the world that is actually around us into our brain and maximizing its efficiency. So that happens through sleep. I just talked about how we restructure our schema through sleep, and that's happening in spades.

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