← Tom Bilyeu's Impact Theory
Tom Bilyeu's Impact Theory
Sleep Expert Reveals How You Can Optimize Your Brain with These Simple Hacks | Matthew Walker (Replay)
00:47:24
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- [00:00]
Tom Bilyeu
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- [00:11]
Matthew Walker
They won't even write me back.
- [00:12]
Tom Bilyeu
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- [00:15]
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- [00:45]
Matthew Walker
From an evolutionary perspective, sleep is the most idiotic of all behaviors when you think about it. Because firstly, when you're asleep, you're not finding a mate, you're not reproducing, you're not caring for your young, you're not foraging for food, and worse still, you're vulnerable to predation. Now, on any one of those single grounds, but especially all of them as a collective, sleep should have been strongly selected against.
- [01:21]
Tom Bilyeu
Hey everybody. Welcome to another episode of Health Theory. I am here with somebody that's going to blow your mind. His name is Matthew Walker. Matthew, welcome to the show.
- [01:31]
Matthew Walker
It's a delight to be here. Tom. Thank you for having me.
- [01:33]
Tom Bilyeu
Dude. Super excited. I was telling you before we started recording that you wrote a book called why We Sleep. And I'm always worried when I'm bringing somebody on that's covering a subject that I've talked about before if they're going to hit it in a new way. And I loved your book. You come at it from a totally different angle. I wore my brain shirt out of acknowledgement of how much you talk about sleep and the neurological impact. And so I want to start with two things from the book that really blew my mind. And the first is that sleep is so important that the Guinness Book of World Records will not let people try to set records for sleep deprivation. Walk us through why not? I think this is a great entry to your world.
- [02:18]
Matthew Walker
Yes. So what we know is that a lack of sleep will impact just about every major physiological system in your body and almost every operation of your mind. For example, if I were to take you and limit you to just four hours of sleep for one single night, there is almost a 70% drop in what we call natural killer cell activity which are critical anti cancer fighting immune cells that's after one night of four hours of sleep.
- [02:46]
Tom Bilyeu
That's crazy.
- [02:47]
Matthew Walker
Secondly, if I were to short sleep you for just one week, your levels of testosterone would be that of someone 10 years your define short sleep, how many hours? So here we could be talking about four to five hours a night for four or five nights in a row, which if you look at the data on the survey, that's not unusual for perhaps even 20 to 30% of the population, certainly during the week. We also know from daylight savings time that it doesn't take very much because there is a global experiment that's performed on about 1.6 billion people across 70 countries twice a year and it's called daylight savings time. Now, in the spring when we lose one hour of sleep, we see a 24% increase in heart attacks the following day. Yet in the autumn, in the fall, we see a 21% decrease in heart attacks. Now you collide all of that information together as well as the impact on the brain, the mental health issues regarding anxiety, suicidality, depression, as well as increased risk for Alzheimer's disease, and we've been seeing that as well. All of these things created this perfect storm for Guinness to take a step back. They used to recognize world record breaking attempts. And to put this in context, several years ago, a remarkable individual, I think his name was Felix Baumgartner, an Austrian with Red Bull, he went up in a space capsule and he went to the outer edges of our atmosphere, of our planet. He opened the door and then in a spacesuit he jumped out, he hurtled back down to earth at over 1000 km per hour. He broke the sound barrier with his body and Guinness says that's just fine. However, sleep deprivation attempts no longer, because they are that much more concerning than to your mental, your physical and your cognitive health.
- [04:46]
Tom Bilyeu
That is the perfect explanation. Like that dichotomy of Felix Baumgartner versus just not getting enough sleep. And I don't think it's a mistake that the Navy SEALs use just catastrophic sleep deprivation as a part of their hell week to really find out like who's got the mental resilience to make it on the other side. Because when you're talking. Because if I remember right, they get like three hours of sleep over five days or just something stupid like that, it's remarkably minimal.
- [05:17]
Matthew Walker
And they start hallucinating. You know, I had a friend who was, who was in the British version of that and they were saying, you know, they were running around on these hills during sort of these combat training events and they were just seeing sort of gravestones popping up in front of them, and they were just delusional and hallucinating.
- [05:37]
Tom Bilyeu
What's going on? Like, what is it that causes us to hallucinate? Do we know the mechanism? Whatever breakdown there is between the conscious and subconscious? I'm not even sure what's happening.
- [05:48]
Matthew Walker
Yeah. What we think is happening is that after some degree of sleep deprivation, you build up this pressure for the different stages of sleep. And one of the two main stages of sleep, of human sleep at least, is something called rapid eye movement sleep, or REM sleep, which is the stage that is principally associated with dreaming. And what we've learned is that once you start to go through sleep deprivation and including REM sleep deprivation, the brain gets so starved of this thing called dream sleep that it just simply says, look, at some point I've got to get this thing called REM sleep. And if you're going to stay awake, I don't really care. I'm just going to produce this state of REM sleep. And so it's almost as though you're awake. But the veil of REM sleep dreaming comes over the brain, and therefore you're essentially dreaming while you're awake. And that's why you start seeing these hallucinations and delusions. That's our current understanding.
- [06:45]
Tom Bilyeu
All right, now that's really interesting. So one of the questions I was most excited to ask you about is the nature of dreaming. So if the brain is saying, hey, look, I'm going to do this whether you're awake or asleep, why is it so contextual? Like, there's no question there are times where the dream is so bizarre, like, I can't anchor it to my life, but a lot of times I can, where I'm like, I know exactly why I started dreaming about that thing. Do we have a sense of what the brain is trying to do with dreams?
- [07:17]
Matthew Walker
We do. And dreaming seems to offer at least two different benefits for the brain. The first is creativity. The second is essentially emotional first aid. It's overnight therapy. So point number one, creativity. One of the things that REM sleep actually does is it takes all of the information that you've been learning. And I should take a step back. It's during deep sleep, which actually happens more in the first half of the night, that those memories, those freshly minted memories that you've recently learned and laid down in the brain, deep sleep will hit the save button on those new memories so that you don't forget. So deep sleep strengthens and solidifies those individual memories. But sleep, we've learned, is much more intelligent than we ever imagined. Because thereafter it's dream sleep, it's REM sleep that takes all of those individual memories and it starts to intelligently collide them and interconnect them. Essentially it's informational alchemy, or you can almost think of it like group therapy for memories that everyone gets a name badge and REM sleep gathers in all of these pieces and it forces you to go and speak to the people not at the front of the room that you think you've got the most obvious connection with, but to the people at the back of the room that you think you've got no connection with at all. But it turns out that you do. It's a non obvious one, but it's a potentially powerful one nonetheless. And so after dream sleep, you wake up with essentially a revised mind, wide web of associations every single day. And as a consequence, you are able to divine solutions to previously impenetrable problems. And it's the very reason that no one has ever told you to stay awake on a problem. And that's one of the benefits of dream sleep or REM sleep. The second, however, is something that we more recently discovered, and we've done a lot of work in this area regarding mental health, is that REM sleep provides this emotional first aid. What seems to happen is that sleep will take in these difficult, often concerning, even painful, traumatic emotional experiences. And dream sleep acts like this beautiful nocturnal soothing balm. And it just takes the sharp edges off those painful, difficult experiences so that you come back the next day and they don't feel as difficult anymore. So in other words, it's not time that heals all wounds, but it's time during sleep that provides that emotional convalescence, as it were. So why does this relate to your question, which is there are times when it seems strange and there are times when I can definitely pick it up. What we know de facto definitively is that dreaming is not simply you rewinding the videotape of the day and then playing it back over again. In fact, only about 5% of your dreaming life is a veritical replay of anything you experience during the day. However, what is dominant if there is a, if there's a red thread narrative that runs through from your waking life into your dreaming life, it is emotional themes and concerns. That's the sort of mental health benefit. That's the mental first aid, the emotional first aid.
- [10:52]
Tom Bilyeu
So the emotional first aid was the second thing that I wanted to talk about. That was one of the most striking things about your book. And I want to go a little bit deeper so much around dreaming and I don't want to stray too far from that because there's so many more questions I have about dreaming. But talk to me about some of the research with noradrenaline and PTSD and the work there because this was where I was like, whoa, there is a layer to sleep that I've never heard anybody talk about the way that you're talking about it. This is really fascinating.
- [11:24]
Matthew Walker
Yeah. So several years ago I developed a theory as to exactly how this emotional first aid would actually work. Were it's, it's what's remarkable about dreaming. It's the only time during the 24 hour period where your brain shuts off this stress related neurochemical called noradrenaline. We never see it at any other time, any other stage of sleep, or any time when you're awake. And the sister chemical everyone will know about in the body, which is called adrenaline, but upstairs in the brain it's noradrenaline. And I propose that what happens during dream sleep, which is remarkable, is that firstly we know from brain imaging studies that we've done where we put people inside of a scanner and we watch their brain as it lights up, as it goes into dream sleep, emotional centers of the brain and memory centers of the brain are reactivated during dream sleep. So firstly we know that the brain is capable and is probably reactivating these emotional experiences. But secondly, unlike when you're awake, it's reactivating and re, sort of playing those memories in a brain state that is devoid of any of this stress related neurochemical. And so in other words, dream sleep we sort of put forward as a theory, allows the brain to take this sort of highly charged emotional memory and strip away the bitter emotional rind from the informational orange so that you come back the next day and it's peeled away. And as a consequence, dream sleep has divorced the emotion from the memory because of this neurochemical state, this kind of mollifying, soothing neurochemical bath.
- [13:10]
Tom Bilyeu
Are you familiar with what they're studying with mdma? Because it feels to me like the same idea, right? So hey, I've got this guy that has ptsd. I'm going to make him relive it, but I'm going to hit him with mdma which neurochemically is going to move him into a real radically different state. They now revisit the same emotion because for, and look, you know so much more about this than I do. But I find this so interesting. You will correct me where I go wrong, but we're not. We're not faithful to the truth of what has happened in our past. We pull a memory forward. As we're sort of holding it in working memory, it becomes manipulatable. And then when we restore it, it's restored with whatever new context we give it. So if you revisit, you can make it worse or you can make it better. And that feels like it's an echo of this mechanism that you're talking about in dreams.
- [13:54]
Matthew Walker
It's exactly that. What we know is that when I was describing that deep sleep hits the save button on those new memories, that's what we call consolidation. But there's also a process of reconsolidation. You're absolutely right. And a great analogy here is a Word document. You'd never open up a Word document and then create a new set of text, which is the memory, then hit the save button and, and then double click it. The next day, open it back up. And you can't do anything with it. You can't change it, you can't edit it. That's a ridiculous system of storage, of information storage. And the brain works just like that. When you recall a memory, a memory once you've hit the saved button is not simply permanent and immutable, it's modifiable. And you can change it and modify it and then you can reconsolidate it, you can re save it. Now it's edited. And that's what therapy does. That's what we think happens with mdma. That's what we think is partly happening with dream sleep. But dream sleep is quite different there. It's this neurochemical strange state that allows you to sort of soothe that memory as well, and as I said, sort of strip away. It's almost like detoxifying the memory of the emotion so that you come back the next day and. And you have a memory of an emotional event, but it's no longer emotional itself. And so I had a theory that was in search of data and I went to a conference in Seattle and I presented the theory. And then the next person up was a psychiatrist called Murray Raskind. And he was working in the VA system with veterans who had terrible ptsd. And he was treating them with a blood pressure medication that was generic because it's the VA system. And that blood pressure medication was called Prazosin. Now Prazosin will actually cross the blood brain barrier. It will not only affect the body It'll go up into the brain. And one of the things that it shuts off is noradrenaline. And what we knew before is that in ptsd, those patients have too high levels of noradrenaline. And what he was finding and scratching his head over was to say, look, I've been treating these patients with this blood pressure medication, and they're coming back to me because, by the way, one of the diagnostic features of PTSD is repetitive nightmares. In fact, you can't get a diagnosis of PTSD without having repetitive nightmares. And so he was coming. These patients were coming back to him and saying, look, doc, I don't know if my blood pressure is any better, but my trauma dreams are starting to go away, and I don't know why. And he was publishing this data. So crazy. So I had a. And that's exactly what the model would predict, that in ptsd, levels of noradrenaline are too high. So the brain is unable to do this elegant trick of stripping the emotion from the memory. So the next night, when they come back to dream, the brain comes back and sleep to sleep and says, look, I've still got this highly charged trauma memory. Please do your trick of separating emotion from memory. It fails again. It's a broken record. It is the repetitive nightmares of ptsd. And I said, look, I've got to speak with you. I flew him down to Berkeley a few weeks later. We had spent the whole day together. We went out to dinner. We just jammed on this. He started doing these remarkable studies with prazosin, looking at REM sleep, looking at dreaming. And several years later, it became one of the only approved medications for repetitive nightmares in ptsd.
- [17:31]
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- [18:32]
Tom Bilyeu
Wow, dude. That, to me is like, just when it feels like, man, we really know a lot about something, and then a breakthrough like that will occur. This whole field of beginning to really understand. Because when the title of the book why Do We Sleep? Is, no one's been able to give a satisfying answer to that. Like, you get a lot of these hypotheses, but this is really starting to feel like we're at the beginning of beginning to understand some of the stuff. So give us the explanation in sort of an evolutionary context of why we know sleeping just absolutely has to be crushingly important.
- [19:10]
Matthew Walker
Yeah, and I'll just touch on your first point, which is to say you write sort of, you know, the book was called why We Sleep, because we do have now a pretty good understanding. 50 years ago, you know, we used to ask the question, why do we sleep? And the crass and unhelpful answer was, at the time was that we sleep to cure sleepiness, which is the fatuous equivalent of saying, and you would know this better than anyone, you know, I eat to cure hunger. Well, that tells you nothing about the nutritional dynamics of food. But it was the best that we had at the time. Now, 50 years later, with over 10,000 empirical research studies, we've actually had to upend the question. We've actually now had to ask, is there anything within the body, any major physiological system in the body or any sort of major function of the mind that isn't wonderfully enhanced by sleep when we get it, or demonstrably impaired when we don't get enough? And so far, the answer seems to be no for the most part. So sort of to come back to your sort of, the second part of the question, you know, from an evolutionary perspective, sleep is the most idiotic of all behaviors when you think about it. Because firstly, when you're asleep, you're not finding a mate, you're not reproducing, you're not caring for your young, you're not foraging for food, and worse still, you're vulnerable to predation. Now, on any one of those single grounds, but especially all of them as a collective, sleep should have been strongly selected against in the course of evolution. But what we know is that sleep, if you look from an evolutionary perspective, sleep appears to have evolved with life itself on this planet, and then it has fought its way through heroically every step along the evolutionary pathway. It's long been said that as a consequence, if sleep doesn't serve an absolutely vital set of functions, then it is the biggest mistake that the evolutionary process has ever made. What we're now learning from the science is that Mother Nature did not make a spectacular blunder in creating this beautiful thing called a full night of sleep.
- [21:28]
Tom Bilyeu
Yeah, it's really interesting to think through. And one of the things that gave me the first hook into why sleep might be ridiculously important is the fact that when you're sleeping, the brain actually shrinks and allows you to clear out amyloid plaques. And basically you're brainwashing yourself, literally washing your brain at night, the glymphatic system. And, and then I was like, okay, that's interesting that you would need to go into sort of this altered state to clear this stuff out. That, to me, gets interesting. What have you found there in the literature that shows that it needs to specifically be an altered state?
- [22:11]
Matthew Walker
Yeah, we never thought that the brain had its own cleansing mechanism. And we all know that the body has that mechanism. It's called the lymphatic system. But it was only probably six or seven years ago that a remarkable scientist, Macon Nedegaard at the University of Rochester, made a stunning set of discoveries in mice. What she found was that the brain actually does have its own cleansing system. It's called the glymphatic system, named after the glial cells in the brain that make it up. Now, if that wasn't remarkable enough, she went on to find two additional discoveries. The first is that that sewage system is not always switched on in high flow volume across the 24 hour period. It's specifically during deep sleep, when that cleansing mechanism kicks into high gear. And as you said, these brain cells will actually shrink and allowing the cerebrospinal fluid to wash away all of the metabolic detritus that's been building up whilst we're awake. Because, make no mistake about it, from a biochemical perspective, wakefulness is low level brain damage and sleep is sanitary salvation. And the third thing that you discovered, which is something you mentioned there, one of the pieces of toxic metabolic protein product that that cleansing system was washing away was something called beta amyloid, which is what we know is a protein culprit in the cascade of Alzheimer's disease. And we've now done a lot of work and others have done this work showing that insufficient sleep may be one of the most significant lifestyle factors determining whether or not you will develop Alzheimer's disease in later life. And it seems to be that it's this particular state of deep sleep and these pulsing, these slow Pulsing electrical, big powerful brainwaves that happen during deep sleep that may be driving the pulsing of this cerebral spinal fluid. And this is wonderful work by Laura Lewis at Boston University, most recently in humans that are coupled to the brainwaves that you have. So the reason that it's this specific state which was your question, why deep sleep in particular? Because it's only that time period where we get these huge, powerful, deep brain waves and we get this shrinking of the cells and we get therefore the flow of this pulsing glymphatic system. So in other words, it's almost like a power cleanse for your brain. It's good night sleep clean, as it were in that regard.
- [24:41]
Tom Bilyeu
Yeah, man, this stuff is so complex, it's crazy. This is exactly why I don't like to take supplements. It's like, man, there, there are levels of complexity that I assure you we have not discovered yet. And you never know. Like the heart medication that's also, oh, this one's bypassing the brain and dealing with noradrenaline. And it has this huge impact. Now that one happens to be positive, but there are some in certain cases, but there are some that very much are not and speaking of, are not positive. So if sleep is so good for me and dreams are amazing and they help with creativity and they, they take the sharp edges off my emotions, why the hell do I have nightmares?
- [25:22]
Matthew Walker
Yeah, so what we know is that nightmares aren't necessarily pathological. And we, we know that in some conditions, and PTSD is a, is a very good example of this, that they can sort of step over that threshold from being normative to non normative. And they can be very concerning and disruptive to people. And it's also very traumatic too to relive those and wake up from them. We do think it's part of the same process of sort of emotional regulation, that it's the brain trying to understand and better comprehend what this thing called waking life and all of its emotional peaks and troughs or are all about. So the bottom line here is that as long as they're not causing you distress and harm, then you don't have to worry about them if they are doing that, though, there are new clinical therapies for what we call nightmare disorders. And it involves usually just what you were describing before, which is speaking with a therapist, writing down the nightmare and then replaying it while you are awake, sort of, you know, speaking about it, writing it back down, working with the therapist and essentially trying to sort of just say, look, okay, in that context, it's safe. Let's better understand that. And repeatedly doing that type of work where you're sort of reactivating the nightmare and then trying to change the context to something that's safe or that's less fearful or that's less negative, gradually over time, that type of work can dissipate the frequency and the severity of those nightmares. So nightmares by themselves, not necessarily a bad thing. If they are causing you problems, you can go and speak to your doctor. And there are some therapies for that that you can sort of just google around. Nightmare therapy, et cetera. And those will help.
- [27:20]
Tom Bilyeu
Yeah. And that like the way in which your brain chooses to interpret its sort of dream reassessment of the real world will have huge implications in your life. It could be ptsd, it could be a bazillion things. I have a feeling I've never had this thought before, but I have a feeling that the more we learn about how individual brains recontextualize things and how much the conscious mind and subconscious mind sort of come into cahoots to decide how they're going to line things up. Because when I was in my early 20s and I was convinced I was stupid, I was interpreting the world one way that was just had me paralyzed by fear. And then as I began to realize sort of the nature of the brain and oh, just because I'm stupid now doesn't mean I can't learn about this. You know, that Carol Dweck's notion of yet, right, I'm not good yet. And so that since then, consciously I have changed the way that I frame things. But I would bet a bazillion dollars that I'm also doing that subconsciously as my brain sort of processes the day.
- [28:23]
Matthew Walker
I think that's what, you know, dreaming, if it's one of its functions, is that recontextualizing of those experiences. You know, dreaming, I think is a. Is a way for us to understand the world in which we live and we can do it whilst we're awake. You know, I'm not suggesting that we don't form connections and we don't see links between different pieces of information, but the way that we do it in dreaming is very different. You know, I often liken it to when we're awake, you're sort of inputting this information into the brain and it's almost like a Google search page one where you insert your search term, you hit return and you get the most obvious immediate hits, the direct connections. That's what waking is all about. Dreaming is you inserting the search term, hitting the return button and being taken straight to page 20. And you inserted impact Theory University. And all of a sudden, on page 20, it's about a field hockey game in Utah. And you think, hang on a second. What on earth is. But then you read it and you think, ah, it's a distant, wacky connection. And it's not obvious to me that I would have made that, but it's a potentially powerful one, because when you start to fuse things together that shouldn't normally go together, but they cause these marked advances in evolutionary fitness, it sounds like the biological basis of creativity. And that's one of the things that we're learning about with dream sleep as well. Contextualization, emotional resolution, creativity.
- [29:55]
Tom Bilyeu
Yeah. So, you know, as we start talking about dreaming and nightmares and all of the different ways that the brain is sort of interacting with, trying to make sense of the conscious world, one thing I heard you talk about is cognitive behavioral therapy for insomnia, which I found very interesting, and I know so little about it. But knowing what I know about cognitive behavioral therapy in terms of pattern interrupting and things like that, is this like us sending a sort of subconscious signal to our brain? Like, how does that work?
- [30:29]
Matthew Walker
Not quite so. What we know, obviously, has been the rise of sleep difficulties in society. And that has been matched by, unfortunately, a rise in pharmacology and particularly sleeping pills. And I say unfortunately not because I'm anti medication. And I know a lot of people who work at these pharmaceutical companies, and they're good people, great scientists wanting to do good things. But unfortunately, sleeping pills are largely blunt instruments, and they don't produce naturalistic sleep. They're in a class of drugs that we call the sedative hypnotics. And when we take sleeping pills, we mistake sedation for sleep, but it's not natural sleep. And in fact, sleeping pills have been associated with a significantly higher risk of death as well as cancer. So much so that in 2016, the American College of Physicians made a landmark recommended intervention. They said that sleeping pills must no longer be the first line treatment for insomnia. Instead, the American College of Physicians said it has to be cognitive behavioral therapy for insomnia. That must be the first line recommended treatment for those sleep problems. And so cognitive behavioral therapy in general really tries to target two things, cognitive and behavioral. And so the cognitive aspects for insomnia are aspects where we try to correct your beliefs or your misbeliefs around sleep and some of your ideas around sleep. Some of those things that can be either inappropriate Incorrect or just triggering anxiety or worry. So we try to modify those cognitions, those beliefs, but then we also look at what you're doing in your life, the different behaviors that you're doing or things that you're not doing, and try to correct the behaviors as well. For example, how's your caffeine intake? How's your alcohol intake? What time are you going to bed? What time are you waking up? What's your chronotype? Are you a morning type, evening type? Are you sleeping in harmony with your chronotype or against your chronotype? Are you getting daylight in the morning? Are you getting too much daylight light at night, artificial light at night? Do you exercise? And so we change behaviors and we change thought patterns. And together, cognitive behavioral therapy for insomnia is just as effective as sleeping pills in the short term. But what's great is that when you stop working with that clinician or your online program, and I should say that I work with a company, I'm an advisor to a company called Shuni. It's S H u N I o if people want to go and explore it. And you can get cognitive behavioral therapy online. There's. But you work with your therapist, and after about five or six sessions, you can continue that benefit of improved sleep for up to five years. The studies have demonstrated. Now, whereas with sleeping pills, when you stop their use, then not only do you go back to the bad sleep that you are having, you typically go back to even worse sleep. It's called rebound insomnia. And now you have to go back onto the use. So you become dependent. There is an addiction, dependency cycle. So that's really what CBT I is, and that's really the best approach for sleeping problems right now.
- [34:00]
Tom Bilyeu
All right, so I have two sleeping problems. One is that there are times where I will get either really stressed or I'll get really excited. And I have a very easy time falling asleep, but then I'll wake up after three or four hours, and I find it very difficult to fall back asleep. And then the second part, just so I don't forget, is sleep inertia in the morning. But what can I do to optimize for staying asleep?
- [34:30]
Matthew Walker
Yeah, so there. It's a case of trying to deal with that sort of downgrade the activation of the nervous system. The reason that people typically wake up in the middle of the night and can't get back to sleep, not always, but often, is because they have this sort of stress relief. They're carrying this anxiety. And anxiety, biologically, is the principal mechanism that we think underlies most insomnia. And what happens in part is that the fight or flight branch of the nervous system becomes overactive. And that's exactly why does it shut down?
- [35:05]
Tom Bilyeu
Like, I find it so easy to fall asleep, but I can tell on the nights where I'm going to wake up, it just seems weird that it dips, but then my subconscious mind kicks it back alive.
- [35:15]
Matthew Walker
Yeah. Why would it be that way? And the reason is because after about 16 hours of wakefulness, you've built up a lot of that healthy sleepiness, what we call sleep pressure. And the longer that you're awake, the more of that sleep pressure builds up. And it's a chemical that builds up in the brain called adenosine. And then when we go into sleep, it's the. The time when the brain can actually start to clear out that adenosine. And so it starts to lower the sleep pressure. And after about eight hours of sleep, you've cleared away 16 hours of that adenosine of that sleepiness. And so you wake up naturally and you feel refreshed and restored. But what will happen is that you can be stressed and sort of, or excited, but the sleepiness, the weight of sleepiness pulling you down is so heavy at that point that you can get to sleep. But then three or four hours later, you jettisoned maybe 50% of all of that identity, maybe even more, because it principally happens during deep sleep. And so now your brain is much more vulnerable to those awakenings because it doesn't have the weight of that sleepiness. Does that make some sense?
- [36:22]
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- [36:52]
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- [37:22]
Tom Bilyeu
It makes total Sense. And it makes me want to punch myself back to sleep. It's so obnoxious. Well, because the benefits, or I should say the damage that you do by not getting sleep is so terrifying that every time I wake up I'm like, come on, you know how much better you will perform if you just sleep. And I am not one of those guys that's like, hey, you gotta grind. And four hours sleep. I'm like, if I need nine hours of sleep, I want to get nine hours of sleep every single night, forever until the end of time. So it's just always super.
- [37:57]
Matthew Walker
If you're hoisting that flag, I will salute it. And I definitely, you know, not everyone, but certainly in the type A sort of particularly business culture, maybe there is this sort of sleep machismo attitude where people wear their lack of sleep like a badge of honor. But you're right, it's foolhardy for a number of reasons. But let me come back to that issue of, you know, beating ourselves up because we need to have some degree of self compassion when it comes to sleep. You know, I am not invulnerable to sleep problems myself. I've had bouts of insomnia throughout my life. To be completely transparent and open with you and everyone, every one of us is going to have a bad night of sleep. It's not unusual. Don't worry, don't stress. You know, back when I was starting to write the book, it took me about four years to write it in 2014. Sleep was sort of the neglected stepsister in the health conversation of that time. And I was so saddened by the sickness and the disease and the suffering that was happening because of a lack of sleep. I came out all guns blazing. And I think that that was important. But for those people who were struggling with sleep, those people who had sleep problems with insomnia, you know, the book kind of felt almost as though it was, you know, sleep or else. And I didn't mean it to be that way. So I want to say right now because I've learned to soften and become a much better appreciator of these conditions. Just like you described. If you wake up and you can't get back to sleep, don't worry. Just realize tonight is not my night. It's not the end of the world. I'm still going to be able to function somewhat tomorrow. Don't stay in bed awake for too long though. That's the important message here.
- [39:46]
Tom Bilyeu
Because I'm super curious to see what you think about this, because I Know where you're going, right? Yeah. You're training yourself that being in bed is. Being awake is okay while you're in bed. So I used to get up and whether I slept for two hours, three hours, whatever, if I couldn't fall back asleep in, like, 15 minutes, I'd get out of bed and I would go to work and start doing my thing, and then I would go lay back down and sleep. And sometimes I'd fall asleep for, you know, two or three more hours. But the number of times I would wake up with a headache after that was just too much. So it was way frustrated. And I'm like, all right, there's gotta be something else. So what I found is if I put an audio book on, dude, I will be back asleep in like, 10 or 15 minutes. It's crazy. And the only thing that wakes me up is the fact that I have headphones in my ears or if they start yelling in the book or something like that, which always pisses me off, but it puts me back to sleep so reliably, it's crazy.
- [40:41]
Matthew Walker
That's great. That's exactly what we recommend. So don't go to work. Don't start checking emails. Don't eat, because it trains the brain to expect food, but instead in a dim room somewhere different. So you change the context. So you're changing the learned association. Just read a book, listen to an audiobook, meditate in dim light. All of these things are great. Find out whatever works for you. And then only when you're sleepy do you return to bed. And there's no time limit for that. And that way you train the brain back out of a bad association that it's learned. Which is my bed is this place of being awake, which if you repeat that over time, you become trained to be awake in the bed. And then you will relearn the association that your bed is the place where you're asleep. So you're 100% right. That's exactly what we recommend to your second question, which is sleep inertia. It's a real thing. Sleep inertia is typically where we wake up and your brain requires some time to kind of warm up to operating temperature, like an old vintage car. You can't just turn the engine on and start flooring it and going up to red line. You need to circulate the fluids and warm the oil up and get the engine warm, and then you can really start to push it. It's the same way with our brain in some ways. Now, different people have different severities of sleep inertia. I'm actually like you. I suffer from quite bad sleep inertia for the first hour. My partner, when I come through in the morning, she wakes up a little bit earlier than me. She kind of knows that I can say, look, honey, I am not the best version of myself in the first hour. I know that I may have done something bad yesterday and we should talk about it. I want to resolve that. But can we not do it in the first hour? Because I'm not the best version. So firstly, accepting that it's normal and it's real. The second thing though, however, is you can. Sleep inertia typically happens in very severe amounts if you're mismatched between your sleep schedule and your chronotype schedule. And so you can go on and you can go online and type Google Morningness Eveningness Questionnaire. And it's a questionnaire that you fill out and it figures out what your chronotype is. Are you a morning type somewhere in between, or are you an evening type? And what we find is that morning types, when they wake up in the morning at their normal time, which is very early or early, they don't have sleep inertia. They're good to go. They can jump into the gym and they're like energizer bunnies and they're all happy and joyful. And to me, I'm just like, oh. Whereas evening types waking up at the time that morning types have to wake up, which is in some ways the way society is designed. Society is desperately biased against evening types and wrongfully so, because it's not your fault. It's genetically determined. There are about six or seven genes that we know right now that dictate what your chronotype is. It's not your fault. Gifted to you at birth, you don't get to choose. Now, if you are suffering from sleep inertia, what we find is that if you can sleep a little bit later into the morning, go to bed maybe a little bit later, sleep later, play around with that and see if the speed with which you wake up is better, that your sleep inertia is less, that's one way. It may not always work. Another way is temperature. Now, it turns out that when people have a cup of coffee, they say, look, I just need like five minutes. And I swig a couple of mouthfuls of coffee and now I'm alert. That's nonsense. Caffeine doesn't actually get into your system until about 12 to 15 minutes. So if you're feeling Any effects of caffeine before that? It's not the caffeine. It turns out that when we go to sleep, we drop our core body temperature, we get very cold, we become almost hypothermic. Now, to wake up, we have to warm up. So to get to sleep, we need to get cold. To stay asleep, we need to stay cold. And to wake up, we need to warm up. And so one way that you can artificially accelerate or try accelerating your inertia in a quicker dissipating manner is to try to warm up more quickly. So get a hot drink in the morning. Doesn't have to be caffeine if that's not your thing. I don't drink caffeine, but I'm not against it. Caffeine is an issue. It's not really the dose that makes the poison, it's the timing that makes the poison when it comes to sleep and caffeine, which we can come on to. But drink a hot drink, get your body temperature up, if you like. If you've got a smart thermostat, program it to start to rise temperature in your bedroom or in the house in the last hour before your alarm, and you can. It can really start to help you wake up and then play around with these smart lights. I have one where it sort of starts to brick me out of sleep about five minutes before my alarm. That can help. But the data is not good on that. The data on temperature, much better. Does that help you, Tom?
- [45:58]
Tom Bilyeu
It does, but I'm surprised that you say to get warm because. Have you done cold showers before?
- [46:06]
Matthew Walker
Yeah, cold showers are sort of more of a noradrenaline thing. Yes.
- [46:11]
Tom Bilyeu
They wake you up, really.
- [46:13]
Matthew Walker
Daylight. They do. Now, that's not necessarily a normative thing, you know, that's you, you know, shocking your fight or flight branch of the nervous system to go from a temperature that it's become accustomed to and it's acclimated to, to then all of a sudden being dumped in ice water, as it were, and it doesn't know it's a threat mechanism. It thinks you're under attack and so of course you're going to wake up. Now, that comes with an adrenergic spike in the body. It comes with an accelerated heart rate. It comes. It could come with a cortisol spike. So I'm not against that. But we don't have to go to those extremes. You can do it in these more subtle manners, which are the more natural ways.
- [46:55]
Tom Bilyeu
Fair enough. I have a question. Going back to waking up in the middle of the night. One thing that is super weird is things that during the day are not in any way, shape or form intimidating or daunting. When I'm supposed to be sleeping. So if I wake up in the middle of the night, I'll start stressing about something and I'll, I'm literally like, once I get out of bed, this is not going to stress me out. So why is it stressing me out at night? Is there a part of my brain that shuts off? Is there a part of my brain that becomes active? Like, why are things at night, do they seem so big and dramatic? Whereas in the day it's like, man, it's not a big deal.
- [47:33]
Matthew Walker
Yeah, we actually don't really fully understand in truth, but part of this is to do with context, that it's dark, you don't have full awareness, you don't have full functioning of the brain. Because when we wake up, that sleep inertia, by the way, in part is because your prefrontal cortex, which is the part of the brain that makes us most human, it's like the CEO of the brain. It's very good at understanding high level concepts, putting things into contextually appropriate boxes, making top down control decisions. It regulates our emotions. That part of the brain is the last thing to come back online as we wake up. And that's why we're not very brilliant if we have sleep inertia. But when we're waking up out of sleep in the middle of the night, we also have some of that. So we don't have the rational, logical part of our brain fully engaged. Plus the context is one that's dark. And so we don't have the daylight giving us this sort of normative safe feeling. And so what happens is that the brain starts to default to rumination and catastrophization. It's almost like this Rolodex of anxiety that then starts to unfold. And that one memory that you bring back into mind at that moment of waking up is the finger that flicks the domino on that cascade of rumination. So again, just realize I've done this before, I've experienced this before. I know that tomorrow by 1 or 2pm in the afternoon, I think about this and I think that was ridiculous to be worrying about. It's okay. Try to remind yourself of that.
- [49:10]
Tom Bilyeu
No question. Dude. Thank you so much for joining me today. The way that you look at sleep, your insights, they are absolutely magically delicious. Where can people keep up with you? Where can they get the book? What's the best way.
- [49:23]
Matthew Walker
Oh gosh. After listening so long to this they shouldn't listen to any more of me. But if you want to find more of me you can find me at Sleepdiplomat. That's my handle. Sleepdiplomat.com youm can buy the book. The book is called why We Sleep. It's now out in a second edition following some needed corrections. My publisher would say, you know you don't have to read the book, you just have to buy it. But I would say go and find a secondhand used copy of the book. I'm uninterested in any of the money. Just as long as you read the book, I'm happy.
- [49:58]
Tom Bilyeu
Awesome. Thank you again so much for what you're putting out into the world and for coming onto the show. It was really, really wonderful. Speaking of things that are really wonderful, if you haven't already, be sure to subscribe. And until next time, my friends, be legendary. Take care.