Aug. 15, 2021 - Rubin Report - Dave Rubin
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| Let's say that you normally go to bed at 10 p.m. | ||
| and you wake up at 6 a.m., but tomorrow morning you've got an early morning flight, so you have to wake up at 4 a.m. | ||
| rather than 6 a.m. | ||
| How much sleep have you lost? | ||
| Well, you've lost two hours of your eight-hour night of sleep, so you've lost 25%. | ||
| Yes and no. | ||
| You've lost 25% of your total sleep, but based on the structure of sleep that we just described, you may have lost 50, 60, 70% of all of your REM sleep, all of your dream sleep. | ||
| So there are real implications to understanding that. | ||
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(upbeat music) | |
| I'm Dave Rubin and joining me today is a professor of neuroscience and psychology | ||
| at the University of California, Berkeley, director of the Center for Human Sleep Science | ||
| and host of the Matt Walker podcast. | ||
| Dr. Matthew Walker, welcome to The Rubin Report. | ||
| Pleasure to be with you, Dave. | ||
| Thanks for having me. | ||
| Well, I'm thrilled that we're doing this because as you know, we're airing this in August, but right now it's the last couple of days of July. | ||
| I am on my 30-day digital and really societal sabbatical, and I'm gonna work on a lot of things, diet, exercise, digital detox, but also work on some sleep stuff, and that is your area of expertise. | ||
| So I guess before I ask you anything else, how does one become curious and enamored and eventually live their life to tell people about sleep? | ||
| of all things. Yeah, I think myself, like many of my colleagues, we are all accidental sleep | ||
| researchers. You know, I don't think when we were kids and you're going around the classroom and the | ||
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teacher was saying, you know, what would you like to be when you grow up? No one was shooting up | |
| the hand and saying, I'd really love to be a sleep researcher. So I fell into it by accident when I | ||
| was doing my PhD. I I was studying different types of dementia and trying to diagnose them very early on, failing miserably, and I realized I should be measuring my patients when they were asleep rather than when they were awake to measure their brainwave activity. | ||
| Started doing that, got some great results, and realized, that was 20 years ago, realized that at the time no one could answer a very simple question, why do we sleep? | ||
| And the best answer we had back then was that we sleep to cure sleepiness, which is the fatuous equivalent. | ||
| You know, that's like saying, well, you eat to cure hunger. | ||
| No, you eat for a whole plethora of different reasons. | ||
| Now, 20 years later, due to the work of all of my colleagues, and we've done a little bit too, I hope, we've had to upend the question. | ||
| We've had to ask, is there any operation of your brain and is there any physiological system in your body that isn't wonderfully enhanced when you get sleep or demonstrably impaired when you don't get enough? | ||
| And so far, the answer seems to be no. | ||
| Yeah, all right. | ||
| Well, there's a whole bunch of questions that I want to ask you that are going to revolve sort of around my sleep habits and my nap habits and this thing, what's in this coffee cup right now, which you probably can guess. | ||
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I'm so glad that you're drinking decaffeinated. | |
| I honestly don't think I've ever had decaf. | ||
| But before we get into any of those specifics, can you just talk to me sort of broadly about sleep? | ||
| You know, we hear about sort of like, you know, the type of sleep that you're having throughout the night. | ||
| What's the most important? | ||
| When are you getting the most restorative stuff? | ||
| All that. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| So sleep, at least in human beings, and in fact, in all mammalian species, is broadly separated into two types. | ||
| We have non-rapid eye movement sleep, and then we have rapid eye movement sleep. | ||
| And those two types of sleep will play out in this beautiful sort of battle for brain domination throughout the night. | ||
| And then the cerebral war is going to be won and lost between non-REM and REM every 90 minutes. | ||
| And then it's just going to be replayed every 90 minutes to create your standard sort of Dave Rubin sleep cycle. | ||
| What's different, however, is the ratio of non-REM to REM within those 90-minute cycles as you move across the night. | ||
| So what I mean by that is, in the first half of last night, the majority of your 90-minute cycles were comprised of lots of deep non-REM sleep and very little REM sleep. | ||
| But as you push through to the second half of the night, that seesaw balance actually shifts. | ||
| And now the majority of those 90-minute cycles is comprised much more of REM sleep. | ||
| And REM sleep is the stage that we typically associate with dreaming. | ||
| And I mentioned this sort of architecture, not just because it's hopefully intellectually interesting, but it has implications. | ||
| So let's say that you normally I'm just going to make this up and we'll hopefully hear what your actual sleep schedule is. | ||
| But let's say that you normally go to bed at 10pm and you wake up at 6am. | ||
| But tomorrow morning, you've got an early morning flight. | ||
| So you have to wake up at 4am rather than 6am. | ||
| How much sleep have you lost? | ||
| Well, you've lost two hours of your eight-hour night of sleep, so you've lost 25%. | ||
| Yes and no. | ||
| You've lost 25% of your total sleep, but based on the structure of sleep that we just described, you may have lost 50, 60, 70% of all of your REM sleep, all of your dream sleep. | ||
| So there are real implications to understanding that. | ||
| To your point, though, which one is more important? | ||
| All stages of sleep are actually important. | ||
| Different stages of sleep do different things for your brain and your body at different times of night. | ||
| But we need all of them. | ||
| You know, if when you think about sleep as being such an idiotic thing to do from an evolutionary perspective, you know, if Mother Nature could have said, well, I'm going to take these three stages of sleep and I'm just going to remove them so we save some time, and there's no harm to the organism, then she would have done it hundreds, millions of years ago. | ||
| But all stages of sleep have been preserved throughout the evolutionary path. | ||
| That means all of them are important. | ||
| And that's exactly what we're finding. | ||
| So is eight hours is that the magic number that everybody sort of still seems to think is like, you know, for the average person, eight hours is the number that you want to get? | ||
| The rain, there is a range. | ||
| So what we recommend right now is somewhere between seven to nine hours of sleep is what the average adult seems to require. | ||
| Once you get below seven, we can typically start to measure impairments in your brain and your body. | ||
| And, you know, so much so based on the evidence that the number of people who seem to be able to survive on less than six hours of sleep without showing any impairment rounded to a whole number and expressed as a percent of the population is actually zero. | ||
| Interesting. | ||
| So I'll give you a little bit of my personal part of this on the eight hours. | ||
| When I started writing my first book last year, really over two years ago at this point, when I first started writing it, I would find that I was thinking about it so much that I would go to sleep, let's say somewhere between like 11 and 12 p.m. | ||
| or midnight basically. | ||
| I'd be thinking and then I'd wake up early with the same thoughts on my mind. | ||
| So I'd wake up at like 6 a.m. | ||
| and then from 6 a.m. | ||
| Till literally like 3 p.m. | ||
| I could just write and write and write and write. | ||
| And then it would be like, man, I need a break right now. | ||
| And I started taking sort of 20 minute or half hour naps around 3 p.m. | ||
| And I still try to do that. | ||
| I can't always do it, obviously, but I try to do that. | ||
| And I'm curious, if you can move some of it into a nap later in the day, do you need it continuously? | ||
| That's a beautiful question. | ||
| So firstly, there is some importance about the continuity of sleep. | ||
| And what I mean by that is at night for that six hours that you were getting, if it's very choppy sleep, it's very sort of staccato and it's broken up and it's peppered with lots of awakenings, that's not good quality sleep. | ||
| But let's go back to your example or your lived life, which is, you know, six hours of sleep and then a nap during the day. | ||
| Is that okay? | ||
| I think the first thing to note is that we human beings may not have been designed in the way that most of us sleep right now, which is what we call monophasic sleep. | ||
| In other words, one long single bout of sleep at night. | ||
| Because if I place electrodes on your head, sometime between the sort of 1 to 4 p.m. | ||
| mark for most people, there is a drop in your brain's level of alertness. | ||
| Which, and it's pre-programmed. | ||
| It has nothing to do with a big lunch, by the way, some people think that. | ||
| But you know, in the afternoon in meetings, you can start to see those ugly head bobs that sort of, you know, it's a dead giveaway. | ||
| People are falling sick. | ||
| That's the three o'clock feeling, right? | ||
| Didn't those five-hour energy people made an awful lot of money on this feeling? | ||
| They certainly did indeed, but it's genetically hardwired. | ||
| As I said, it's pre-programmed. | ||
| It happens to all of us. | ||
| What that means is that we may not have been designed as a species to sleep in a monophasic pattern. | ||
| We may have been designed to sleep in what we call a biphasic pattern, which is a long bout of sleep at night, just as you're getting, and then a short sort of siesta-like nap in the afternoon. | ||
| So I think that that's perfectly fine. | ||
| In fact, we may be designed to do that. | ||
| But naps are a double-edged sword. | ||
| There is a dark side to naps. | ||
| And it's the following. | ||
| When you're awake during the day, you build up all of this healthy sleepiness. | ||
| And it's a chemical that builds up. | ||
| And it's been building up in my brain and your brain since the moment we woke up this morning. | ||
| And it's called adenosine. | ||
| The more of it that builds up, the sleepier you feel. | ||
| And then when you go to sleep at night, the brain gets the chance to evacuate all of that sleep pressure, all of that adenosine, so that after about eight hours, you wake up feeling refreshed and restored. | ||
| The problem with naps then is that if you take a nap that's too long or too late in the afternoon or in the evening, it just takes the edge off that sleepiness. | ||
| It's a little bit like a valve on a steam cooker. | ||
| You know, it just releases some of that steam. | ||
| And so now it's harder for you to fall asleep and then stay asleep at night. | ||
| So it's a little bit like snacking before your main meal. | ||
| So I think, you know, For you, I would say if you are not struggling with sleep at night and you can nap regularly during the day, then naps of about 20 minutes, sometime around, stop before about 4pm, that's great. | ||
| But if you are struggling with sleep at night, then avoid naps during the day. | ||
| Build up all of that healthy sleepiness. | ||
| Have you done any research or do you know of anyone that's done any research? | ||
| Sometimes what I'll find is if I try to just close my eyes for 20 minutes at 3 o'clock, I don't necessarily fall asleep. | ||
| And it's actually pretty rare that I would get into a deep sleep. | ||
| But you know, I could be in that quasi-sleep stage. | ||
| But sometimes it's more just, I've just closed my eyes and just try not to think about anything major. | ||
| Politics, the craziness of the world. | ||
| And that in and of itself is almost enough of a reset. | ||
| Have they done any research on that, that just the process of just 20 minutes with your eyes closed and maybe just getting into that initial phase could be enough? | ||
| Yeah, we have done studies on that. | ||
| And that's exactly what we're finding, that even that quiet rest where you have your eyes closed and you're somewhat disengaged. | ||
| Now, if you look at the brain itself, it's actually dipping like a little beak into water. | ||
| It's dipping itself and having a little soup son of sort of sleep during that time. | ||
| Most of that time you're not aware that you're asleep because it's still lighter stages of sleep, but it can be restorative. | ||
| It can have benefits for your mood, for your emotions, even some benefits for cardiovascular health. | ||
| Is it as potent as getting into sleep? | ||
| No, it's not. | ||
| But is it better than just constantly trying to power through and grab another cup of coffee and hope for the best? | ||
| Absolutely, it's much better than that. | ||
| So it's all a range. | ||
| I think there's a gradient of different conscious states that our brain goes through, and some of them can really be beneficial. | ||
| It doesn't have to all be about sleep. | ||
| Alright, so you mentioned coffee. | ||
| I already showed you the coffee cup. | ||
| I'm a coffee guy. | ||
| When I wake up in the morning, the first thing that I think about is that cup of coffee. | ||
| Sometimes I'm thinking about it as I'm going to bed the night before. | ||
| And I probably have a second cup most days. | ||
| Am I doing something wrong here? | ||
| Am I overly caffeinating my brain? | ||
| Am I harming my sleep? | ||
| Am I doing something too unnatural to my normal rhythm? | ||
| Based on what you just said, you're not doing anything wrong. | ||
| And I would actually recommend drink coffee, which sounds strange from someone like me. | ||
| But when it comes to coffee, just like with drugs, the dose and the timing makes the poison. | ||
| So first, there are some wonderful health associations with coffee. | ||
| And that is, I think, very strong evidence. | ||
| By the way, it has nothing to do with the caffeine, though. | ||
| That the principal reason you get health associations with a cup of coffee is because the coffee bean contains most of the antioxidants that people eat or consume because our diets are not particularly enriched the way that we eat in this modern era in antioxidants. | ||
| And it's left to the coffee bean, the humble coffee bean, to carry the weight of most people's antioxidant needs. | ||
| So a cup of coffee or two cups of coffee or even three cups of coffee in the morning, that's just fine. | ||
| Try to cut yourself off after about midday for most people. | ||
| And here's the reason why. | ||
| Firstly, coffee or caffeine has a half-life of about five to six hours. | ||
| In other words, after about five to six hours, 50% of that caffeine is still in your system, which means that caffeine has a quarter-life of 10 to 12 hours. | ||
| So if you have a cup of coffee at midday, it would be the equivalent of you getting into bed at midnight and before you turn the light out, you swig a quarter of a cup of coffee and you hope for a good night of sleep. | ||
| And it's probably not going to happen. | ||
| But even if you're one of those people who says, you know, look, I can have an espresso with dinner. | ||
| I fall asleep fine and I stay asleep. | ||
| So no harm, no foul. | ||
| That's not quite true either because A cup of coffee in the evening will decrease the amount of deep sleep that you get, deep non-REM sleep, by somewhere between 20 to 30 percent. | ||
| Now for me to take away that amount of deep sleep from you, I would probably have to age you by about 15 years. | ||
| Or you could just do it every night with an espresso. | ||
| So I think, you know, I want to be clear here. | ||
| I'm just a scientist, and I'm not here to tell anyone how to live their life. | ||
| That's not my job. | ||
| All I want to do is, you know, give you the science behind sleep and things like caffeine so that people can make an informed choice. | ||
| You know, life is to be lived to a certain degree. | ||
| Yeah, so when you meet the people who are like, oh, you know, if I have a cup of coffee after 4 p.m., I'm up all night, versus the guy that can have the double espresso at 11, is that partly just how they're wired? | ||
| I mean, is that just their physiology? | ||
| It is their physiology. | ||
| And in fact, it's their genes. | ||
| And we know these genes, there are several different genes. | ||
| And it's if you want to sort of get a little bit nerdy, it's called cytochrome p450. | ||
| And it determines the speed of breakdown of decomposition, essentially of the caffeine in your system. | ||
| Now, some people have a version of that enzyme, where they will break down the caffeine very quickly. | ||
| Other people, and unfortunately I'm one of them, have a version of that enzyme where the caffeine metabolism is very, very slow. | ||
| So if I have a cup of coffee at, you know, 9 a.m. | ||
| in the morning after waking up at, you know, 6.30 or 7 in the morning, even that usually leads to me not having a great night of sleep. | ||
| So there are individual differences and we understand the genetic basis of those. | ||
| What about some of the habits of good sleepers? | ||
| One of the things that I've been trying to do for the last couple years, probably about two years now, is I try not to bring my phone in the bedroom. | ||
| So I don't want the phone to be the last thing that I look at when my head hits the pillow, and I don't want it to be the first thing that I see when I wake up in the morning. | ||
| That's been pretty helpful for me. | ||
| Do you guys recommend certain habits, or have you found that certain people just have better habits related to actually getting to that deep sleep? | ||
| Yeah, I think you mentioned a great one here, which is the phone, you know, the invasion of technology into the bedroom has been a harmful influence on our sleep in the modern era. | ||
| And in a way, though, you know, that genie is out the bottle, and it's not going in anytime soon. | ||
| So there's no point in me necessarily saying, you know, it's got to be a technology free environment. | ||
| What I would say, though, is You've probably had that experience where you know that you need to get up for an early morning flight or there's something that you have to do ultra important the next morning. | ||
| You know that that night of sleep is just not going to be the best night. | ||
| And it's almost as though if you've got to wake up at five in the morning for your flight, You wake up at 4.58 before your alarm. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| And the reason is because the brain stays in this very shallow form of sleep. | ||
| It's not very restorative sleep. | ||
| And it's a phenomenon that's called anticipatory anxiety. | ||
| In other words, you know something is upcoming and the brain goes into almost this threat detection state because of the anxiety and your sleep is shallow for understandable reasons. | ||
| I mentioned this because having your phone there is a kind of diet version of that. | ||
| You know, it's sort of anxiety light, L-I-T-E, for the next day. | ||
| Because you're right, for most of us, and I've been guilty of this in the past, You know, the first thing that we do when we wake up in the morning is reach across and we swipe right and we open up the phone. | ||
| And we know that there is waiting for us just a tsunami of anxiety, of emails, social media, it all comes through. | ||
| And what that does is that it trains your brain to expect that type of anxiety jag each and every morning. | ||
| And so when you go to bed at night, you're not going to have that restorative, restful sleep. | ||
| The other thing with technology, by the way, in the evening is that it causes what's called sleep procrastination. | ||
| It's a real thing where, you know, you're perfectly tired, you could fall asleep, but you have your phone there and you think, oh, I should just check Facebook one last time. | ||
| And I'm just going to order that thing on Amazon. | ||
| And, you know, oh, you know, Dave Rubin had this great section, I'm going to watch the And all of a sudden it's 20 minutes later, and you do that each and every night, it's like compounding interest on a loan, and it can really degrade your sleep. | ||
| So I would say the rule of thumb, if you want to try and hack that, is you can only use your phone in the bedroom when you're standing up. | ||
| And after about five minutes of doing that, as soon as you sit down or you want to lie down, that's the time you've got to put the phone away. | ||
| Yeah, so you mentioned the compounding interest part of this. | ||
| So when people are in those phases, when you're just not getting that good enough sleep, you're too busy, life's crazy, anxiety, whatever it might be, what is the compounding effects of that? | ||
| What are those effects? | ||
| They are non-trivial. | ||
| I think, you know, we used to think of sleep as the third pillar of good health alongside diet and exercise. | ||
| Now, in fact, I was wrong when I used to say that. | ||
| It is actually the foundation on which those two other things sit. | ||
| That's how essential it is. | ||
| And that's the reason that we've now been finding significant links, and some of them causal, between short sleep duration and things such as Alzheimer's disease, depression, cardiovascular disease, obesity, stroke, diabetes, numerous psychiatric conditions as well. | ||
| And so I think what this tells us is that sleep is, it's not really an optional lifestyle luxury. | ||
| It is a non-negotiable biological necessity. | ||
| And if you use that sweet spot of seven to nine hours a night, there is an unfortunate simple truth that the shorter your sleep, the shorter your life. | ||
| Short sleep predicts all cause mortality. | ||
| It is the elixir of life. | ||
| You know, it's the sort of, it's the Swiss army knife of health, as it were. | ||
| So as a scientist, I am sure you're around scientists who would love to figure out ways to make us operate at higher levels with less sleep, to be, you know, quote unquote, more productive, whether that is true or not, or I suppose it would depend on your definition of productive. | ||
| But is there research in that regard? | ||
| Like, you know, if I could get five more hours in a day, just think about all the things that I could do in those five hours. | ||
| Yeah, and the way that sleep science has taught a lesson around this question is a slightly different view. | ||
| The longer that you're awake, so firstly, what we know is that after a human being has been awake for about 20 or 21 hours straight, you are as cognitively impaired as you would be if you were legally drunk. | ||
| You know, which makes it surprises me that In the workplace, not all workplaces, but commonly, you know, people are, it's almost this sort of sleep machismo attitude sometimes where we're quite braggadocio of how little sleep that we're getting and, and employers will sometimes co-opt and encourage that kind of behavior from their employees. | ||
| And what's funny to me is that, you know, no employer would say, gosh, I've got this great team I'm working with. | ||
| They're drunk all the time, you know, but that's the situation when your team is trying to survive on insufficient sleep in a way. | ||
| So rather than answering your question in the sense of can we, although I do have several ideas and desires to try to do what you're saying, which is, Can I compress sleep? | ||
| Can I kind of, you know, what's the the analogy would be, can I create a zip file for sleep? | ||
| Can I, you know, shrink down the time and we get everything that we need in less time? | ||
| I think that that's a foolhardy way of doing it, though, because when you are well slept, you are just much more effective and you are much more efficient. | ||
| So to answer your question, if you want to get back those five hours of your day, Don't think of sleep as a cost. | ||
| Think of sleep as an investment in tomorrow, because when you are well slept, it's a little bit like cooking. | ||
| Why would you try to boil a pot of water on medium heat when you could do it in half the time on high? | ||
| That is the consequence of a good night of sleep. | ||
| And so sometimes people say, look, I, the reason I can't get my seven to nine hours of sleep is that I'm just so busy. | ||
| And my response is sometimes, well, it may be that you've got so much to do or so much left to do because you're not well slept. | ||
| And if you were well slept, your efficiency would increase and you wouldn't have that much left on your plate. | ||
| That's what the science is actually teaching us. | ||
| Where do things like the pillow and the mattress and the temperature and all that kind of stuff fit into this? | ||
| Because I know just from YouTube and online life, almost every ad these days is about a new pillow that's gonna fix all your sleep problems or a new mattress or some other, you know, this new sheet has a special thing in it that will keep you cool if you're hot or keep you hot if you're cool or just some other version of that. | ||
| There seems to be like a real obsession with this now. | ||
| Yeah, and I don't mind the obsession so much because in some ways it draws attention to this, you know, sleepers being the neglected stepsister in the health conversation of today for the past 10, 20 years. | ||
| So that's okay. | ||
| But there are, you know, there's a little bit of snake oil out there for sure. | ||
| We don't have much data on the effectiveness of pillows. | ||
| Mattresses, there is some data and mattresses are tough because it's very individualized based on your weight, your anatomical structure. | ||
| Are you in pain in terms of your back? | ||
| Are you not? | ||
| Are you in pain for your neck? | ||
| And I do like, I mean, the mattress is an interesting, it's an interesting vehicle for sleep researchers because when you think about the car that you drive today, versus the car that you were driving, maybe, or could have bought 20 years ago. | ||
| From a technology standpoint, they are radically different. | ||
| Nowadays, your car is packed full of sensors that measure just about everything. | ||
| Think about your mattress, though. | ||
| You know, your mattress today is much more similar to your mattress of 20 years ago. | ||
| Why is that the case? | ||
| Because we spend, you know, hopefully, seven to nine hours of sleep on our mattress. | ||
| I very much hope that most people don't spend that much time. | ||
| Maybe they spend two hours a day in their car at maximum. | ||
| So yeah, we were happy to invest tens of thousands of dollars in our car, which we spend less time in, and we haven't got there yet with mattresses. | ||
| So I think mattresses have an untapped potential, and there are a number of companies now that are doing this. | ||
| The final thing you mentioned is temperature. | ||
| This is definitely one of the things that you can use to help manipulate your sleep. | ||
| It turns out that your brain and your body need to drop their core temperature by about two to three degrees Fahrenheit, or about one degree Celsius, in order for you to fall asleep and then stay asleep soundly across the night. | ||
| And it's the reason you will always find it easier to fall asleep in a room that's too cold than too hot. | ||
| So what we've been finding is that if you can use the mattress or just make sure that your bedroom, the ambient temperature, is set appropriately. | ||
| And when I say appropriately, for the average adult, it's somewhere between 65 to 67 degrees Fahrenheit, which I know sounds cold, but cold it must be. | ||
| If we can get there, usually better sleep unfolds. | ||
| Yeah, I mean, I'm completely with you on that one. | ||
| We usually do probably like 68, which is close enough to that range. | ||
| I mean, it's pretty chilly in that room, and that's the number, because there's nothing worse than waking up in the middle of the night and you're hot and sweaty. | ||
| Oh, yeah, it's a disaster. | ||
| And that changes your sleep cycles and the quality of your sleep as well, temperature. | ||
| All right, let's talk about marijuana. | ||
| Where does marijuana fit into the equation here? | ||
| Because every now and again, not that often, I take basically like a puff or two once or twice a week, but it's really only at night when I know I'm gonna fall asleep soon. | ||
| So I got Seinfeld on and I'm laying on the couch and it's like one puff. | ||
| And then once I feel the eyes go heavy, I go to bed. | ||
| That's what I try to do. | ||
| Every now and again, I pass out on the couch. | ||
| But what do you think about marijuana when it comes to sleep? | ||
| I love it. | ||
| Seinfeld and a bit of marijuana is sort of the Dave Rubin prescription for good sleep. | ||
| There might have been a glass of red wine in there, which I'll ask you about that one too, or you can just take it away from there. | ||
| Yeah, but you'll have to send me that t-shirt. | ||
| Unfortunately, it's not great news when it comes to marijuana, but I want to separate THC from CBD. | ||
| So, cannabis has a composition of many different compounds. | ||
| THC, or tetrahydrocannabinol, is the psychoactive component of cannabis. | ||
| That's the thing that gets people high. | ||
| CBD is different. | ||
| It is the non-psychoactive component. | ||
| What we found is that cannabis use, it can speed the time with which you fall asleep. | ||
| It's speeding up that. | ||
| So in other words, it takes you a shorter amount of time to fall asleep. | ||
| But there are two problems with cannabis use and sleep. | ||
| Firstly, you develop a dependency and it develops quite quickly. | ||
| And then when you stop, typically what you do is have terrible rebound insomnia and you have to jump back on the bandwagon again of cannabis use. | ||
| The second issue with THC is that it's very good at disrupting and suppressing your REM sleep, your dream sleep. | ||
| And REM sleep, dream sleep is associated with things such as your emotional and mental health, things such as creativity and memory benefits. | ||
| Even your lifespan is predicted by the amount of REM sleep that you get. | ||
| It's also critical for hormonal regulation, testosterone in men, for example. | ||
| So you really don't want to have anything that disrupts your REM sleep, but THC will do that. | ||
| So I'm really not, you know, again, I feel when it comes to coffee, | ||
| and I'm gonna make things even worse for myself when it comes to alcohol, but I'm a desperately | ||
| unpopular person by both nationality and personality. | ||
| But when I start offering these things, I'm even less sort of interesting. | ||
| So THC, I would stay away from it. | ||
| CBD, however, and we don't have enough data yet, nowhere near enough data to say anything definitive. | ||
| But it looks interesting. | ||
| I think what we can say about CBD so far is that it at least doesn't harm your sleep. | ||
| There are some signs that it could help your sleep, and I think there are a number of roots, biological roots, that are tenable through which CBD could act as a sleep promoter. | ||
| The first is that CBD alters your body temperature, and it will produce a state of increased hypothermia. | ||
| In other words, it will help cool you down. | ||
| The second thing is that THC, and there are some great studies now demonstrating that it's a very strong what we call anxiolytic, meaning it makes you feel less anxious. | ||
| If you can cool the body down and you can switch the body away from the fight or flight branch of the nervous system, in other words, the anxious branch of the nervous system, then you are well on your way to better sleep. | ||
| So I can see why there are at least two parsimonious reasons why CBD could have a benefit. | ||
| Do we have the data yet where someone like me would feel comfortable advocating that? | ||
| Not right now. | ||
| The only thing I would note is that the evidence suggests CBD is interesting in its curve. | ||
| And what I mean by that is, at low doses, CBD may actually be wake-promoting. | ||
| and force you awake and make your sleep worse. | ||
| But at higher doses, it seems to be more soporific in that sense. | ||
| Again, we don't have the data. | ||
| I am not a medical doctor and none of this is prescriptive advice. | ||
| It's just the science that we have so far. | ||
| But I would say that people should just be a little bit mindful here. | ||
| Again, the dose can make the poison when it comes to sleep, perhaps. | ||
| All right, now the wine part of this, or we can answer this with with all alcohol, but wine. | ||
| We've all sat at a table with someone who's drinking wine, and at some point they're basically falling asleep at the table. | ||
| So how could that not be good for sleep? | ||
| Yeah, so alcohol is not great for sleep in three different ways. | ||
| Firstly, alcohol is in a class of drugs that we call the sedatives. | ||
| And sedation is not sleep. | ||
| But when you have a couple of drinks in the evening, and you think, well, I fell asleep more quickly, you're mistaking | ||
| sedation for sleep. And they're not the same thing. If I were to | ||
| show you your electrical brainwave activity, when you've had a couple of drinks in the evening during sleep versus | ||
| natural sleep, they're not the same thing. The second problem | ||
| with alcohol is that it fragments your sleep. So you wake up many more times throughout the night. Now the | ||
| problem here is that you will typically not remember waking up | ||
| So the next morning, maybe you don't feel restored or refreshed by your sleep, but you think, well, you know, I fell asleep quickly and I don't remember waking up. | ||
| So it's not the alcohol, but it definitely will just litter your sleep with these awakenings. | ||
| The final problem with alcohol is that, similar to THC but through a very different mechanism, alcohol will also block your dream sleep. | ||
| So, you know, again, I'm not trying to tell anyone what they should do and, you know, again, life, you know, live life. | ||
| To a full, because I've heard that we're dead a long time. | ||
| So, but, you know, if I was to give politically incorrect advice, you know, if it's just you and me now talking, Dave, and no one's listening, the best advice I would have is go to the pub in the morning. | ||
|
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And that way the alcohol is out of your system in the evening. | |
| And there's no worry at all. | ||
| But I would never say that, you know, publicly on a show. | ||
| Got it. | ||
| So you go to the pub in the morning so you can take that 3 p.m., although I guess it's not quite the nap that you want. | ||
| You're getting more of the other thing. | ||
| Right. | ||
| Stick it out, lust it through, and then you'll probably be washed out by the evening. | ||
| So where does diet fit into all of this? | ||
| Because I think we've all had different moments where, you know, you eat a real rich, heavy meal and suddenly you're not necessarily sleeping well. | ||
| You're maybe getting some indigestion, some heartburn, that kind of stuff. | ||
| That obviously doesn't help sleep, but I'm sure there's some other foods that probably aid sleep and foods that probably harm sleep. | ||
| There's definitely a bi-directional relationship for sure. | ||
| Firstly, what we know is that eating to excess in the evening and also eating a diet that is high in sugar and low in fiber, both of those things have been associated with significantly worse sleep quantity and significantly worse sleep quality. | ||
| There is a bit of a myth, though, around this, you know, you need to stop eating after four hours or three hours. | ||
| What we found is that you can go as close as 60 minutes before bed, and food doesn't seem to be a significant disruptor of sleep. | ||
| Now, after that, once you get too close to sleep, then it does have a blast radius where it can be detrimental to your sleep. | ||
| Um, there are certain different sort of food types that may enhance sleep. | ||
| And this comes onto sort of some of the supplement world. | ||
| And I am very, I'm a hard-nosed scientist. | ||
| And again, I don't advocate for supplements, but it's interesting. | ||
| I've been doing a lot of sort of reading and research around the supplement space, you know, and there's some fascinating work, things like tart cherry juice. | ||
| You know, I was thinking this is nonsense. | ||
| And I was ready to read the papers and rip them apart, the scientific data. | ||
| But paper after paper from some very well-respected scientists seem to show that it had a benefit. | ||
| Even kiwi fruit seemed to have a benefit. | ||
| Now, why is this the case for some of these studies? | ||
| I don't think it's because there's anything necessarily magical about them. | ||
| It's that they are high in antioxidants. | ||
| And what we found is that when you administer antioxidants, it has a beneficial effect on sleep. | ||
| And so when you're getting your sufficient supply of those key ingredients, it seems to communicate a signal to your brain for better sleep at night. | ||
| But overall, I think when it comes to diet, you know, staying away, well, a diet that's high in sugar and low in fiber is pretty much bad for just about anything, but it turns out sleep is part of that problem too. | ||
| And it works both ways, by the way. | ||
| If you're not getting sufficient sleep, you will gain more weight. | ||
| And there are a number of reasons for this. | ||
| Firstly, your appetite regulating hormones go in very bad directions when you're not getting sufficient sleep. | ||
| So you won't feel satisfied by what you're eating, and you'll want to eat more because you're constantly hungry. | ||
| It's basically the sleep deprivation induced munchies. | ||
| And it's not just those hormones. | ||
| Coming back to cannabis, Your body produces its own version of those cannabinoids. | ||
| They're called endocannabinoids. | ||
| And most people have sort of had or heard, I'm sure you have not experienced, but when you have a little too much just to smoke, you get the munchies. | ||
| Yeah, and you start just wanting to consume everything. | ||
| Because these cannabinoids increase your appetite. | ||
| They increase your desire to eat. | ||
| Well, when you are under-slept, when you're sleep-deprived, your body increases its own production of endocannabinoids. | ||
| That's part of the reason why you start to feel so much more hungry when you are sleep-deprived, and why you will eat somewhere between 200 to 400 extra calories each day when you're not getting sufficient sleep. | ||
| Wow, that's really interesting. | ||
| Let's wrap up with dreams because this will be my fifth August Off The Grid and one of the things that I've noticed is because I try to work on exercise and diet and sleeping better and just general digital detox and relaxation, I've noticed in the four previous years that I've done this that my dreams are more vivid during that time. | ||
| Maybe it's from being less distracted or something. | ||
| So just broadly, what the hell is going on when we're dreaming? | ||
| And what can we do to, I suppose, maybe gain more insight from our dreams or something to that effect? | ||
| Yeah, and actually, I have a quick question for you. | ||
| So when you're doing the detox, will your sleep schedule change where you may start to go to bed a little bit later and wake up a little bit later? | ||
| No, I'll be going to bed earlier usually because I'm not doing as much during the day. | ||
| So, you know, for a portion of this, and perhaps right now as this is being aired, I'm hoping that I'm on the beach and it's a nice bright sunny day and I'm under a and it's about 3 p.m. and I'm napping, that would be nice. | ||
| But then, you know, after a day out on the beach, by nine o'clock, there's a good chance I could be sleeping. | ||
| And then I'm still, regardless of when I go to sleep at night, I'm an early riser. | ||
| That definitely is something new to me at the last couple of years of my life, | ||
| where it's like, and maybe that's partly sunshine in LA. | ||
| You know, it's sunny here usually at about 6 or 6.30 a.m. | ||
| And I'm usually just kind of ready to go at that point. | ||
| But I probably will get a significant amount more of sleep in the course of these 30 days or so. | ||
| Got it. | ||
| So firstly, to stick a pin in the daylight component, daylight will absolutely regulate your sleep timing and you can use it on both ends. | ||
| If you get too much light exposure in the evening, then it will block a hormone called melatonin, which is critical to signal to your brain it's nighttime and it's time to sleep. | ||
| And so when we have too much electric light, or we're using our computers at night, it stamps the brakes on melatonin. | ||
| And that's why some people can struggle with sleep at night. | ||
| So try to dim down half of the lights in your home in the last hour before sleep. | ||
| And then you can reverse engineer the trick in the morning, get lots of daylight, you know, LA is a great place to do that. | ||
| And it enlivens you because it now sort of that daylight will apply once again, the brakes on melatonin, and it will help you wake up. | ||
| But coming back to dreams and the function of dreams, REM sleep dreaming, at least, seems to provide at least two different benefits. | ||
| The first is creativity. | ||
| What we found is that it's during dream sleep when the brain takes all of the information that it's been learning, and it starts to fuse it together in creative and innovative ways. | ||
| You know, it's almost like informational alchemy. | ||
| And so we go to sleep with the pieces of the jigsaw, but we wake up with the puzzle complete. | ||
| And that's one of the creative benefits of sleep. | ||
| And there's a reason that no one has ever told you to stay awake on a problem. | ||
| And there's a very good scientific basis for exactly that. | ||
| The second interesting thing that we've discovered, and we've done quite a lot of work in this area, is that REM sleep dreaming provides a form of emotional first aid. | ||
| And you can think of dreaming as overnight therapy. | ||
| And REM sleep dreams will take those difficult experiences, sometimes even traumatic experiences that you've been having, and it acts like a 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 painful anymore. | ||
| And so I think in that sense, dreaming, you can think of it as, well, it's not time that heals or wounds. | ||
| It's time during dream sleep that provides emotional convalescence. | ||
| And those are the two functions that we've been strongly associating with REM sleep dreaming. | ||
| What about people that don't remember their dreams? | ||
| I always find it so odd because I really do remember my dreams every now and again. | ||
| I'll have a notepad by the side of my bed and I'll scribble something down that I want to remember for the next morning, something like that. | ||
| And I do find that there are insights and I can piece together something that maybe I couldn't have otherwise. | ||
| What about people that just have no memory of their dreams? | ||
| You hear about that every now and again. | ||
| Yeah, it's not infrequent. | ||
| It's not necessarily pathological. | ||
| It's not something that you have to worry about or go and see your doctor about. | ||
| We don't truly understand why there are those individual differences. | ||
| We certainly know that they are present, but we also know that those people who say, look, I just don't dream. | ||
| It's not really that you don't dream, as you said, it's that you don't remember your dreams. | ||
| Because if I bring those people into my sleep center here at University of California, Berkeley, and we can clearly see that they're going into dream sleep. | ||
| And in fact, if I go into the bedroom, well, when they're in a REM sleep phase, and I wake them up, and I say, can you just tell me what was going through your mind before I woke you up? | ||
| They will say, it's the strangest thing. | ||
| I was having a dream for the first time. | ||
| It's just that when they wake up in the morning, that memory seems to evaporate too quickly. | ||
| And it doesn't seem to be committed to conscious memory recollection. | ||
| Does it mean that that memory isn't there at all? | ||
| I actually don't think that that's true. | ||
| I think it's quite possible that we remember much more of our dreaming lives than we are consciously aware of or that we have conscious accessibility to. | ||
| But what we know from brain science is that implicit memory, information that you're not consciously aware of, can still profoundly change your decisions and your actions and your behaviors. | ||
| So it leads to a wacky hypothesis that, in fact, you know, much more of our waking life is determined by our imprinted dream life, but we just don't have conscious access to that dreaming. | ||
| And I say that because, you know, I'm sure you've had that experience too, where you wake up and you think, I was dreaming. | ||
| I know. | ||
| What was that dream? | ||
| It's just gone. | ||
| And then two days later, you know, you're getting into your car and you see the key chain, and it instantly triggers the unlocking of the memory of that dream. | ||
| In other words, that memory was always there. | ||
| It just you'd lost the IP address to go and find it for conscious recollection. | ||
| And if it's still there, it could still be changing your behavior. | ||
| All right, I said the dreams was the last question, but I'll give myself one bonus question here, which is, do you have one other tip or trick that I can incorporate into this month so that I come back as well-rested and ready to go and be back in the crazy political and cultural fight that I find myself in 11 months out of the year? | ||
| You are a brave, brave man knowing what you do, and I admire it greatly. | ||
| I am far too thin-skinned to be doing what you do. | ||
| You're definitely a wiser man, so yeah. | ||
| Let's not rush to judgment. | ||
| I've probably, in the past 45 minutes, just proven that to be wrong as well. | ||
| But I will give you one conventional tip and one unconventional tip. | ||
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Great. | |
| The first conventional tip is regularity. | ||
| If I could give you one single thing to start doing, go to bed at the same time, wake up at the same time, no matter whether it's the weekday or the weekend. | ||
| And regularity is king. | ||
| And the reason and because I don't think people respond to rules that are just barked at them, they respond to the reasons, not the rules. | ||
| And the reason is this, that your brain has its own 24 hour clock. | ||
| And it responds best to record sort of the recognition of regularity. | ||
| So when it's getting regularity, it's going to anchor your sleep. | ||
| And as I said, improve the quantity and the quality of that sleep. | ||
| So aim for regularity no matter what day it is. | ||
| In terms of an unconventional tip, and this may sound a little bit strange, but if you have a bad night of sleep, and everyone has them, you know, I am not immune just because I know a little bit about sleep. | ||
| I have got my big share of bad nights, and I've had my own bouts of insomnia that I've battled and struggled with. | ||
| But after a bad night of sleep, people say, what should I do? | ||
| And my answer is do nothing. | ||
| And what I mean by that is don't wake up any later, don't drink any more coffee the next day, don't nap during that day, and don't go to bed any earlier than you would otherwise. | ||
| Do nothing. | ||
| Just stay the course and repeat the same behavior. | ||
| Because if you wake up later, Then you're not going to build up enough of that sleep pressure that we spoke about for you to fall asleep at your normal time because you slept in later. | ||
| And second, if you go to bed too early because you think, last night was so bad, I should get to bed early, your body is not expecting to sleep at that different time, that new earlier time. | ||
| So you're just going to lie in bed, awake, tossing and turning, and it's going to be even worse. | ||
| And then obviously caffeine and naps we've spoken about too. | ||
| So the best unconventional advice if you've had a bad night of sleep is do nothing. | ||
| Stick to your routine. | ||
| Matt, this was a little unconventional for my type of show, but I thoroughly enjoyed it. | ||
| This is exactly what I wanted to do right before I went off the grid. | ||
| And I hope that everyone watching is going to do a little bit of this in August, if no other month. | ||
| You know, I always do my off the grid thing in August because I feel like it's end of the summer. | ||
| If there's ever a time for anyone to get their life in order, that's it. | ||
| And then hopefully you can incorporate it into those other 11 months. | ||
| I've really enjoyed talking to you and I appreciate you doing the show. | ||
| Thank you so much for having me. | ||
| Take care and good luck with August. |
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