Dr. Matt Walker

Yes, you can think about the seesaw with sleep deprivation from a sympathetic parasympathetic.

You can also think about it from a positive versus negative valence.

And once again, our hypothesis was that you're just going to slide down into the negative and you're just going to be less responsive to the rewarding positive.

It was the opposite.

You were...

abnormally and excessively sensitive to both of those domains, which you could argue is perhaps the very worst of all adaptive responses.

Absolutely.

As an organism, you don't want to be non-reactive.

Emotions are powerful, and we've spoken about the benefits.

You need to have emotions

to be a functioning human being or organism in the world.

They are designed to adaptively help us survive.

But you can't go to the extremes.

That's maladaptive rather than adaptive.

But that's where you go when you are sleep deprived.

It's this loose hinge and you become very, very erratically and extremely reactive from a neural perspective.

I would say just to keep it high level and brief, the single best way –

cheapest non-pharmacological way that you can enhance your REM sleep is to just sleep an extra 15 or 20 minutes later into the morning don't try to put if i tell you this is about by the way this is about the the quantity that your sleep opportunity

Don't try to add that 30 minutes or 20 minutes if your goal is to increase REM sleep at the start of the night at the front end.

Instead, take that desire that I've offered you of adding just 20 minutes or 25 minutes of extra sleep now to the...