Dr. Matt Walker

Things like ice cream and sort of pizza and all of that good stuff and sweets, candy, as you would say over here.

And we looked at their ratings.

And by the way, to make this a more ecological, because you could say, well, they're gonna know what's the healthy choice.

So they're probably just gonna be politically correct and say, oh, I desire the healthy food.

Because the way that we tried to get around that was we said, anything that you said was desirable, when you come outside of the scanner, we've actually got all of these foods and you're gonna have to eat them.

So they were making more realistics.

And each person went through the experiment twice, one night after a full night of sleep, one night with significantly less sleep.

And sure enough, inside of the scanner, they were rating unhealthier foods as more desirable.

So your preference was going in that unhealthy direction.

was interesting was what was going on in the brain we saw that the frontal lobe regions these sort of areas that sit above our eyes that almost act like the ceo of the brain and they help regulate our deep emotional centers those regions of the brain had gone offline by way of a lack of sleep

and these emotional centers that are usually associated with more hedonic reward.

And they're also excessively more active in people with obesity who have what we call hedonic eating patterns.

Those regions were ramped up by way of a lack of sleep.

So it's not just that there are chemical changes in your body that conspire to have you eat more.

There are also changes in your brain that prevent you from making the healthy food choices.

But when you're getting sufficient sleep in the control condition, when they were getting that sleep, their brain was beautifully regulating the optimal food choices.

so that's just another example of a carrot carrot no pun intended now um that when you're getting sleep if one of the ways you want to manage your your body composition and manage your appetite is by way of getting sufficient sleep it's actually a very powerful tool that we probably underrate and then this other aspect i would say is emotional and mental wellness and

everyone knows that your emotional and mood states will take a nosedive like a dart into the ground when you're not getting sufficient sleep it's that idea of i just snapped dot dot dot and those are the words that usually you know are uttered by people who are not usually sleeping very well but

But when you're getting good sleep, it's so much easier to regulate and manage those emotions.

And Michael Grandner, great sleep research, he did an interesting study.