Dr. Matt Walker

they end up having this intense REM sleep.

By the way, to your point about reward and addiction sensitivity with sleep deprivation, one of the things that we did in a collaboration, gosh, this was years ago when I was at Harvard with Carl Hart, who I think you, I don't know if you- Yeah, Columbia.

Yeah, Columbia, you know him.

Yeah, he's a fantastic researcher, a very interesting man too.

And what we found was that a lack of sleep

was not only predictive of your addiction potential, but when you went into a clinic to abstain and trying to come off, some of those in here, we were looking at cocaine addiction, a lack of sleep was a strong predictor of your abstinence and you falling off the wagon and going back to you.

So sleep is so critical, not just for

um maintaining or pushing you away from that addiction potential but once you are addicted and you're trying to abstain it gives you that lift of altitude to try to resist falling off the wagon and when sleep gets short that's when you become vulnerable again probably because your reward circuitry becomes enhanced and all of a sudden you just cannot resist the temptation anymore

Yeah, get as much sleep.

So focus on all of those four macros of sleep, quantity, quality, regularity, and timing.

And notice that if you want to try to optimize some of those, that emotional reactivity imbalance, you may want to...

slightly over-index on your REM sleep in that regard.

And one easy, cheap way of doing that, if you can, lifestyle permitting.

And again, of course, I understand everyone has a life to live and pressures, but that's the way that if you were to ask me, can you do it and do it simply?

Yes, you probably can.

Great.

It is because if you look at the diagnostic criteria for PTSD, firstly, you see sleep disturbance.

And as I said, right at the top of this episode, there is no major psychiatric disorder where there isn't some mention of sleep problems in its diagnostic criteria.

But something else was intriguing about PTSD that compelled me to think about it and then create a theory around it.

It's not just sleep problems, it's also nightmares, and specifically repetitive nightmares.