Dr. Matt Walker

It's the same way with a lack of sleep.

So I make this point about going through the traffic lights because you can have these lapses of attention and these lapses of attention are caused by microsleeps.

Microsleeps happen when the brain just very briefly, it's almost like one of those toy ducks that kind of dips its bill into the water and then sort of comes back up again and dips it.

Your brain just drops down and has a quick sample of sleep and microsleep.

And we can measure it in your eyelid, that your eyelid starts to have what's called a partial closure, and it just kind of goes half the way over, or it closes fully shut.

That's a microsleep.

Even when it's half open, your brain is essentially offline.

It's in a sleep-like state.

We can measure it, and then it comes back online.

so i bring that that's a very long way of saying that's the second metric i would use are you having these absences where you just kind of lapse another is that you mentioned it before i just don't feel restored um you could say look i i sleep for probably around about seven and three quarter hours every night but i just don't i don't feel awake i don't feel refreshed i don't

So can you operate without needing caffeine and have good grace, good mood, and good cognition without needing caffeine before 11 a.m.

in the morning?

And if the answer is no, you may be self-medicating your state of insufficient sleep.

But that metric of saying, I sleep seven hours and 45 minutes, that's what my sleep tracker says, but I don't feel refreshed, that comes to the second Q of QQRT.

sufficient quantity of sleep, my guess is that I would then look at the quality of your sleep and we'd probably find a deficiency in the quality of your sleep.

So there are these different sort of tools that you can use, but a good one is, do you feel refreshed and restored by your sleep?

It's not to guarantee any of these, but...

Beautiful questions.

I would say that one should not take necessarily either of those two as your best metric.

The reason is the wake up component for some people like you, you're waking up and you are good to go pretty much out the gate.